THE TESLA KILLER IN HANDCUFFS: D4VD ARRESTED FOR MURDER OF CELESTE RIVAS

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher. Monday, April twentieth, twenty twenty six. Let me walk you through this. Months ago, we were following a case that looked for a little while like it might just quietly disappear. A twenty year old singer whose stage name is spelled D four VD but pronounced David. Real name David Anthony Burke, had a tesla that had been abandoned on a public street in the Hollywood Hills. That tesla got towed it sat at a Hollywood impound lot. Employees at the towyard noticed a smell. They called police, and inside the trunk, investigators found a black cadaver bag holding the decomposing body of a fourteen year old girl named Celeste Revas Hernandez, whose arms and legs had been severed and placed in a second black bag underneath the first. She had been reported missing by her mother three times in twenty twenty four. She was thirteen when she disappeared. She was fourteen when she died, and her body was found days after what would have been her fifteenth birthday. We spent weeks on this case in the fall. Then it went quiet. The medical examiner's records got sealed by court order. The LAPD declined to officially call it a homicide because the remains were too decomposed to determine cause of death. A grand jury was quietly convened in November. David's managers testified. A friend of

1:35 his named Neo Langston testified in February. Unsealed court documents revealed the prosecution had formally named him a quote target of a murder investigation, and then for two more months nothing, no indictment, no charges, just a young woman in a black bag, a singer on hold, and a city waiting. That weight ended the thirdday afternoon LAPD robbery homicide rolled up to a twenty thousand dollars a month. Hollywood Hills mansion with K nine units, gang and narcotics officers, a battering ram and tactical gear. They forced the front gate open.

2:15 One officer yelled on footage TMZ later obtained quote if you try to run or try to resist, you will get hit and you will get hurt. David Anthony Burke, twenty one years old, was taken out of that house in handcuffs, thrown into a cruiser, and driven to La County Jail, where he is being held this morning without bail. The case is being presented to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office today. His lawyers are pushing back hard. No grand jury indictment has been returned, no criminal complaint has been filed, and they say they will vigorously defend his innocence. The DA's Major Crimes Division is reviewing everything to decide if there's enough to charge. But I'll tell you what you don't roll swat on a rented mansion in Hollywood Hills with a K nine unit and a battering ram on a whim. That was a decision, that was a plan, and that happened for a reason. We've also got updates today on the Athenas Strand trial out of Fort Worth, Texas, a case we took a full episode on last Monday and updated again last Thursday. Since then, there have been two more days of testimony that includes some of the worst DNA evidence I have seen presented at a capital trial, a mother's testimony that reduced the defendant to tears, and a prosecution that has now officially rested its case. And then finally we're going to introduce you to a brand new trial happening right now in Provo, Utah.

3:44 Meet Tracy Grist, sixty years old grandmother, mother of two, charged with masterminding the murder of her own son in law, who was shot seven times in her living room by her own son after being lured there by her own daughter. It's called the family Trap murder trial, and the Google search history on this woman's devices connects this case to one of the most infamous murders for hire of the last decade. You'll never guess who she was googling. Actually, if you listen to this show you might. Let's get into it, so, David Anthony Burke, let's go back to where we left this one, because some of you might be new to the case, and some of you were with us back in the fall when we were covering it every week. If you're new, here's what you need to know. David Burke, professional name D four VD is a twenty one year old singer who went viral on TikTok in twenty twenty two with a song called Romantic Homicide.

4:44 If you've heard it, you know what that chorus is about. If you haven't heard it, here are the last words of the song quote in the back of my mind, I killed you and I didn't even regret it. I can't believe I said it, but it's true. I hate you. That song got him signed, It got him a Billboard chart run, It got him collaborations with Sizza and Caliuchiese. It got him a world tour in support of his first full length album, and then in September of last year, it got him a body in his trunk. On September eighth, twenty twenty five, employees at a towyard in Hollywood noticed a stench coming from a twenty twenty three Tesla Model Y that had been impounded after sitting abandoned on Bluebird Avenue for more than seventy two hours. The Tesla was registered to a Texas address belonging to David Anthony Burke.

5:36 When investigators opened the trunk, they found a black cadaver bag covered in insects. They partially unzipped it and saw a decomposed head and torso. Then they lifted that bag out and underneath it was a second black bag. Inside the second bag were the victim's severed arms and legs. It took a week to identify her. Her name was Celeste Revas Hernandez. She was fourteen. Her body was found the day after what would have been her fifteenth birthday. Her mother, who lived in Lake Elsinore, had reported her missing three separate times in twenty twenty four, when Celeste was thirteen. Her mother has said her daughter was dating a guy she'd never met, a guy her daughter only referred to as David. Friends of David Burke have told TMZ the two were frequently seen together. People who partied with them said they thought Celeste was much older than she was, and they had matching tattoos on their right index fingers that said, and I cannot believe I'm about to say this on air. Sh So that's the backstory. Now, let me walk you through what's changed. Through most of the fall, David's team insisted he was fully cooperating with the investigation. Lapdsources told NBC News in November that was not true. He was not cooperating. What he was doing, apparently was moving. He broke these on the Hollywood Hills home police had raided in September and moved somewhere else.

7:04 Police also confirmed that sometime in the spring of twenty twenty five, right around when investigators believe Celeste actually died, David traveled to Santa Barbara County. They haven't said what he was doing there, but they know he was there and they think that matters. In mid November, the Los Angeles County District Attorney began presenting evidence to an investigative grand jury. Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman led the presentation. His managers testified, a friend of his name, Neil Langston, testified. The grand jury sat for several days. Nothing was formally announced. In February, unsealed court filings, specifically petitions demanding that David's parents testify in front of the grand jury, revealed something we hadn't known before. In those petitions, David was formally described as a quote target, not a person of interest, not a witness, A target. The document used the words quote target may be involved in having committed the following criminal offenses. One count of murder That was February, then two months of silence, and then Thursday. Here's what Thursday looked like. Around four point thirty in the afternoon, in broad daylight. LAPD's Robbery Homicide Division, along with Gang and narcotics officers and a K nine unit descended on David Burke's current Hollywood Hills residence, a rented mansion reportedly going for twenty thousand dollars a month. Officers in full tactical

8:36 gear with rifles forced the front gate open with a battering ram. TMZ published the footage. One officer can be heard yelling quote, if you try to run or try to resist, you will get hit and you will get hurt. Minutes later, David Burke, twenty one years old, was walked out of the house in handcuffs, placed in a squad car, and driven directly to La County Jail. He is being held without bail. The LAPD issued a statement Thursday evening confirming the arrest. Detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department Robbery Homicide Division have arrested David Burke, a twenty one year old resident of Los Angeles, for the murder of Celeste Rivas. Burke is being held without bail. The case is being presented to the La County District Attorney's Office today Monday. The DA's Major Crimes Division will review whatever evidence LAPD has assembled and decide whether to formally file charges.

9:34 David's defense team came out swinging. In a statement released Thursday night, His lawyer said, quote, there has been no indictment returned by any grand jury in this case, and no criminal complaint filed. David has only been detained under suspicion. We will vigorously defend David's innocence. Now, I want to break that statement down for a second, because it's carefully worded. Notice what it says and what it doesn't. It says no grand jury indictment has been returned. Okay, maybe the grand jury didn't return one. Maybe the prosecution decided to go the preliminary hearing route instead, which is their right in California. It says no criminal complaint has been filed.

10:15 That's technically true. The complaint gets filed when the DA decides to proceed, which is exactly what's supposed to happen this week. It does not say he is innocent. It does not say he wasn't with her. It does not say he doesn't know how she ended up in his trunk. What it says is a procedural objection to the posture of the case, which is exactly what good defense lawyers are paid to say, when your client just got walked out of a mansion in zip ties. Here's what we don't know yet. We don't know what LAPD recovered in Thursday's raid. We don't know what flipped. We don't know whether someone who testified before the grand jury suddenly provided corroborating evidence, whether forensic work finally pinned down cause of death, whether her digital evidence from the tesla's on board systems placed David somewhere he said he wasn't, or whether one of his associates is now cooperating. All we know is that on Thursday afternoon, someone in the Robbery Homicide Division walked into their lieutenant's office and said, we're ready, and the lieutenant said, go. Here's what we do know. We know the medical examiner determined Celeste had been in that Tesla for an extended period of time, weeks, possibly longer.

11:26 We know her body was dismembered. We know that tesla was registered to David Burke. We know the car was moved multiple times in the months leading up to when it finally got impounded. We know David traveled to Santa Barbara County in the spring of twenty twenty five, which is right around when investigators believe Celeste actually died. We know she was fourteen. We know he was twenty. We know she was missing from her home in Lake Elsinor for over a year before her body was found. We know her mother was trying to find her. We know he was on a world tour when she was discovered, from voding an album called Withered, performing songs about killing women. There's a playbook for this. The young famous guy with the money and the lawyers and the pr team and the carefully worded statement, the system that protects young men who make money for record labels for as long as it possibly can. The fans who will tell themselves that maybe there's another explanation. The defense team that will file motions and push for delays and request bail hearings and argue about chain of custody. It is coming. All of it is coming. But there's also this. A fourteen year old girl in a black bag in a trunk, whose mother reported her missing three separate times and was ignored, whose body was discovered because a tesla smelled bad at a towyard, who had a matching tattoo with a man seven years older than her that said be quiet. Nobody was paying attention to her. Now everybody is Celestro vas Hernandez,

12:56 fourteen years old. Say her name. Last Monday, we spent an entire episode on the Athena Strand case. Last Thursday we came back with an update, and today we have to come back again because the trial in Fort Worth has produced two more days of testimony since we last spoke about it, and the nature of the evidence has changed. Quick refresher in case you're joining us. Late Tanner Lynn Horner, thirty five years old, pleaded guilty to capital murder and aggravated kidnapping on April seventh, the morning his trial was supposed to begin. He was a FedEx contract driver who delivered a package of Barbie dolls to the home of seven year old Athena Strand in Cottondale, Texas in November of twenty twenty two. He hit Athena with his delivery van.

13:51 She wasn't seriously hurt. Instead of calling for help, he panicked, put her in the van, tried to break her neck, and when that didn't work, strangled her with his bare hands. He led police to her body in the Trinity River. This trial is the penalty phase the jury's job is to decide whether Tanner Horner dies by lethal injection or spends the rest of his life in prison. On day seven, which was Wednesday, the fifteenth, prosecutors called a DNA expert named Kristin Casoda, and what she said from the witness stand is the thing I haven't been able to shake. Forensic scientists had done DNA testing on swabs taken from Athena's body during the autopsy, specifically a vaginal swab, an anal swab, and an oral swab. Initial testing on the vaginal swab showed what's called a DNA mixture that weakly excluded the suspect, which at first sounds exculpatory, but Casoda explained why it wasn't a clean result. The victims DNA was overpowering any male DNA that might have been present in plain in English, Athena's own DNA in high concentration was washing out the trace amounts of anyone else's DNA in the sample. So the lab ran what's called y str testing. That's a specialized DNA test that only targets male DNA markers. It filters out everything female. It zeros in on whatever male DNA is present even in trace

15:23 amounts and amplifies it. They ran y STR on all three swabs, vaginal, anal, oral, All three came back the same way Tanner Horner could not be excluded as the contributor. That's a very careful, very legal phrasing. What it means in the real world is this his DNA profile was consistent with the male DNA found on Athena's body, not quote a match, because why str testing doesn't produce the same statistical certainty as standard autosomal DNA testing, but can resistant on her mouth, inside her body in three separate places from a seven year old child. That's what this jury heard on Wednesday. And it tells you what happened in that van, and it tells you what happened after he hit her, and it tells you why he was so desperate to hide the body. Because the autopsy itself didn't show what you would call definitive sexual trauma, but the DNA evidence suggests that something happened that is not consistent with an accidental collision between a van and a child sorting laundry in her backyard. And on day six, which we talked about last Thursday, the jury had already heard from two adult women who testified that Tanner Horner had sexually assaulted them years before Athena died. One of them was sixteen when they met, Horner was twenty one.

16:48 He told her to lie about her age. In December of twenty fourteen, she testified she woke up to him raping her. So on Wednesday, the state built on all of that with the DNA and then after the DNA expert, Athena's mother took the stand. Her name is Maitland Gandy. And what she did on that witness stand, I'm going to be honest with you, I don't know how she got through. She described her daughter to the jury. She talked about who Athena was, playful, happy, deeply loved. Images were shown in court of Athena as a joyful little girl, hair and Bow's big smile, a kid. Gandy talked about the moment she found out her daughter was missing. She said, and this is her testimony, I felt like I was dying.

17:33 The Court TV producer who wrote the headline on that segment titled it quote, I felt like I was dying. And while she was testifying, while this mother was on the stand describing the daughters she will never see grow up. Tanner Horner sat at the defense table and cried, wept, fought back, tears broke down. Now. I want to be careful here. I know some of you are listening and thinking, oh good. Maybe he feels something, Maybe he has some shred of humanity. Maybe this means something. And I want to tell you what I think it means. I think it means he feels sorry for himself. I think Tanner Horner has had three and a half years to sit in a jail cell and get used to the story he tells himself about his own victimhood, about the alter ego he blames the one he calls zero, about his autism, about his mother drinking while pregnant, about the led exposure as a child, about the fact that he quote has a good personality for rules and protocol, as his own defense attorney said in opening statements, three and a half years of building up a self concept in which Tanner Horner is the real tragedy here and then the mother of the child he raped and strangled gets on the witness stand, and for maybe the first time in a long time, Tanner Horner had to look directly at the actual tragedy, not the one he invented for himself. The real one, the one with a name, the one who was seven, the one whose mother was describing what it

19:06 was like to lose her. That's not remorse, that's reality. Briefly breaking through the story he's been telling himself. And when the hearing ends today, he'll go back to his cell and rebuild the story because the story is the only thing that protects him from what he actually did. And Maitland Gandhy has something to say to him. Court TV published her statement separately. She has one question for her daughter's killer. She wants to know why, not the elaborate shifting, alter ego blaming version. Tanner Horner has given police seven different ways, the real one Why a grown man saw a seven year old girl sorting laundry in her backyard, hit her with a van and decided the safest thing for him was to make sure she never spoke again. I don't think she's going to get an answer.

19:52 Tanner Horner doesn't have one. What he has is a catalog of excuses and a willingness to cry when it suits him. Then, Day eight, which was Thursday, Athena's father, Jacob Strand, took the stand, and his testimony was different, quieter, more interior, absolutely gutting in its own way. He talked about the Barbie dolls that Horner had delivered that day. The barbies were a Christmas present. The reason Horner was at the house delivering a FedEx box was because Athena's stepmother, Elizabeth, had ordered her stepdaughter's Christmas gifts online. Jacob talked about spending time with his kids before he left on a hunting trip with his own father that weekend, and he said, quote, he felt like he wasn't there to protect her, and he feels guilty. Let me say something about that. Jacob Strand did not kill his daughter. Jacob Strand was not failing his daughter. Jacob Strand is a father who went on a hunting trip one weekend because that is a normal thing fathers do. And while he was gone, a stranger in a FedEx vest pulled into his driveway and took his child. There is no world in which the guilt belongs to Jacob Strand. The guilt belongs at the defense table. It belongs on the man in the orange jumpsuit who was crying for himself on Wednesday. It does not belong to a father who went hunting with his dad.

21:22 I wish someone would tell him that. I hope the jury told him that. Then Texas Ranger Job Espinoza was recalled to the stand to walk the jury through the physical evidence that completes the picture of premeditation and what Espinoza showed that jury is the part that makes this case for me shift from a panic decision to a planned one. Let me walk you through this. Horner had dash cameras inside his van, both a front facing one pointed at the driver's seat and ones that captured the interior. Those cameras were installed by his contracting company to monitor drivers. On no ninth, the day before Athena was murdered, Horner made a delivery at the home of a man named Kevin Huffman. Huffman has two kids who were playing outside when Horner pulled up, ages seven and ten. Horner asked them if an adult was home. The next day, November thirtieth, at four oh nine in the afternoon, Horner covered the front facing camera in his van with sticky notes. Sticky notes on the camera at four oh nine At five point thirty, he arrived at Athena's house. You do not cover a camera at four o nine on a whim.

22:33 You cover a camera at four o nine because you have decided what is about to happen next. That's not a mistake, that's a choice. It gets worse. After Horner murdered Athena, he drove to a Love's gas station to clean the van. Then, on December first, the next day, while the Wise County community was out searching for Athena with dogs and horses and four wheelers, he drove right back to the area where he had dumped her body on the job in his FedEx van, and while he was driving, Dispatch called him on the radio asking about a delivery from the day before. That call was captured by the truck's internal recorders. On the audio, you can hear Horner cheerfully say I have more packages. I have more packages, while driving past searchers looking for the little girl he'd killed the day before. And then there's the final thing. Espinoza presented, and this is the part I have struggled with. Investigators recovered items from Horner's home. Among those items were articles of Athena's clothing, her underwear in her pants had been placed in his backpack, the backpack he carried to work and taken home with him. He took them as trophies, as keepsakes. I don't know, but he took them. And then the prosecution played the audio that captured Athena's final moments for the jury. Court TV's reporting does not describe what is on that audio, and I am not going to speculate on this podcast, but I will tell you that after prosecutors presented that evidence, they announced they were resting their case. That means the

24:06 state's presentation is over. The defense begins calling their witnesses now the mitigation phase, where they will try to convince the jury that Tanner Horner should live instead of die. The jury won't be back until April twenty second, Wednesday, because the court is holding what are called dobare hearings in the meantime. Those are hearings outside the presence of the jury to determine whether certain expert defense witnesses are qualified to testify. Expect the defense to lean heavily on autism spectrum diagnosis, fetal alcohol syndrome claims, and mental illness. Whether any of that will matter to twelve jurors who have now seen the DNA results. Heard Maitland Gandhi describe her daughter and listen to audio of Athena's final moments.

24:52 Will find out Athena Strand, seven years old, will keep saying her name as long as this trial. Right, all right, let's move to Provo, Utah, because right now, in a courtroom in Provo, there is a trial starting that has everything family betrayal, a stage self defense, a son as the trigger man, a daughter turning state's evidence on her own mother, a knife in the wrong hand, and I am not making this up. A Google search history that connects this case to one of the most infamous murders for hire in American legal history. It's being called the family Trap murder trial. The defendant is sixty year old Tracy grist the victim is her son in law, forty two year old Matthew Ristelli, and the state is arguing that this sixty year old grandmother was the architect of a plot in which her own son shot her own daughter's husband seven times in her own living room while the two young grandchildren were in the house. Let me walk you through this, because the setup matters Matthew Rostelli lived in California with his wife, Katherine, who is Tracy Griss's daughter, and their two young children. By the summer of twenty twenty four, the marriage was falling apart. Catherine

26:23 wanted out, she hated her husband. She'd been sending text messages to her mother and to her brother, a man named Kevin Ellis, about how much she hated him, how she wanted a divorce, and this is the key. She did not think she would get custody of her kids if she divorced him, and she did not think she would be allowed to leave California with the children, so instead of filing for divorce, the state alleges Catherine and her mother and her brother came up with a different plan. On July twelfth, twenty twenty four, Matthew Rostelli was told his wife and kids needed him to come get them in Utah. His wife was visy ziting her mother, the kids were with her, and he needed to drive out, pick them all up and bring them home to California.

27:07 Except according to the state, Catherine had no intention of ever going home with him, and according to Catherine's own testimony, last Monday, at her mother's trial that plan, the plan to kill Matthew had been in motion for a while. In her words, it quote started as a joke, just a dark conversation among family members that eventually stopped being a joke. Catherine testified that at some point she told her mother she didn't want to go through with it, and she testified that her mother insisted. Her mother insisted. Matthew drove to Utah. He pulled up to Tracy Grists home in the town of American Fork, just north of Provo.

27:49 The lights inside the house were off. He walked up to the door. He went inside to get his wife and his kids and go home. He was shot seven times. Kevin Ellis, Racy's son, Catherine's brother, Matthew's brother in law, was waiting for him inside. Ellis pulled the trigger. When police arrived, Ellis was standing over the body with his arms folded. He told officers he'd shot Matthew in self defense. He pointed them to a knife on the floor near Matthew's hand. Tracy Griss told officers she'd heard the shots from another room, run to check on her daughter, and called nine one one. The story was self defense and intruder with a knife, a son protecting his mother and his sister and his nieces and nephews from a violent brother in law. Here's why the story fell apart. First, Kevin Ellis has already been convicted. He had a separate trial.

28:41 He was found guilty. He's going to prison. Second, Catherine Ristelli, the victim's wife, pleaded guilty to murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and discharge of a firearm shortly after her arrest. She was sentenced to one to fifteen years, and she testified against her brother at his trial, and she's now testifying against her own mother at this one. Third, the knife police found in Matthew Ristelli's hand was in his non dominant hand, which is not it turns out how self defense generally works when a man is rushed by an armed gunman. And when investigators traced where that knife came from, they found it had been purchased online, allegedly by Tracy grist Fourth, the medical examiner, doctor Amanda Ho, testified on day two of the trial last Wednesday, that Matthew Ristelli had seven gunshot wounds. Three shots went entirely through his body, four more stayed lodged in him. The damage she cataloged included both lungs, his heart, his diaphragm, his liver, his stomach, his spleen, his kidney, and his ribs. Seven shots perforated organs across his entire Torso that is not a self defense shooting. That is not oh no, I feared for my mind life. I fired until the threat stopped. That is a man being emptied into fifth. A forensic scientist at the State Crime Lab, Rachel Williams, tested the knife

30:12 for DNA, and here's what she found. The DNA on the knife did not belong to Matthew Rostelli. It did not belong to Catherine Rostelli. It did not belong to Kevin Ellis, It did not belong to Tracy Grist. It didn't belong to any of them, which is a very interesting result because if you were going to grab a knife from your own kitchen to defend yourself from an intruder, you would expect your DNA to be on it. And if the victim had been holding the knife, even in his non dominant hand, even briefly, even post mortem, you'd expect his DNA to be on it. But neither was.

30:53 The knife had been handled by none of them, which is consistent, the state argues with a brand new knife that had been purchased online for exactly one purpose, to be placed in a dead man's hand. Sixth, the neighbors. Tracy Gris's next door neighbor, Caitlin Laney, called nine to one one that night because she heard what she thought were gunshots six to eight loud bangs in succession. Before she called nine to one one, she texted Tracy Grist and, in a text message that the jury saw last Wednesday, Tracy Grist admitted to her neighbor in writing that Kevin Ellis had just shot Matthew Ristelli. Seventh Earlier in this segment, I promised you a Google search history that connects this case to an infamous murder for hire. Let me deliver Dan Markel. Longtime listeners of this show know the name.

31:45 Dan Markel was a law professor at Florida State University who was murdered in his own garage in twenty fourteen, shot in the head by two hit men hired by his ex wife's family, specifically by his former mother in law, Donna Adelson, his former brother in law, Charlie Adelson, and a middlewoman named Katherine Magbanua, who had a relationship with Charlie Adelson and served as the liaison between the family and the shooters. Five people have been convicted in that case. It is a landmark murder for Higher Case. It was the subject of a Dateline episode. It has been covered extensively in legal media. Here's what investigators found on Tracy Griss's devices. A search for Catherine Magbanua, A search for quote where was Donna Adelson arrested? A search for the dateline episode about the Addlson family, A search for quote how to get my US passport fast? And for a little dessert on top of all of it, A search for the quote it's happening meme the office meme, you know the one, Oh my god, it's happening. Stay calm.

32:53 That's not a person who got swept up in a messy situation. That's a person who studied. That's a person who researched how other family murder plots had been investigated, who noted where they had failed, Who thought about how quickly she'd need to get out of the country if things went sideways, and who celebrated the execution of her plan by googling an internet meme. There's a playbook for this, and Tracy Grist apparently wrote it down. The defense's argument, delivered by Attorney Dana Faismeyer on day one, is essentially this, It was a messy situation that got out of hand. Kevin Ellis has already been convicted. He is solely responsible for Matthew Rostelli's death, and the state is overreaching by trying to pin his mother for a crime. Her son pulled the trigger on quote, one guy murdered a guy.

33:43 One guy murdered a guy. That's what the defense is going with. Matthew Rostelli's own mother, Diane Rostelli, took the stand on day two and day three. She testified about her three sons, Thomas, Jonathan, and Matthew. She described Catherine, her daughter in law, with two words dark and tough. She described the phone call she got from Tracy Griss the night Matthew died. Tracy told her quote, matt is dead, and she testified that later when she spoke to Catherine on the phone, she could hear Tracy Grist in the background quote coaching her responses, coaching her own daughter on what to say to the mother of the man. She helped kill. On day three, the jury saw bodycam footage from the scene. They saw officers arriving to find Matthew face down on the floor, his son standing over the body with his arms folded. They saw the knife, They heard the self defense claim. They heard Tracy Grists composed carefully rehearsed nine to one to one call story. The trial continues next Monday, April twenty seventh, with day four.

34:50 We'll keep you posted as it moves toward verdict. Here's the thing I keep coming back to on this one. Tracy Grist is a sixty year old grandmother. She sits in court in Cardig. Her hair is neat, she looks as every woman of a certain age in these trials seems too utterly unremarkable. Someone's grandma, And if the state is right, this grandmother researched a famous murder for hire, bought a knife online to frame a dead man, lured her son in law across state lines under the pretext of picking up his wife and children, and stood in her own home while her son emptied a firearm into the man seven times, three through and through four, still in the body, and then coached her daughter on how to lie to the dead man's mother on the phone afterward.

35:35 There's a playbook for this, There really is. And every time we think we've seen every version of it, someone finds a new way to run it. Matthew Ristelli, forty two years old, husband, father of two, drove to Utah thinking he was bringing his family home. Someone has to say his name. Three stories today, One around that was months in coming, one trial that is grinding toward verdict with DNA evidence that shouldn't exist in a case about a seven year old, and one trial that is barely beginning about a family that apparently ran a murder plot out of grandma's living room. The common thread, if there is one, is that every one of these cases got where it is because somebody decided accountability was optional. A grown man who thought he could fame and lawyer his way out of a dismembered fourteen year old in his trunk.

36:30 A delivery driver who thought sticky notes on a camera and a good panic could be his defense. A grandmother who thought she could google her way to a full proof murder plot. Accountability doesn't have a legal department, it doesn't have a PR team, it doesn't have sticky notes, and it doesn't care what you searched on your browser history. It just shows up on a Thursday afternoon with a battering ram. I'm Garrett Fisher. This is Daily Crime and Justice. Tomorrow will be back with whatever the week bring us do better. Disclaimer. Daily Crime and Justice is produced by Calaroga Shark Media. This episode draws on court records, LAPD press statements, reporting from The Daily Mail, NBC news people, the Los Angeles Times, Court TV trial coverage, 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. Everything here is our opinion and interpretation of events, offered in the spirit of honest, candid conversation about cases that matter.