"Shot in the Back Over Bottled Water, a Dentist and His Wife Murdered While Their Toddlers Slept, and a Girl Who Killed Her Mother at 14"

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher. Monday, June first, twenty twenty six. Three stories today, and all three of them come down to the same question, who decides what a life is worth? We start in Ohio. A dentist and his wife, Spencer and Monique Tape, shot dead in their own home the week before New Year's no forced entry. Two small children left alive in the house. The man charged with killing them is the only one who can answer the one question everyone is still asking why, and so far he isn't talking. This weekend, the anchors at Court TV and Long Crime took the whole case apart on a stage in Las Vegas, and they surfaced a detail about the weeks before the murders that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Then we go to Columbia, South Carolina, where a man is on trial for chasing a fourteen year old boy down a road residential street and shooting him in the back. The accusation that started it all that the boy stole some bottles of water.

1:07 Investigators say he didn't steal anything. The boy's name was Cyrus Carmack Belton, and we're gonna say his name a lot today, and we finish in Mississippi, where a girl who was fourteen years old when she shot and killed her own mother is now asking the state's highest court to undo a sentence that says she will die in prison. This one is hard. Both things can be true at the same time, and we're gonna sit in that discomfort together. I'm Garrett Fisher. This is daily crime and justice. If you've been with us a while, you already know the bones of this one. Let me give you the quick version, because there's news. December thirtieth, twenty twenty five, Columbus, Ohio, Spencer Tepe, a thirty seven year old dentist, and his wife, Monique, thirty nine, are found shot to death inside their home.

2:01 Two children, ages one and four, are unharmed. No sign of forced entry, no sign of a break in. Spencer simply didn't show up to his dental practice that morning, and when he didn't, the call started four separate nine to one one calls from worried friends and co workers who knew that a man like Spencer Tepe doesn't just not show up. Weeks later, police arrest Michael McKee, he's Monique's ex husband. He lived about six hours away in Illinois. He is pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of murder and to account of burglary. And the question that has hung over this case from the very first day is still hanging over it. Now, why Garrett shift to the new material. This is the Crime Con panel. This past weekend in Las Vegas. At Crime Con, the anchors from Court TV and Law on Crime put this case up on a stage and went through it piece by piece.

2:55 And I want to walk you through what they said, because it reframes the whole thing. Vinnie Politon asked the room to do something uncomfortable. He asked them to imagine what actually happened inside that house because the two victims, he said, were not killed at the same instant, which means, and I want you to really hear this, when one of them went down, the other one knew what was happening. Sit with that for a second. Whatever else this was, it was not quick and it was not merciful. Sierra Gillespie from LAWNG Crime kept coming back to the thing that makes this case so strange. There's no forced entry, there's no break in. Somebody got into that home, and the evidence so far doesn't suggest they kicked in a door to do it. Cody Thomas from Court TV actually went to the neighborhood and what he described was a place in transition. The Tepees lived in a beautiful home, but there were two housing projects nearby, and neighbors told him prostitution was a problem on those blocks. And here's the detail that turned out to matter. Thomas said he had never seen so many cameras in one place in his life, surveillance equipment everywhere, and those cameras caught a man near the Tape home right around the time of the killings. Investigators say that man was Michael McKee. Now the divorce, Chris Stewart described it as what looked on paper like a very amicable split. McKee and Monique were married, they divorced, They had no children together. From the outside,

4:26 no fireworks. Jesse Weber put the honest version of it plainly, there's still so much we don't know. Investigators have not put a motive on the table, not one, Garrett. The new detail let it land slowly, But here is the moment from that panel that I keep turning over. Weeks before the shooting, the Tepees went to the Big Ten Championship game over in Indiana, a football game, a normal thing that a happy couple does, And while they were there, Monique left. She went back to the hotel because she was upset about something, and that's something involved McKee, and prosecutors say that while Spencer and Monique were sitting at that football game, McKee actually traveled to their home in Ohio.

5:11 Let me be careful here, because this is an allegation and McKee is pleaded not guilty, and nothing about that trip has been proven in a courtroom. But if prosecutors are right, then this wasn't a man who snapped. This was a man who knew where they'd be, knew when the house would be empty, and went there anyway. That's not a mistake. If it's true, that's a choice, and it's a choice somebody apparently started making weeks before anybody died. There's no trial date set yet. McKee is represented by Diane Minasha, who the panel described as a genuinely formidable defense attorney, and Weber expects her to go hard at the search warrants and to argue this was a sloppy investigation. So the defense fight is taking shape and the central mystery, The why is still sitting there unanswered. Spencer Tepe was a dentist whose patients and coworkers noticed within hours that something was wrong. Monique Tepe was a mother of two small kids. Somebody has to say their names while this case grinds toward a trial, so we will a quick heads up before this one. We're going to talk about the death of a fourteen year old, including some of the medical testimony. If you've got young kids in the car, this is the segment to come back to later. Let me walk you through this because it started over almost nothing and a child is dead. Columbia, South Carolina, May twenty eighth, twenty twenty three. A Shell gas station on

6:43 Park Lane Road, a fourteen year old boy named Cyrus Carmack Belton walks in. According to the people who knew him, he was smart, he was funny, quick, wit, well liked at Summit Parkway Middle School. He wanted to own a tattoo shop one day. He wanted to be famous. He was fourteen. Inside that store, the owner's wife asks Cyrus to take off his backpack. He does. He picks up four bottles of water and then this is on the store's own surveillance video played for the jury last week. He puts each one of them back. Investigators went back to that store after the fact to check, and they concluded no merchandise was ever stolen. Nothing. And then he gets confronted anyway by the owner's son, Andy Chow, and by the owner's wife, and Cyrus runs and the owner, sixty one year old Rick Chow and his son chase him not across the parking lot. Prosecutors say they chased that boy roughly one hundred and thirty yards off the property, down a residential street toward an apartment complex. A witness who drove past said Cyrus was running so hard one of his sneakers came off, and he kept going on one shoe until he tripped in the grass. And there with the boy on the ground injured, trying and failing to get back up, Rick Chow fired. The bullet went into Cyrus Carmak Belton's back. Now, Rick Chow is charged with murder, and he has pleaded not guilty. And I want to be fair about what is actually in dispute here.

8:11 Nobody disputes that Chow fired the fatal shot. What's in dispute is whether he had any right to the defense, led by veteran attorney Jack Swirling, says Chow acted in a split second to protect his son, that Andy believed Cyrus had a gun, that he had pointed it at him. Here's where it gets complicated, and I'm gonna give you both sides. There was a gun connected to Cyrus that night, and the defense has shown the jury a photo from social media of Cyrus holding a firearm. So the defense wants you to see a threat. But and this is a big but, witness after witness has now testified that they never saw a gun in that boy's hands. The woman who got to him first, Lori An Carson, and her daughter Kennedy, both told the jury they never saw anything in his hands. The man who drove past and watched the chase, DeVante Bryant, said he saw Cyrus carrying only a backpack and never saw him hold or throw a gun. And the first deputy on the scene testified that not one witness initially told him they'd seen Cyrus point a gun at anyone. And there's the geography of it, which a judge already weighed once. Last November, a judge denied Chow immunity under South Carolina's stand your Ground law, ruled the evidence didn't support a self defense claim and sent it to trial. Because here's the thing about stand your ground. It is not a license to chase. You don't get to pursue a fleeing fourteen year old one hundred and thirty yards down the street and then claim you feared for your life when you shot him in

9:41 the back. The prosecutor, in his opening put it as bluntly as I've ever heard it put. He told the jury that on that day, Rick Chow decided Cyrus Carmack Belton's life was worth less than four bottles of water. Garrett. The medical testimony handle with care. The forensic pathologist, doctor Amy Durso, testified about the autopsy, and I'll keep this brief, but it matters. The bullet entered Cyrus's lower back, It tore through the lower lobe of his right lung, and it passed through his heart. She told a jury something that I think every parent listening will feel in their chest. A wound like that doesn't kill instantly. A person can survive a minute, maybe two, sometimes running on pure adrenaline before they collapse from the blood loss, so that boy was alive for those last moments. Lori An Carson testified that when she reached him, she tried to clear the leaves from his mouth because he was struggling to breathe while others did CPR. The defense has been doing what defenses do. They pointed out Cyrus had no money or wallet on him and argued that suggests he intended to shoplift.

10:49 The judge, Heath Taylor, has reportedly had to rain the defense in more than once. And by the way, the jury is not hearing about a separate detail at a pre trial hearing, the defense actually he got the judge to keep out evidence that the Sheriff's department had once taken the extraordinary step of inviting chow In to talk to him about the legal limits of using force. He was never charged over it. The jury won't hear about that conversation unless the defense opens the door by claiming chow never had any prior contact with deputies. This trial started last Wednesday. The state has been building its case all week and was expected to wrap up its witnesses heading into the weekend. We are going to stay on it. Look, I'm gonna be honest with you. There are cases where I genuinely don't know how I feel until I've heard everything.

11:35 This is one where I'm working hard to keep an open mind because Rick Chow is presumed innocent and he's entitled to make his case to that jury. But a fourteen year old put four bottles of water back on a shelf and then ran for his life down a residential street, and he did not make it home. Cyrus Carmack Belton, somebody has to say his name. Our last story is one we haven't covered on this show before, and it's the kind that doesn't resolve cleanly. So I'm going to ask you to stay with the complexity of it. Brandon, Mississippi.

12:18 March nineteenth, twenty twenty four, a fourteen year old girl named Carly Gregg shot and killed her mother, Ashley Smiley, who was forty. She also tried to kill her stepfather, Heath Smiley. At her trial, Carly's lawyers argued she was not guilty by reason of insanity, that she was in the grip of a mental illness when the violence happened. The jury did not buy it. In September of twenty twenty four, a Rankin County jury found her guilty of first degree murder, attempted murder, and tampering with evidence, and she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Carly Gregg is now seventeen, and last Wednesday, her appellate lawyer stood in front of mississip Be Supreme Court and ask the justices to throw that sentence out.

13:04 Garrett lay out the legal argument plainly, now here's the thing I need you to understand, because it's the whole ball game. The appeal isn't really about whether Carly greg did it. A jury already answered that. The appeal is about how she was sentenced and about a rule that exists specifically because she was a child. Back in twenty twelve, the United States Supreme Court decided a case called Miller versus Alabama, and the holding was this, you cannot hand a child a mandatory sentence of life without parole. A court has to actually stop and consider that the defendant is a kid, their immaturity, their home life, their capacity to change before it locks them away forever. It's not optional, it's constitutional law. And Carly Gregg's lead a Pellet attorney, James Murphy told the justices that in this case that didn't happen. He described what he called the sentencing phase, and he used that term in his words loosely as the judge announcing the jury's verdict and then turning immediately to the prosecution to ask if they wanted to call their first sentencing witness. Both sides declined. They rested on the trial evidence argument only. Murphy's point there was no meaningful process to develop mitigation, no real chance to bring in family members, teachers, the people who could speak to who this child was and whether she could be rehabilitated.

14:31 For a kid facing the rest of her life behind bars, he's arguing that isn't enough. There was even a strange moment where the justices and the lawyers got tangled up over what the sentence even is. The jury instructions seemed to point to life without parole. The actual sentencing orders seem to say just life. Those are very different futures for a seventeen year old, and the fact that the record is murky on that point is frankly part of the problem. The defense's point, and then Murphy raised something I want to flag for you because it goes to how juries get pushed. He told the court that when the jury was weighing life versus life with the possibility of parole, the prosecutor stood up, and Murphy was paraphrasing here told the jurors that if they gave her parole, nobody knows when she gets out, that she might be out in as little as a year, that you might run into her at the supermarket or at church, anywhere out in public. Murphy called that improper what lawyers call golden rule rhetoric, appealing to the personal fears of the people in the jury box rather than the facts. And here's the kicker. Carly's trial lawyer didn't object to any of it, which is exactly why her new lawyers are also arguing she had ineffective assistance of counsel. As Murphy put it, there's no strategic reason a competent defense attorney would let that go unchallenged. So let me be honest with you about where I land on this, because it's not comfortable. Both things can be true. It can be

16:03 true that Carly Gregg did something horrific, that a mother, Ashley Smiley, is dead at the hands of her own daughter, and that no appeal undoes that loss. And it can also be true that when this country decides to put a fourteen year old away forever, the Constitution demands that we do it carefully, deliberately, with the full weight of the fact that we are sentencing a child. Those aren't in competition. A justice system that can't hold both of those ideas at once isn't a justice system. It's just punishment wearing a robe. The Mississippi Supreme Court has not ruled. They heard the arguments, and now we wait. Appeals like this can take months. We'll tell you when there's a decision.

16:50 So here's where we are. In Ohio, the Tepe case is still a mystery, with a man in custody and no motive on the table, and a new detail that suggests, if prosecutors are right, that someone may have been planning this weeks before anyone died. In South Carolina, Rick Chow is on trial for chasing and shooting a fourteen year old who put the water back, and in Mississippi, Carly greg is asking the highest court in the state to take a second, more careful look at how a child gets sentenced to die in prison. Tomorrow, we stay on the Rick Chow trial, the state's case is winding down, which means the defense is about to take the wheel, and that's when we find out exactly how they plan to turn one hundred and thirty yard chase into a self defense claim. You're going to want to be here for that, And I want to hear from you on the Chow case because I know it's gonna split people.

17:38 Where's the line when does protecting your property stop and chasing a kid down the street begin. If you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment right there on the episode and tell me where you land. I read them. If today's show meant something to you, the single best thing you can do is share it. Tell a friend, Send this episode to one person who you know about this stuff. That word of mouth is how a show like this actually grows and it costs you nothing. And again, if you're on Spotify, leave a comment. If you're listening somewhere else, a follow and a rating help more than you'd think. Cyrus Carmack Belton wanted to own a tattoo shop. He was fourteen. Somebody has to say his name, so we did.

18:23 I'm Garrett Fisher, do better. A note on today's stories. In the Ohio case, Michael McKee has pleaded not guilty to the murders of Spencer and Monique Tepe. No motive has been established, and the account of his travel before the killings is an allegation that has not been proven in court. He is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. In South Carolina, Rick Show has pleaded not guilty and his trial is ongoing. He is presumed innocent. No verdict has been reached, and key facts, including whether the victim was armed or shoplifting, remain disputed and are for the jury today aside. In the Mississippi case, Carly Gregg was convicted by a jury in twenty twenty four. Her appeal is currently pending before the Mississippi Supreme Court, which has not yet ruled. Some statements attributed to attorneys are paraphrases drawn from public hearings. This program is for information and commentary and is not legal advice.