[ambient street noise]
[foreboding music playing]
[subway train rumbling]
[siren wailing in distance]
[foreboding music continuing]
[woman 1] When I got the call,
they said, "Oh, Carnegie Deli. You've got a quintuple."
Five homicides.
[sirens wailing]
[man 1] When we got to the scene, we had a hell of a lot of people outside.
The restaurant was jammed. Uniform closed the place down.
We want to keep the crowd there so we can interview them.
Try to get witnesses as quickly as you can.
I get up there and I get briefed by the detectives.
[steadily intensifying ticking]
[woman 2] So at the scene, there was three likely and two DOAs.
Three people who are likely gonna go to the emergency room, the hospital.
I can't imagine laying there,
hearing the shots go off and knowing that you're next.
You can't shoot five people in New York.
They're gonna hunt your ass down.
They're gonna find you.
[tense intro music playing]
[man 2] Every case takes a piece out of your soul.
[woman 1] You cannot do this job unless you really care.
[man 3] You want to find out the truth.
That's what detectives do.
[man 4] I've always liked the peek behind the curtain.
What really happened?
[woman 2] It's so important for a family to know who murdered their relative.
That's my job.
[man 5] In New York City, the NYPD…
This is it.
[intro music trails off]
[siren wailing in distance]
[mysterious music playing]
[woman] I love New York.
I grew up in Alphabet City on 10th Street in housing projects.
My parents were very strict with me.
I was never allowed to do a thing.
[funky music playing]
But we used to cut out of high school and go to movie theaters on 42nd Street.
It was a real grungy area for a long time.
You had the peep shows.
You had all the pedophiles in the arcades.
But it had color. It had life.
It also had quite a bit of business for me, most unfortunately.
When I became a cop in the '80s, it was still really high crime.
[man] Police officers who were hired in the 1980s
kind of cleaned up those streets in the 1990s.
[funky music trails off]
[man 2] By 2001, Broadway was at one of its peaks.
Theaters were all crowded every night.
And the Carnegie Deli was thriving. People would wait on line to get in there.
[Butcher] It's bright and crazy,
and it's filled with tourists dislocating their jaws on huge sandwiches.
It was right next to the theater that Letterman filmed.
So people flocked there. It was a landmark.
So it's a Thursday. I worked earlier in the day and was done.
And I was at the ball field, coaching my son's baseball game.
The game ended when I get the call.
[phone rings]
When you start saying it's in Midtown Manhattan,
and you start mentioning a landmark like Carnegie Deli,
I have to get up there as soon as possible.
In retrospect, I probably should have put a suit on. I did not.
I show up, I'm wearing shorts and a T-shirt.
The crime that took place in that building
was on the top-floor apartment, not in the restaurant.
Fifth floor was where everything took place.
We spoke to the super. We speak to the neighbors.
We do canvasses, find out if anybody can tell us who these people are.
The cooperation from the deli downstairs…
We identified Jennifer Stahl.
[Rivera] It's her apartment.
[Parrino] I remember standing in the doorway of the apartment building
and seein' this guy coming down the stairs, takin' pictures.
I don't know everybody in Crime Scene by name,
but I know everybody in Crime Scene by now.
I've been around long enough, and I'm like,
"I don't even see Crime Scene's car. Who's this guy takin' pictures?"
I remember it went something like this. Like, "Who are you?"
"What are you doing in my crime scene?"
"Are you in Crime?" "No, I'm not." "Then who are you?"
"I'm the police commissioner's photographer."
I'll tell you what I said. You could bleep it out.
"I don't give a fuck who you are. Get out of my fuckin' crime scene."
[Rivera] Parrino's not a kiss ass.
A case like this, everybody wants to come and look.
But when you're in charge of the scene,
no matter who the boss is, you tell them, "You can't come in."
[Zeins] We get upstairs, and inside, there on the floor,
were two bodies face down
with their hands behind their back,
tied up in duct tape and shot in the head.
[Butcher] They didn't break in.
Door's not broken down.
So that gives you some clue.
Barbara Butcher was like having another detective there,
but a detective who knew more than you.
[Butcher] I was a medical legal death investigator
working for the Office of Chief Medical Examiner in New York.
We go to that scene and investigate the body.
We work with the police.
The scene belongs to them.
The body belongs to me.
[suspenseful music playing]
Four people had been lined up and shot.
[quietly] One, two, three, four.
And there was blood in a rectangle
down the living room floor.
And then the smears of blood
where two of the people had been pulled away by EMTs.
And then I photograph the wounds and the bindings.
[shutter snaps]
Tied behind the back, ankles tied, things like that.
One of the detectives saying to me,
"Let me take you where we think the first shooting occurred,
the first victim."
That was Jennifer Stahl.
[somber music playing]
Somebody told me that she was the owner of the apartment,
and had been removed because she still had a pulse.
Even though the body isn't there, I still need to collect whatever evidence,
whatever story I can about that person
if they're likely to die.
And we went back to a little recording studio.
She had this wonderful little creative thing.
The kind of thing I would like.
And, um, I… I had a flash of sadness.
And to see blood in that little…
sweet little studio.
It was not good.
You wanna be careful not to let your emotions get away with you.
So, you know, quick, boom. Let's close the lid on that.
Let's tamp that right the hell down. Let's get about our business.
[melancholy music trails off]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Parrino] I remember walkin' into the apartment.
It becomes apparent this is a place of business.
This was not the "nickel bag in Washington Square Park cut with oregano"
kind of pot dealing.
She was dealing, uh, high-end marijuana.
We discovered drugs and money missing.
[Rivera] Right away, we're gonna think, "It's a robbery gone bad."
But you have five people tied up, four people on the floor.
That's very unusual, especially in Midtown.
That doesn't really happen there.
All shot in the head, back of the head, execution style.
We can think it could be a personal thing. We could think it might be domestic,
where Jennifer might have had a problem with a boyfriend or somebody else.
The fact that Jennifer Stahl was selling weed wasn't important to us,
even though marijuana wasn't legal then.
We were more concerned that five people got shot.
The media was all over it from the beginning.
They caught wind of it the night it happened.
[intense, riveting music playing]
[reporter] Detectives and investigators search for clues
hours after two men and a woman were killed
and another man and woman hospitalized.
A friend of mine called and was like, "Mich, did you… Turn on the TV."
"Did you see the news? There's been a shooting at Jen's."
[siren squawks]
They were interrupting TV shows.
Massacre happened above the Carnegie Deli.
…execution-style shooting inside the building
were bound and gagged with duct tape.
She'd broken her finger and had a surgery.
You could see the cast on her hand, and I knew it was Jen.
I knew it was her.
With media pressure came more resources, which was very helpful.
[man] Manhattan is divided for police department purposes,
Manhattan North and Manhattan South.
So the dividing line is 59th Street.
Manhattan South handles everything south of 59th Street,
down to the Battery, river to river.
Each borough has several precincts.
Each of those precincts has a detective squad.
Homicide squads come in as a support group
when a homicide drops in one of those precincts.
The case was assigned to Midtown North Precinct.
So it's Manhattan South Homicide.
You need personnel. The more personnel, the more information you're gonna get.
You wanna get Manhattan North Homicide down there.
We would be called to assist them.
They never would be called to assist us.
[Rivera] Manhattan South, we called them "Manhattan Soft."
Cops that work in Manhattan North are tougher.
There was this whole competition.
When I went to work in Manhattan South, I changed my opinion.
Manhattan South, you have to really use your head and investigation skills,
because a lot of the cases were stranger-on-stranger homicides.
And a lot of the perpetrators come from New Jersey, Brooklyn, Queens.
They can come from anywhere.
[intense, riveting music playing]
There were witnesses on the scene who saw a red car driving away.
Close proximity to the deli.
These bits of information, when they're put together,
it's either gonna fit into the pattern of the investigation
or it's gonna get ruled out.
But everything is worthy of a look.
It's a full-court press to find out as much as we can.
[Rivera] First, we identify Stahl. It's her apartment.
From there, we have to identify all the victims.
All your effort goes into identifying the person
before figuring out what happened.
[McNeely] You do victimology. You look into their backgrounds.
We had a gang database.
You're gonna run them through that database.
Check with Narcotics to see if they knew any individuals that were there.
Nicknames, phone numbers, things like that.
[Rivera] The DOAs were Stephen King and Charles Helliwell.
[Butcher] Jennifer didn't make it.
She died probably just a few hours later.
Gunshot wound to the head.
And the other two, by a miracle of God,
despite being shot in the head, they survived.
[somber, pensive music playing]
[Veader] I just feel like somebody was watching out for me, you know?
That my mother was with me or something like that.
God was on one shoulder and my mother was on the other.
Because…
Um…
Yeah, that was… that was close.
[subtly menacing music playing]
I was shot on my right side,
behind my ear right at the bottom of my hairline.
And then the exit came out, um, above my occipital bone.
So it just basically followed the curvature of the skull and came out.
Which is a lucky thing,
'cause I think if it went in, I wouldn't be here probably.
I never left my… my spot 'cause I didn't know…
I was in this big puddle of blood.
And I didn't know if I would lodge…
If the bullet was still in me, if I would lodge the bullet in me, or, um…
or if I was gonna die, I didn't know.
So I just stayed where I was.
Once I thought that they were gone
is when I got my hands untied from the gaffer's tape
and reached for my cell phone in my pocket and called 911.
Then kept making phone calls.
I dunno. I just wanted to say some goodbyes to some of my friends.
The two that survive,
we're trying to get statements out of them.
[Veader] The detectives were there right from when I got to the hospital.
I just told them what I knew.
I mean, what… what I saw.
[Rivera] We found out the victims, they were all theater people, in the arts.
And I understood that one of those living victims
was the fiancée of one of the DOAs.
I told the police officer, "I walked in. Jen introduced me to a couple,
Rosemond and Trey, that were up from St. John."
They were sitting around having a glass of wine.
She just asked me to join them, and I did.
My intent was just to go there and give her a trim and get weed.
I'm a hairstylist, so we did a little bartering.
About 15 minutes after I got there, there was a buzz at the door.
It was almost like a bit of a blur of two people coming in,
but you could tell from the size of them…
One was taller than the other one, one was better-looking.
I didn't know them from Adam.
The taller one of the two took a gun out from his waistband and said,
"Everybody get on the ground and put your arms behind your back."
I mean, I just did what I was told, and…
I thought maybe that would keep it from anything escalating, but…
One of them took my friend Jennifer into the other room.
I remember, um, her saying,
"Please, take whatever you want. Just don't hurt my friends."
And with that, that's when I heard the first gunshot go off.
[intense, foreboding music pulsing]
[gunshot]
And I guess he… he… he killed her right there.
I just didn't hear her again after that.
So I think I… I just think I…
I knew then…
"This is it."
You know, I figured we're…
There wasn't gonna be anything else.
[delicate, somber music playing]
[Zeins] In New York City,
there's no telephone notifications when someone dies. It's face-to-face.
You gotta go knock on this person's door in the middle of the night
or middle of the day, and tell them that someone in their family's deceased.
That's really the hardest part.
Those words don't come out of your mouth easy,
to say that their loved one has been murdered.
You know, tragically like this, and senselessly, and…
It's… I think there's another level to it.
And, you know, I just…
You can just feel it, when people learn it for the first time.
So it's just…
Yeah. Yeah. It's not an easy thing.
[somber, restrained music playing]
-It was May 11th that we found out. -Eleventh.
My mom and dad, they were on the Cape, and a police officer came to their house.
My mother was watering her flowers in her bathrobe, and two…
At 6:00 in the morning.
…two policemen walked down the driveway and said, "Are you Karen Helliwell?"
-She said she had this sinking sensation. -Her heart sunk. Yeah.
And they're like, "Is your husband here?"
He was, so they sat them down.
And they told them the news that Trey was dead.
-Yeah. -Our lives were forever changed that day.
[Jennifer] Two days later was his birthday,
and it was lilac season.
He absolutely loved lilacs.
He was born and he died in lilac.
The height of its glory.
[Holly] Mm-hmm.
We knew Trey was coming to New York
to meet Rosemond's family and to attend a cousin's wedding.
And they were supposed to stay at Jennifer Stahl's Carnegie Deli apartment.
-Yeah. -And so that's how they ended up there.
[Cramer] My heart goes out to them.
Rosemond came to visit Jen,
but I felt it was really sad because Trey didn't really know Jen.
Just, you know, a friend of a friend, hanging out with her.
[intense, erratic music playing]
[Parrino] In this case, we raised 18 fingerprints
between inside the apartment and on the banister.
But we collected no ballistic shells. So that tells you something.
Five shots. You don't find any shells.
You're probably looking at a revolver.
[Zeins] Maybe they threw a weapon, the gun, in the sewer.
We call DEP. We look at the garbage here.
We have people lookin' in garbage cans on the street.
You're doing everything to get as much information as possible.
[McNeely] There had been a camera installed in the staircase.
That night, they discovered that.
The surveillance video depicted two male Blacks.
One had dreads and a hoodie, and the other one had shorter hair.
[Wagner] In my history,
in the hundreds of homicides I worked on,
only one other than this had video in it.
So I was surprised when I saw the tape.
I was like, "Whoa. This is… This is very good."
We knew those people were suspects,
people we wanted to get into contact with and speak to.
[Rivera] This case happened at 7:30 p.m.
We worked around the clock in the same place.
In Jennifer's apartment, there was an answering machine.
It was blinking. We hit play.
Her friend was asking is she okay.
She hadn't heard from her and was wondering where she was.
I had called Jennifer's house while the murders were happening.
[Rivera] Based on that, we needed to interview her friend,
find out why she was worried about her.
Why was she concerned that Jennifer wasn't answering her phone?
[tense, arresting music playing]
[Coleman] The morning of May 11,
homicide detectives walked into my house.
They looked like they were off of a set of NYPD Blue.
And they asked me questions about her business.
I said to them, "It was a place to gather."
It was just, like, friends hanging out, and people smoking, talking.
So they were people that you met in passing,
but we didn't necessarily become friends.
Jennifer sold weed to support her artwork.
We learned that she was an actress that was in Dirty Dancing.
But music was more of an interest to her at that point than dancing and acting was.
[Stahl singing] ♪ Ganja woman ♪
[Cramer] Her recording studio was the room that she dealt pot out of.
She did also love to bring friends in and record with them too.
[Coleman] People that came in and out of Jennifer's apartment
were Jennifer's friends.
[Cramer] It was just getting busier.
I think it seemed chaotic to her sometimes, hard to manage.
Her buzzer going off.
Occasionally, she would have a friend there who would help manage the door.
[low, somber music playing]
[Coleman] Stephen was there working that night,
answering the door for her.
She was basically dealing to her friends and people that she knew in the industry.
She dealt with some famous people.
Saturday Night Live cast, things like that.
Her clientele was, like, well-vetted.
She had to know you.
If you said, "So-and-so sent me,"
I don't think you're getting buzzed up into Jennifer's apartment. She was…
She was ultra careful.
[Coleman] This was very hard for us as her friends,
because if they wanted something from Jen,
she would have given it to them.
There was no reason to shoot five people.
[somber, pensive music playing]
[Coleman] I saw Jen just a few days before her murder,
and she was quite upset.
Jennifer had been fighting with her boyfriend.
I believe she was trying to leave, and he grabbed her hand,
and so her finger got broken.
One of the suspects was the Black man with long dreads.
I felt very certain that her boyfriend had killed her,
because he fit that description.
With the information we got from Barbara, we got Jennifer Stahl's boyfriend's name,
and then we had to go interview him.
There's some domestic issues going on there.
We had to make sure he was not involved in this homicide.
[Veader] I was positive it wasn't her boyfriend.
I didn't think it looked like him.
I had met him, and he was always very nice to me,
and I don't think that he would do something like that.
[tense, intriguing music pulsing]
We interviewed Jennifer Stahl's boyfriend,
but he was ruled out based on information he gave us
as to where he was, what he was doing.
We knew he was not the perpetrator.
When he called me,
he said, "I had to get a lawyer."
"Everybody thought it was me."
I said, "Yes, I thought it was you."
And he said to me, "How could you have thought it was me?"
"I loved her!"
I said, "You guys were fighting."
"She had a broken finger,
and they said a Black man with long dreads left the scene."
I said, "Who was I to think?"
He said, "How could you think I would hurt her?"
I apologized to him.
[mysterious, puzzling music playing]
[Veader] After I was released from the hospital,
the detectives told me that Rosemond's gonna be in there a lot longer,
and that the bullet lodged in her jaw.
We didn't know each other.
We just were both the victims of an awful circumstance.
Her more so than me.
I mean, she lost her, you know…
her other half, so…
Um…
I can't even imagine.
[lawyer] As the prosecutor,
I have to extract as much information as I can as quickly as I can,
but also be mindful of the fact that this is traumatic
to talk in detail about something that they just want to forget.
I remember speaking to Rosemond two days later.
Rosemond was describing how the sound of the gunshots
were coming closer and closer to her,
and she was next in line.
She heard the shot that killed her fiancé, Charles Helliwell.
I can't imagine laying there, hearing the shots go off,
and knowing that you're next.
[Nuzzi] If it was the last thing she was gonna do,
she was gonna turn around and see the person who killed her,
and she moved and turned her head
at the last moment before she was shot.
That might very well have saved her life.
Rosemond said that the initial buzzer ring was answered by Stephen King.
And she heard Stephen King say, "It's Sean," to Jennifer.
And Jennifer said, "Okay. Let him up."
And so it was at that point that we had initially the name "Sean."
We didn't have a last name,
but we had at least a first name for one of the two people.
[enigmatic music playing]
[Parrino] The two main leads we had
were the fact that there was a name of "Sean,"
and the fact that there was a video.
Those were the two main things we had to go on.
I know that there's a number of prints that are removed,
but we don't know the value, or whether it's gonna lead us to anything,
or whether it was the police commissioner's.
[McNeely] They interviewed people that purchased weed from her,
were friends with her.
They were trying to run down whatever leads they could
and make connections.
It could be somebody that knows 'em and knows the person "Sean."
[Cramer] When I saw the footage, I didn't recognize Sean.
I… I really didn't know who it could have been.
[Parrino] When we were searching the apartment and crime scene,
after the initial forensic collection is made,
then you go back in looking for leads.
Things that aren't forensically connected,
pieces of paper, photographs, this kind of thing.
And we found a résumé which gave us the first steps to a "Sean."
Apparently, he was a roadie
for George Clinton and the Parliament-Funkadelic.
Jen always tried to connect people to create things.
That was really a big part of what she did.
[erratic, unsettling music playing]
They went to the address that Sean Salley had listed on his résumé,
and he wasn't living there. He had left that place.
[Parrino] We were concentrating on Sean,
and we ended up with numerous addresses in New Jersey.
Detectives had contacted every single person, just about,
in his life that he knew.
One of those individuals viewed the videotape from the Carnegie Deli
and recognized Sean Salley.
Significantly, they knew the second person who we were trying to identify.
They knew his nickname was "Dre."
So they started to run him down.
We're going to different homes, interviewin' people.
And we go to… And I recall it as his girlfriend's home.
[Nuzzi] She knew someone named Dre,
her boyfriend/common-law husband, Andre.
[Parrino] Andre wasn't there.
I was the only one who had business cards. I think that's why my card gets left.
[foreboding music playing]
[Parrino] Sunday morning, the 20th…
[ringing]
[Parrino] We get a phone call at the office.
It… It's Andre.
And he's willing to talk to us.
Andre Smith showed up, ironically, in a red car
that fit the description of the car that a witness saw driving away
in close proximity to where the murders occurred.
When Andre Smith came in,
we asked him if he can give a set of prints,
which he agreed to, and they took his prints.
[Parrino] I can only assume he thought he was gonna be smart enough
to keep us at bay and never get trapped into anything,
but totally show cooperation.
I'm assuming that was his goal.
The two people who spoke to him had him in the room for a long time.
These are senior detectives, senior to us.
They continued speaking to him for hours.
Then when they weren't getting anywhere, then the next team comes in.
Fresh people who'd slept all night.
[Parrino] It's kinda like this endless supply of pinch hitters
until you find the pinch hitter that makes the connection,
then you run with it.
Billy and Tommy Bidell go in there and start trying to talk to him.
[McNeely] He denied being in Manhattan, denied being at the scene,
denied having any knowledge of who Sean Salley was.
I showed him still photos of the video surveillance tape.
And Andre Smith's face is right there for him to see.
And, "Nope." He denied it.
He was like that…
What was that song? That Shaggy song. "It Wasn't Me."
He does a very good job at denying it, but keeps on talking…
And, you know, there's always…
Detectives always joke about the "levels of denial."
"I don't know what you're talking about. I wasn't there."
"I know what you're talking about. I wasn't there."
"I was there, but I didn't do it."
To eventually, "I was there, and I did it."
So we're walkin' him through those levels of denial.
There comes a point in time
where we are able to match his prints while he's in there to the duct tape.
And that becomes extremely important,
because up to that point, we're pretty sure he's in there.
We feel very strongly he's involved,
but you don't have physical evidence that puts him on the scene at the time.
It's a tremendous confidence builder for the interrogators
that they're in the right place.
And now they could probably push a little harder
because they know he was there
as opposed to pushing him to a place they don't know the answer to.
We had been in there several hours.
We approached it from different angles 'cause he was not moving.
This guy was tough enough.
We know six detectives spoke to him and basically told him,
"We have you red-handed," and he still fuckin' denied it, you know?
Tom Bidell and I are talkin' and trying to figure out another strategy.
And Irma came into the room.
She said, "Would you guys mind if I went in and talked to him
just now while he's eating?"
I was like, "No, Irma. Have at it." Fresh face, that's my thinking.
Anything just to, you know, change up what's been going on.
[tense, erratic music playing]
"Let a female go in there. See if you can soften him up."
I don't know Andre Smith.
I don't know who the person is I'm interviewing
till I sit in front of them.
Then I can more or less read them. I can read what they're like.
You know, what triggers them.
I go, "You remind me of my brother, Ruben."
'Cause he did. He reminded me of my brother Ruben a bit.
I'll talk to perpetrators more on a personal level,
and then go into an interrogation.
And it works for me,
'cause I make them feel comfortable with me.
But I've had prisoners who said,
"That Rivera smiled in my face and stabbed me in the back." You know.
[Parrino] Irma has this ability to read the suspect
and figure out where it is that she has to make her connection
so that she can continue and get the answers that she needs.
I don't care if you're wearing a $5,000 suit,
or if you're, uh, homeless wearing a pair of sweatpants and dirty sneakers.
It doesn't make a difference to me. I treat everybody with respect.
Everybody who's bad,
there's still something good in them, no matter what.
You gotta find that good spot in them when you interview them.
"How did you grow up?" "I grew up the same way."
I didn't have toys when I was a kid. I didn't have Christmas sometimes.
We didn't have food sometimes.
I grew up in a housing project, so I can relate to them.
Andre Smith was very polite.
He was kinda soft-spoken.
He said he has a baby.
"Oh, you have a baby?" I know that's gonna bring something soft in him.
I use that.
[McNeely] All of a sudden, I just noticed these inflections.
He picked his head up.
He was engaged. He was listening to her.
You could see his eyes kinda brightened up a bit.
She hit something. Like a nerve.
He told me he did it 'cause he needed to get diapers for his kid.
That's when I thought he was ready.
I said, "They're gonna come back in. They're great guys. They're my friends."
"You can talk to them. You can trust them."
[tense music playing]
[McNeely] Irma gave us the signal.
I had to turn around. I interrupted Tommy Bidell
'cause he was eatin' a fuckin' Suzy Q and drinkin' a Yoo-hoo,
which was his dinner of choice, usually.
I was like, "Hey, shithead, let's go."
"Dump that Suzy Q. Let's get back in."
"This guy's changing up. Let's go and take a hit."
This is an interrogation by a team at its best.
Irma gets this real personal connection where he's ready to go.
It's that tipping point where they're done with the denial
and they're ready to… and they're ready to vomit information.
He's nodding his head when I'm asking him questions.
We were able to get Andre to speak.
And he said he met Sean Salley in Newark through a mutual friend.
Sean Salley was saying how he was down on his luck,
didn't have money,
and brought about this plan to… to rob a weed spot in Manhattan.
Then finally Andre Smith gave an account, anyway, of the murders.
He intended to go in, rob the weed, rob the money.
And he said, "I even told the girl
when she said, 'Don't hurt me. Don't hurt my friends.'"
He said, "I told her that's not what I'm here for."
She was bagging up the money and the weed for him.
He looked out. Salley was struggling to get everybody taped up.
So he went out and said, "Here, you stay with her."
Started to tape everybody,
and then he said, "This guy started shootin' everybody."
[gunshot]
[low, ominous music playing]
[Parrino] Once we were into the written statement
for the confession of Andre Smith,
I get wind that the police commissioner took exception
to me, uh, correcting his photographer.
He also took exception to me showing up in shorts and a T-shirt.
Within a day or two,
I'm removed from the case by the police commissioner.
I'm transferred to the 2-5 Precinct in Harlem
and to the detective squad there.
Irma goes, "Take his name and put it on a piece of paper."
"Put that piece of paper in your shoe,
step on him every day for ten days, and it's all gonna work out."
This was my father's mother. She was into Santería.
She believed so much in that.
She taught me, when anybody does anything wrong to you,
take a piece of paper, put their name in it…
I know you're all gonna be doing this now.
You take their name, put that in your shoe and you walk on them.
You walk on them and tell them you want that person out of your path.
[Parrino] So it is hard to walk away because you kinda own it.
But I can't be givin' my thoughts or directions to the detectives
and undermining the new boss.
Because now somebody else is responsible.
If they call you up and ask for your advice, that's great.
But you don't go callin' them, offering advice, right?
And it's difficult for them too now
because they know the police commissioner's mad at you.
They're not interested in talking to you
because they don't want your stink on them.
So, um…
I forced myself to completely remove myself from the case.
I don't even think I followed it too much in the media afterwards.
They killed three people, shot two execution-style, for $2,800.
The New York City Police Department has in custody Mr. Andre Smith.
To the second suspect responsible for these heinous crimes,
who detectives have identified as Sean Salley,
make no mistake that the New York City Police Department
will be relentless until he is in our custody
alongside his accomplice.
My suggestion is that he follow Andre Smith's lead
and turn himself in at the nearest police station.
[Nuzzi] Andre Smith said that he left the apartment with Sean Salley.
They went back to Newark,
and that was the last time he saw Sean Salley.
[Rivera] We have to continue looking for Salley.
We gotta get a phone number, find out who he's calling,
and then track the phone.
So what we were doing is we were tracking the cell sites.
He had stopped in Louisiana.
[McNeely] We had a team of people,
of detectives and sergeant, down in New Orleans.
Salley, he just seemed to be one step ahead.
At that point, you just keep continuing,
see if you can get phone information, but he got rid of his phone.
We had run out of investigative leads.
We're still pursuing it, but now it's, like, two months.
You know, the case goes cold.
We applied to have the case put on America's Most Wanted.
[Nuzzi] On July 14th, America's Most Wanted
aired the Sean Salley, Carnegie Deli homicide case
in an effort to get some leads.
It's a national show.
So it covers a tremendous amount of ground
and you've alerted the American public.
[multiple phones ringing]
[Coleman] God bless America, that's what I want to say,
because 20 minutes after that aired,
people started calling in.
[phones ringing]
Someone in Florida recognized him and notified us.
And he was thought to be at a homeless shelter in Miami.
[suspenseful music pulsing]
Miami gets contacted right away.
And they're like, "Hey, you need to go get this guy."
A detective from Miami
was interviewing people at that homeless shelter.
Sean Salley walked into the lobby, and he bolted.
The dogs tracked him down and cornered him in someone's backyard.
[thoughtful, somber music playing]
[spokesperson] He was captured by a City of Miami K9 officer.
He did suffer a bite, a dog bite, to the left forearm,
but he was treated on the scene, and we do have him in custody.
He's facing three charges of first-degree murder
and one charge of resisting arrest without violence.
Before they caught him, I was just like…
Every creak that I heard, I couldn't sleep through the night.
I just thought somebody was coming in.
Once both of them were caught,
it was relief.
[Rivera] The chief of detectives, borough of Manhattan, at that time
told me to go to Florida and do the interrogation on Sean Salley.
I really feel that sometimes when people are on the run,
it's kinda like a relief to get caught.
He seemed like he was a bit relieved that he was caught at that point.
So I interviewed him. I asked him what happened.
He kinda just gave it up.
[Nuzzi] They had gotten oral and written statements from him
where he admitted killing Jennifer.
Although he said the gun went off and it was an accident.
And he, um, put the rest of the blame on Andre Smith
for the people in the living room.
The fact that he admitted pulling the trigger,
accidentally or not, to killing, uh, Jennifer Stahl,
was significant.
It was significant
because it doesn't matter in a… in a prosecution for felony murder
whether you intentionally or accidentally kill someone.
In fact, it doesn't even matter whether the person died
because you shot them or someone else shot them.
If you participate in the underlying robbery,
you are responsible under the law for the murders
just as much as the person who pulled the trigger.
[foreboding music playing]
[reporter] Phillip King sat in the second row of the courtroom
for his first face-to-face encounter with Sean Salley,
one of the men who stands accused of murdering King's son, Stephen.
I just kept telling myself, "Restrain yourself."
"Don't jump over the rail and go for him."
I could see it. I could see what that man went through.
I hope that's the relationship I have with my son.
I'm gettin' a little choked up here now.
[shakily] Um, pretty sure I do, and that's the relationship I had with my father.
[Nuzzi] We're busy preparing and trying to get ready for court.
It's a year or two later for you,
but for that mother, or that father, or brother, or sister,
it's like it happened yesterday.
[portentous music pulsing]
[Parrino] It's a Tuesday.
I'm with my children, dropping them off at school.
And I hear that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
[explosion rumbling faintly]
I'm in jeans and a… and a T-shirt.
Because of my trouble that I ran into at the Carnegie Deli,
I went home and put a suit on.
I'm assuming that held me up maybe 20 minutes.
I actually hear the second plane hit while I'm in my apartment.
[chilling notes play]
[music halts abruptly]
It was true…
Like, when they say "terror," it was, like, terror.
Everybody was fuckin', like, beyond anxious and frightened.
Everybody that you saw.
It's unbelievable what took place there.
When it all collapsed… You never forget those things.
And I lost some very good friends.
I mean, it's a… it's a hard thing to talk about.
[indistinct radio chatter]
I survived September 11th.
Perhaps that 20-minute change would have put me in a different location
that would have came up with different results.
And I kind of always accredited that lesson with having to put the suit on
and not responding in street attire to saving my life.
People that died that day, God rest their memory,
but it continued to kill people for many years after.
Twenty years later, I'm diagnosed with 9/11-related cancer.
The terrorists that did that got more bang for their buck, so to speak.
[Butcher] I was so wrapped up in 9/11.
My office was turned upside down.
That changed my life so radically.
Changed my work life, my personal life, everything.
[McNeely] We were all involved, all in the same day, all there.
We all felt like it was necessary
to pick each other up and have each other's back.
And we continued to do that.
Then we got back into work and did what we do well.
And then we continued that.
[frantic music pulsing]
[Cramer] The trial was almost a year to the date of the murders.
It was a very unique court case.
I had never seen anything like that before.
They were both on trial at the same time.
They actually had two juries and the two defendants in the courtroom.
The saving grace of doing it this way
was to avoid the surviving victims having to come back
and relive this twice in the two separate trials.
It's traumatic enough once.
[Veader] I don't like to be the center of attention.
Here I am, in a box, telling my story.
I think I focused on my friend Francesca that was sitting there
and went with me.
That kept me a little bit more grounded.
[Nuzzi] The trial was a few weeks long.
There were a lot of witnesses.
[Cramer] I wanted to understand what happened to Jen,
what happened to her friends who she loved so much.
Seeing those crime scene photos was way too much.
The one perpetrator said,
"Oh, when I was with Jennifer, I was guarding her with a gun,
and my hands were shaking, and I was so afraid."
"I just wanted to get out of there. It accidentally went off."
No, it did not.
And the reason we know that is because Jennifer's head wound,
the bullet wound, was a close-contact wound.
So don't tell me you were wiggling and shaking, and it accidentally went off.
No, you held it purposefully with full intent, and you shot it.
The evidence doesn't lie.
People do.
A lot.
[dramatic music playing]
[McNeely] When we heard the verdict for the Carnegie Deli,
it was like, you know, a… a relief and a sense of pride, obviously.
I… I was so happy, because all the effort,
and on behalf of the… the people that had passed away,
and… and, you know, Rosemond, and Anthony that were still living,
and their families, everybody's families.
They finally… Now they had something, a bit of closure.
The sleep was much easier.
To just say, "You'll never see the light of day again."
[somber, thoughtful music playing]
Were people jumping up and down and celebrating? No.
It was sort of a very quiet moment
where I think people just…
Hugging and crying.
-Just like, "Okay." I mean… -Yeah.
Justice has been served.
[Cramer] The passing of Jen, so many of us were affected,
but we didn't know each other.
And then we just eventually all connected.
Every year after that tragedy,
we celebrated Jen's life on her birthday.
General Jen Day.
[Cramer] She was such a good soul.
She really was.
[Parrino] Irma called me and told me about the conviction.
I was very pleased to find out there was a conviction.
But it's, you know…
It's not like winning the World Series or something like that.
You're not elated because someone had to die for this to happen.
It's a very strange… I don't know how to explain the feeling.
[Rivera] When I first became a cop, I started getting panic attacks.
And the first time that I ever experienced one,
I had two dead bodies in one day. I had never been really exposed to death.
Eventually, I learned how to shut my feelings on and off.
I can actually visualize, like, a switch in my head.
Like a light switch. And I can go, "Click."
"On, off. On, off." And I can shut it on and off.
It's not that I don't care. It's that…
You have no control what's gonna happen, so…
you learn to live a day at a time.
That's how I live, a day at a time.
[Butcher] These murders were just senseless.
It brought me back to that first case
where I really understood just how evil people could be.
That was the Michael McMorrow case in 1997.
It was so brutal.
So over the top.
One of the most disturbing crime scenes I ever saw,
and I've seen thousands.
[distorted audio warping]
[train rumbling]
[dramatic music building]
[man] We respond to the location
for a missing person at 115 Central Park West.
It's a very affluent building.
We see a young girl, young boy in a bathtub,
in water, washing each other off.
As awkward as that scene must have been,
he noticed that there was some blood.
[man] And she said, "There's a body in the lake."
Body in the lake. Really? What's the chances of that?
[reporter] The body of 44-year-old Michael McMorrow
was pulled from a lake in New York's Central Park.
The victim had been stabbed 30 times, slit open, and disemboweled.
Why would someone want to destroy him like this?
Why? Why? Why?
[siren wailing]
[intriguing outro music playing] him like this?