GUILTY in the Jared Bridegan Murder-for-Hire, No Weapon and No DNA, and Lindsay Clancy's Jury Just Got a Manslaughter Option

0:03 Calaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Shark Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Friday, August 28th, 2026. We told you Thursday that a jury in Jacksonville had the Mario Fernandez-Saldana case and that we would have the verdict as soon as it came. It came Wednesday afternoon, and it was guilty. Both counts. First-degree murder and solicitation to commit a capital felony in the death of Jared Breidegen. Automatic life. In Plymouth, the five-week Lindsay Clancy trial ended Thursday with closing arguments. And before those arguments, Judge William Sullivan made a ruling that reshapes everything. That jury is no longer choosing between murder and a psychiatric hospital. They now have a third door.

0:55 And in Las Vegas, prosecutors rested their case against Dwayne Davis after 25 witnesses and about eight hours of recordings of the defendant. The last thing they showed that jury was a video of Davis holding up his own book and telling people to spend $ 20 on it. Let's get into it. On the night of February 16th, 2022, Jared Bridegan dropped his twins, Abby and Liam, at their mother's house in Jacksonville Beach after taking them out to dinner. He got back in his Volkswagen with his two-year-old daughter Bexley strapped in the back seat and started for home. On a dark one-way street, he found a tire lying across the road, stopped, and got out to move it.

1:39 Four rounds were fired at him. Two of them hit him. He died on the asphalt while his daughter sat in her car seat a few feet away. And one correction from our Thursday show, I told you he was shot four times. Four shots were fired, he was struck twice. The detail matters and I want it right. Jared Breidegen was 33 years old, a senior design manager at Microsoft and a father of four. For months, police could not construct a motive. He had no enemies. His wallet was not taken, his watch was not taken. It took 11 months to make the first arrest and four and a half years to seat the first jury. On Wednesday afternoon, that jury came back guilty on both counts. Mario Fernandez Saldana is 38. He faces an automatic sentence of life in prison, and he is due back in court on October 5th to be given a sentencing date. And I want to be precise about what that jury actually decided, because it is a bigger legal statement than the headline suggests.

2:38 Nobody ever accused Mario Fernandez Saldana of firing a gun. The state's own case was that Henry Tennant pulled the trigger. What the state argued, and what this jury accepted, is that under Florida law, a person who encourages, assists, advises, or hires a killer is as guilty as the man who fires. They accepted that with no murder weapon. It has never been found. With no DNA belonging to Fernandez Saldana on anything tested. No surveillance, no fingerprints, no hair putting him in that truck or in Jacksonville Beach that night. The lead detective conceded every bit of that on the stand. So what did they have? Three checks. Roughly $ 10, 000 paid to Henry Tennant after the murder, written for landscaping, roof repair, and a business investment. One of them with a memo line that read, Kickstarter, good luck. A tire found at Fernandez Saldana's rental property matching the tire in the road.

3:35 Dozens of phone contacts. GPS data showing Tennant driving Breitigan's exact route in the weeks before. And another correction from Thursday. The defense closing was delivered by Jesse Dreiser, not James Hill. Hill gave the opening. My error. Dreiser's argument was clean and I understand why he made it. He told the jury his client gained no benefit from the death of Jared Breitigan. and that nobody had testified that Fernandez Saldana ever said Breidgen deserved to die. The state's answer was the trust. Prosecutors told that jury Shauna Gardner comes from money, that her family had established a trust, and that she could only become trustee of it once every legal entanglement with Jared Breidgen was finished. Their theory was that Fernandez Saldana solicited a man who had been evicted and had nothing in his bank accounts, to solve a custody fight and unlock a trust fund. Assistant State Attorney Christina Stifler put the motive plainly. They wanted more of the decision-making.

4:40 They wanted more custody. And she told the jury it does not matter whether they were completely right about that custody dispute or completely wrong. You do not get to solve a family court problem with a hired gun. And I want to give you the shape of that trial because the numbers are striking. Seven days of testimony. The state rested Monday afternoon. The defense case took about half a day and consisted of two witnesses, both of them staff from the private school the twins attended, who testified that Fernandez Saldana was a friendly, involved parent who came to events and picked the children up and that everyone knew the marriage was ending. Mario Fernandez Saldana did not testify.

5:21 That was his absolute right. And the jury was instructed they could not hold it against him. And I still think it was the correct legal call. Putting him on the stand would have handed prosecutors the one living person who could be cross-examined about those checks. But it does tell you what the defense believed. They were not trying to win by explaining. They were trying to win on the gap. And the gap was not enough. After the verdict, Kirsten Breidegen stood in front of cameras with her husband's family and the state attorney's office. She thanked law enforcement, the prosecutors, and the people who called in tips. She said that when this started, she felt like she was alone and that she quickly learned she was not. And then she said this, truth won today and justice has been served in part, in part. She said it deliberately because this is one of three. Shanna Gardner is 39.

6:19 She has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and related charges, and she is presumed innocent. Jury selection in her trial begins Monday, three days from now, in the same county that just watched her husband convicted of murdering her ex-husband. Judge Kite refused to seal this verdict until her case was over. He said it comes out when the jury reaches it, and it did. Henry Tennant goes to trial next year. He pleaded guilty in 2023, then withdrew the plea and told the court his statements under it were false. So nothing he said under that agreement was used against anyone in this trial. Look, I'm going to be honest with you about what this verdict says because it is not really about one man. There is a version of this crime that almost worked. Hire a stranger. Stay miles away.

7:08 Leave no DNA, no weapon, no witness. And then when they charge you, stand up and say there is no physical evidence. That is not a defense strategy. That is the product being delivered. You paid for distance and then you asked a jury to acquit you because the distance worked. Assistant State Attorney Alan Mizrahi said it better than I can in his rebuttal. He told that jury the absence of physical evidence is not a hole in the case. It is why you hire somebody else in the first place. 12 people in Duval County did not buy it. That's not a mistake. That's a choice. And they made the right one. And there is one more thing this verdict does, which almost nobody is talking about. Henry Tennant withdrew a guilty plea and said his own statements were false, which took the state's cooperating witness off the board entirely. Prosecutors went to trial without him and won anyway. That changes the arithmetic for everyone still charged in this case and it changes it four days before Shauna Gardner starts picking a jury. Jared Breidegen was 33 years old. He had four children. His two-year-old daughter was in the car and heard it happen, and afterwards she told an adult that something happened to her daddy. Four and a half years.

8:24 One conviction. Someone has to say his name. When we come back, five weeks of testimony ended in Plymouth yesterday, and Lindsay Clancy's jury walked into that room with an option nobody expected them to have. On the evening of January 24th, 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children with exercise bands in the basement of their house in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old.

9:06 Clancy then attempted to take her own life and has been paralyzed ever since. Yesterday, that case ended. First, a correction I owe you. I've been telling you this trial ran more than 40 witnesses. The final count is 84. 74 for the prosecution, 10 for the defense, across 21 days of testimony. I was off by half and you should have better from us. Now the ruling. On Wednesday after the jury went home, Judge William Sullivan held the charge conference. That is where the lawyers fight over what verdict options actually appear on the paper the jury takes into deliberations. It is boring, it is procedural, almost nobody covers it. And it may end up mattering more than every expert who testified in this case. Kevin Reddington asked for a manslaughter instruction. Prosecutor Shane and Buckingham objected, and her argument was that these children were strangled, which is not a manslaughter fact pattern. Sullivan gave it to the defense.

10:02 He said he was inclined to give a single manslaughter instruction rather than parsing between voluntary and involuntary. And that is what he did. So here is what changed. For five weeks, this jury was looking at a binary that a lot of jurors find unbearable. Either you convict a woman of first-degree murder and she dies in prison, or you find her not criminally responsible and she goes to a state psychiatric hospital. Nothing in between. Now, there is something in between. If this jury cannot agree that the Commonwealth proved first-degree murder, they have somewhere to go that is not an acquittal. Reddington's theory for it was not insanity.

10:43 He argued that even if jurors reject the full defense, that a mental disease or defect could still have affected Clancy's ability to think, to react, to understand what she was doing, enough to reduce murder to manslaughter. That is a much lower bar than the one he has been trying to clear all month, and Sullivan just handed it to him. The defense did not get everything. Sullivan refused a Bowdoin instruction, which would have told jurors they could weigh the shortcomings of the police investigation. And Reddington had spent Wednesday calling that investigation horrific, pointing at blood inside the house, a window screen, and powder found in a wine tumbler. None of it ever tested. Buckingham countered that police documented the scene and that witnesses explained why certain items were not tested, though she did acknowledge medications found in a drawer were never flagged. Then came Thursday, one hour aside. Jennifer Sprague closed for the Commonwealth, and she made a choice that I think is going to define how people argue about this case for years. She went at the privilege. She told the jury Lindsay Clancy had health insurance that covered multiple doctors, access to specialty programs, 18 weeks of maternity leave, a nanny who helped with the housework, support at home, and then she said it.

12:03 This was not a woman suffering from a lack of care or a lack of resources. That is a hard, effective argument, and it is aimed squarely at the crowd in pink outside that courthouse. The entire public conversation around this case has been that the system failed Lindsay Clancy. Sprague stood up and said the system gave this woman more than most people in this country will ever get. I understand the argument. I also want to say something about it. Access is not the same as adequacy. You can see six providers and still have every one of them miss the thing that is killing you. The counter-argument is not that she had no help. It is that she had a great deal of help and it did not work, which is a more frightening thought, not a less frightening one. Reddington closed by going back to the man he built his case on. He reminded the jury that Dr. Philip Resnick, who testified in both Andrea Yates' trials, is a leading authority on malingering, on detecting people who fake mental illness, and that the prosecution's own expert agreed he is a leading authority. Then he pointed out that this expert on faking looked at Lindsay Clancy and said she had a horrific mental disease or defect when she killed, in his words, her beautiful children. That is the move.

13:18 You brought me three men who say she is faking. Here is the country's expert on faking, and he says she is not. And Reddington had one more thing working for him, which is the sheer weight of what the defense experts described. Not one of them said Lindsay Clancy was a healthy woman who snapped. They described a mental state deteriorating over months, made worse by a rotating set of prescriptions, ending in postpartum psychosis, which is an uncommon but real psychiatric emergency in which a new mother loses contact with reality. That is not a fringe theory invented for a courtroom. It is a recognized medical crisis, and the argument between these experts was never whether it exists.

14:01 It was whether she had it on January 24th. There is one more thing from Wednesday I want you to hear, because it is the most human moment of this entire trial, and it came from the prosecution's side. Reddington was cross-examining Dr. Sathoff, the FBI psychiatrist. He walked him through everything Lindsay Clancy did before January 24th. The internet searches about postpartum depression, the visits to multiple maternal and mental health providers, telling her mother she was suicidal, telling her husband she was afraid she would hurt the children, calling a suicide hotline. And then Reddington asked him essentially whether he believed Clancy killed her children because she no longer liked the life she had chosen, whether it was a selfish choice by a woman manipulating her providers for a quick fix. Sathoff would not take it. He told the courtroom that framing minimizes what she was going through. That is the Commonwealth's own expert, the man whose entire testimony is that she is criminally responsible, refusing to call her selfish. I have watched a lot of experts get led into a cheap answer.

15:10 He did not take it, and it says something about him. The jury has the case. The standard is two-pronged, and the defense only needs one. Either she could not appreciate the wrongfulness of what she did, or she could not conform her conduct to the law. The burden is on the Commonwealth throughout, and Sullivan will have told them that in plain language before they went in. And I want to lay out honestly what is in front of those 12 people because it is genuinely hard. First-degree murder in Massachusetts here means deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity or cruelty. Both sides largely agreed on that language. If they get there, it is life without the possibility of parole. If they find she was not criminally responsible, she does not walk out of a courthouse. She goes to a state psychiatric hospital under a commitment with periodic reviews to determine whether she can ever live safely in the community, and those reviews can go on for the rest of her life.

16:09 And now, in the middle, manslaughter, which is the option that exists for a jury that believes something was profoundly wrong with this woman, but cannot bring itself to say she was legally blameless. Here is my honest read, and it is only a read. The manslaughter instruction makes a hung jury less likely and a compromise verdict more likely. That is what middle options do. Whether a compromise is justice in a case with three dead children is a question I do not think I am qualified to answer. And I'm not sure 12 strangers from Plymouth County are either. But they are the ones who have to. There was a line at that courthouse Thursday morning that reached the parking lot. One writer got there at 6.15 in the morning and lay down on the sidewalk to hold her place.

16:56 Not one empty seat. All of those people are waiting on 12. Cora Clancy was five years old and in kindergarten. Dawson Clancy was three. Callan Clancy was eight months old. For five weeks, the country has argued about their mother. Someone has to say their names. When we come back, the state rests in Las Vegas, and the last thing that jury saw was Dwayne Davis selling his book. As always, we run Las Vegas a day behind, because court out there is often still in session when we record. This is where things stood as of Wednesday. Tupac Shakur was shot at an intersection off the Las Vegas Strip on September 7th, 1996, and died six days later at 25.

17:56 Dwayne Davis, known as Kefi D, is 63 and the only person ever charged. He has pleaded not guilty. On Wednesday, after a week and a half, prosecutors rested. 25 witnesses, roughly eight hours of recordings of the defendant, drawn from four separate occasions across two decades, all of them placing him in a car next to Tupac Shakur that night. And the state closed its case on two things you should hear about. The first was a retired Compton police officer named Robert Ladd, who spent years working gang homicides. Ladd's testimony was not about ballistics or receipts. It was about hierarchy. And it is the closest thing this prosecution has to a theory of how a man who never fired a gun is guilty of murder. Ladd told the jury that Dwayne Davis was a shot caller in the Southside Compton Crips and that he ranked about as high as you can get. He described what that means. A man who can tell younger gang members what to do with severe consequences for anyone who does not listen. He said younger members are supposed to do what they are told without hesitation. And Ladd told the jury something else that explains why this case sat unsolved for 27 years.

19:10 In his experience, gang homicides get solved by admissions because the witnesses will not talk. Not because they do not know. Because cooperating gets you labeled a snitch. And being labeled a snitch in Compton in 1996 was a death sentence. So the prosecution's own witness confirmed the thing that has haunted this case for three decades. Everyone knew and nobody would say it. And the only reason there is a trial at all is that one man could not keep his mouth shut for money. Then prosecutors walked him to the point. Assume based on Davis's own admissions that the Cadillac held four men, Davis, Terrence Brown, DeAndre Smith, and Orlando Anderson. Who is the leader in that car? Lad said Davis. Who is the shot caller? Davis. And could Orlando Anderson, a younger, lower ranking member, have opened fire with Davis sitting right there without permission? Lad said no.

20:08 He said if Davis had told them to handle it another time, there would not have been a shooting. That is the whole case in one exchange. Under Nevada law, you can be held responsible for a murder you did not personally commit if you intentionally participated in it or helped it happen. The state is not arguing Davis pulled a trigger. It is arguing that nothing happened in that car unless he allowed it. Ladd also gave the jury the aftermath, and it is worth sitting with. He testified that Shakur's killing set off a 10-day war in Compton between the Southside Crips and Mob Peru. Three people killed, 10 attempted murders. That is what nobody remembers about September of 1996. One shooting on a Las Vegas street and 13 more families in California got the worst phone call of their lives inside two weeks. Nobody was paying attention to them. There is no documentary about them. Now, Michael Samps got his hands on Ladd too, and he got exactly what he needed. Ladd acknowledged that apart from Davis' own admissions, he had no physical evidence placing Dwayne Davis in Las Vegas that night. No phone records showing Davis ordered a shooting. Nothing. So the state's expert on gang hierarchy just told the jury that the entire structure rests on a man's word about himself. And then prosecutors ended their case with the second thing, which is either the smartest choice they made or the strangest. They played the jury a YouTube video. In it, Dwayne Davis holds up

21:39 a copy of his own memoir, Compton Street Legend, and tells the audience they can get the real truth about this whole situation. It's your $ 20, he says. That is how the Clark County District Attorney's Office rested a murder case, not on a weapon, not on a witness. on the defendant on camera, monetizing the story he is now on trial for. Then they played jail calls and they sat down. After the jury left Wednesday, Judge Carly Kearney turned to Davis and advised him of his right not to testify and told him that if he stays off the stand, prosecutors cannot mention it in closing arguments. She also noted that if he does testify, the state is limited in what parts of his history it can raise. essentially to convictions from a jailhouse fight in December of 2024. Davis has not decided. Think about that for a second. This is a man whose entire legal problem is that he cannot stop talking. Four recorded interviews, a memoir, a docuseries, a YouTube channel, and now the one room where talking would actually be under oath, and he is weighing it.

22:48 The defense case began Thursday. Sanft has said he plans to call a detective and two Las Vegas police officers. And you can see the shape of what he is going to argue because he has been consistent since day one. Sanft told this jury in his opening in a single word on a slide that I am not going to say on this show exactly what he thinks of his client's statements. His position is that it took authorities 30 years to charge a man that the witnesses they called have criminal histories of their own. and that the state is now treating an embellished memoir as if it were evidence. That last point is the strongest thing he has. Because the state's case really is built substantially on a book and a set of interviews given by a man who was paid to give them, and who has since said parts of it were invented. One more thing. Before the state rested, Malcolm Greenidge, who recorded with Tupac as part of the outlaws and called him a brother, described the shooting itself for that jury. He said he saw an arm come out of the back seat of a light-colored Cadillac and open fire. He could not see a face.

23:53 Asked how he felt watching it, Greenidge said he was horrified. 30 years of theories, books, documentaries, and podcasts. And underneath all of it is a young man in a car watching his friend get shot and not being able to do anything about it. Tupac Shakur was 25 years old. Someone has to say his name. That's the show for Friday, August 28th. If this was useful, send it to one person. Word of mouth is the whole engine here. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment, because I want to know what you make of that manslaughter option. Did Judge Sullivan just give that jury a fair third choice, or did he give 12 exhausted people an easy way out?

24:39 Tell me. The Clancy jury is deliberating. Shanna Gardner picks a jury Monday, and Dwayne Davis is deciding whether to take a witness stand. We will be here for all of it. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing and timing. This episode was recorded before court opened Friday morning. The Lindsay Clancy jury began deliberating after closing arguments and instructions on Thursday and had not returned a verdict as of recording. If a verdict came after we recorded, this episode does not reflect it, and we will have it in full. Two corrections carried in this episode. We previously described the trial as involving more than 40 witnesses.

25:20 The final count is 84 across 21 days of testimony. And we previously said Jared Breidegen was shot four times. Four rounds were fired and he was struck twice. We also incorrectly attributed the defense closing in Jacksonville to James Hill. It was delivered by Jesse Dreiser. One clarification on the mistrial motion we covered Wednesday. In denying it, Judge Sullivan noted it was the witness, Dr. Heilbrunn, and not the prosecutors who raised the subject of religion. Kevin Reddington's characterization of the exchange as intentional misconduct was his argument to the court, not a finding by the judge. On the Jacksonville case, Mario Fernandez Saldana has been convicted and faces an automatic life sentence, with a sentencing date to be set October 5th. Shauna Gardner has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent, and her jury selection begins Monday. Henry Tennant has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent and goes to trial next year. Nothing said at Fernanda Saldana's trial is evidence against either of them, and testimony offered outside the presence of that jury is not repeated here.

26:27 On Las Vegas, outlets differ on the running witness count, with figures of 24 and 25 both reported. Allegations Dwayne Davis has made in recorded interviews about living people never charged in this case are claims made by a man whose own attorney has told the jury he cannot be corroborated. The jury has been instructed there is no indication Davis had anything to do with the murder of Christopher Wallace. This episode discusses child deaths, suicide, and postpartum mental illness. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. For postpartum mental health specifically, the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is available by call or text at 1-833-TLC-MAMA. Postpartum psychosis is rare, it is a medical emergency, and it is treatable when it is caught. The overwhelming majority of people who experience postpartum mental illness never harm anyone.