[ambient street noise]
There are situations you hope to never be in.
What happened in that room, it's not something you can just forget about.
I arrived for my shift as night manager at Soho House
on Thursday, December 9th, 2010.
Soho House is a private members' club,
very exclusive to the arts, and film, and music industry.
Not open to the general public.
A few hours into my shift,
as I'm going through my checklist for the evening…
[phone rings]
…I get a call that a guest is experiencing
a heavy leak of water into their room.
We begin to trace back the origin of the leak,
where eventually it leads me to Sylvie's room.
Sylvie Cachay was a young, rising swimsuit designer
who had worked with the likes of Victoria's Secret and Tommy Hilfiger.
She was up-and-coming, rising,
and heading for great things.
And she was just the perfect member to be a part of Soho House.
We knock. We get no answer.
I'm able to open up the door.
And it's when I see Sylvie in the bathtub, uh, submerged underwater.
My first reaction was just to jump in and remove her out of that tub.
I'm shaking her. I'm talking to her.
I look for a pulse. I feel no pulse.
I then start to perform CPR.
I directed my colleague to call 911
as I continue to try to resuscitate her,
screaming at her to wake up, to wake up.
Um…
Yeah.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Mooney] Our job is to make sure you can go home and sleep at night.
[Rivera] It's so important for a family to know who murdered their relative.
[chief] Compassion for the victims, that's the most important thing.
[Parrino] I've always liked the peek behind the curtain.
What really happened?
[McNeely] You want to find out the truth.
That's what detectives do.
[officer] Your instinct is to help people.
[Titus] In New York City, the NYPD…
this is it.
[suspenseful music trails off]
[phone ringing]
[detective] It was a, uh, chilly night.
It was quiet. There was nothing going on.
The phone rings.
It was a young sergeant from the 6th Precinct on the other end.
He says, "Yeah, lemme give you a heads-up."
"We have a young woman dead in the bathtub at Soho House."
"It looks like she drowned."
I say, "She's pronounced?" "She's pronounced."
And he was like, "Uh, do you think this is a problem?"
I said, "It's a problem."
"Because it's pretty tough to drown yourself in the bathtub."
"We're en route. Just lock it down."
[tense music playing]
The NYPD precinct detective squads operate
from 8:00 in the morning till 1:00 a.m. in two shifts.
But at 1:00 a.m., crime doesn't stop. Crime just rolls 24/7.
So we have what's known as "night watch."
You get to go out and do detective work, but then you pass it off in the morning.
Manhattan's divided into two boroughs, Manhattan North, Manhattan South.
I worked Manhattan South night watch.
I'm a night owl. I was born middle of the night.
I loved it.
The saying is, "Nothing good happens after midnight."
Well, it… That's a true statement.
Soho House is a very exclusive, high-end club.
Not just anybody can walk in and say, "Hey, I wanna become a member."
There's a vetting process, and it comes only with recommendations.
It's high-end. It's very high-end.
Probably not a place I'll be staying in, but it is what it is.
When we get to Soho House, I'm with an ambulance, cop car, and us.
Not many people there.
The room was not a big room.
There was a nice, big bed,
but literally three feet in front of the bed
was this huge, bowl-shaped bathtub.
The hotel manager had removed the woman from the tub.
We learned the identity of the victim.
It was Sylvie Cachay, female, 33 years old.
She was on her back, laid out in front of the tub.
She had a sweater-type top on,
a pair of panties, and a Rolex watch.
Generally not stuff you're going to wear into the bathtub.
And I'm the suspicious type.
I'm never good with dead people in bathtubs to begin with.
And there were a number of pill bottles laid out on the counter.
I think they were antidepressants.
Did this person overdose and drown in the bathtub?
You don't know.
I call the commanding officer of the 6th Precinct.
[ominous music playing]
And the precinct detective squads cover everything in that geographical area.
Tommy Jones, Bobby Moller, solid detectives I know for a long time.
They came right over to the scene.
We had an arrest the night before, and we were working a late night.
So we responded over to the Soho House.
It's very unusual.
The clientele that are there, you don't expect this to happen there.
We're briefed by the night watch sergeant, Pete Panuccio.
It's suspicious, but we don't really know what we have.
You look for blood.
"Is there any blood around?" No blood.
She had what appeared to be a bite wound on her hand, which is odd.
When stuff like this happens, homicide squad's gonna get a phone call.
These guys do a lot of footwork for you, and they help in any way possible.
One in particular, Detective Al Titus, who is a great guy.
I worked on many cases with him before.
He does his due diligence.
We had a whole team of detectives on this case.
It was a big deal because it was a high-end establishment.
There was a celebrity element to the whole case.
So there's gonna be press involved
and a lot of extra pressure
to come up with answers as quickly as possible.
[foreboding music playing]
The crime scene unit started photographing the scene,
fingerprinting the tub,
and taking DNA swabs from the tub and the faucet on the tub.
One of the things I noticed, a pair of wet socks on the floor.
And not the kind of socks a young, fashionable woman would be wearing.
They were gray men's socks.
We were like, "Okay. Now, what happened?" What's going on? Who was she with?"
One of the first people we spoke to was Bryan Alvarez,
who was the night manager of the Soho House Hotel.
The detectives are asking questions of, "What's going on?"
"Who is Sylvie? Is she with a guest?"
And the timeline of me entering the room and seeing Sylvie in the tub.
And we were told that she checked in with her boyfriend, Nicholas Brooks,
at about 12:30 in the morning.
Sylvie and her boyfriend Nick checked into the hotel that evening,
shortly before I started my shift.
[Titus] One of the benefits of the Soho House
was that they have a lot of surveillance cameras.
And we were able to quickly look at the video.
Sylvie seemed a little off her feet. She was a little tired.
[Alvarez] Sylvie did mention to my colleague
that she'd taken a sleeping aid,
and that she wasn't feeling well, and… and needed assistance up to her room.
[Moller] So Nicholas sat and did the check-in,
and the employee of the hotel said, "I'll bring you to the room."
[Titus] The surveillance video shows Sylvie Cachay getting helped upstairs.
It shows Nicholas Brooks coming in and out of the hotel room
several times after they had checked in,
which was kind of strange.
Surveillance video also shows
Nicholas Brooks leaving the hotel room the last time at 2:18.
And then at 2:51, the manager came to check on the leak.
I had asked Bryan Alvarez,
had he seen Nicholas Brooks after he found Sylvie Cachay?
I explained to the detectives that he's no longer here. He stepped out.
[foreboding music playing]
She checked in with somebody, and he's no longer there.
He's leaving the hotel,
which is starting to look like a crime scene.
So, yeah, it is suspicious.
We have to find out why he's not there. Where did he go?
[tense music playing]
[Titus] Our priority was finding the boyfriend.
We were planning to go canvass the bars in the area.
At about 5:30 in the morning, I'm standing in the lobby,
and he came walking right through the front door.
[music halts abruptly]
The hotel manager says, "That's the guy right there."
We look at him, and his eyes are bloodshot red.
He's completely disheveled.
You could tell he is drunk, or high, or both.
Obviously, he went out to go party somewhere.
[Panuccio] I look down, and he's not wearing any socks.
They're in the room, in the middle of a crime scene.
Men's gray socks.
[Jones] I introduced myself to this young gentleman.
I asked him his name, and he said, "My name is Nicholas Brooks."
I said, "Were you the male
that checked into the hotel with Sylvie Cachay?"
He said, "Yeah."
I said, "Okay, I have some bad news."
I said, "We found Sylvie upstairs in the bathtub, unresponsive,
um, and she didn't make it."
He never got upset.
He never said anything like, "What happened?"
But maybe he's acting weird because he's intoxicated.
I said to Nicholas, "We need to talk to you,
find out who your girlfriend is."
"We're gonna need to go back to our office and figure out what's going on here."
[suspenseful music playing]
[Jones] Nicholas Brooks was willing to go with us.
I put Nicholas in an interview room.
I said, "It's important for you to tell me where you were tonight,
for you to tell me what happened tonight."
And he's just… [sputters]
You know, stuttering and this and really out of it,
and his eyes were closing.
I wasn't gonna get straight answers out of this guy.
He's messed up.
So I thought, best for him, "Put your head down for a little while."
You know, "We'll get back to you later on."
I didn't want to interview somebody
that didn't understand what I was trying to ask or say.
And although it does delay the process, it's just better.
And he fell asleep.
If that happened to any one of us, we'd be beside ourselves,
crying, and not able to sleep.
Wasn't like that with him.
The first thing we want to do, obviously, is notify Sylvie's family.
Making a notification is tough enough.
I have daughters, so you're always thinking about the family.
And because they lived in Virginia, I can't do it personally,
which I prefer to do.
So we got in touch with the Virginia police department,
and they went over,
and confirmed that they did make the notification to the family.
[somber music playing]
[man] I received a call from my mother,
just frantic, in tears, telling me that Sylvie had been killed.
Um…
Uh, it was terrible. It was…
completely outside of the realm of anything I was expecting to hear.
My sister and I grew up in McLean, Virginia,
a suburb of Washington, DC.
My stepfather was Peruvian 100%, as was my mother.
So Sylvie was the daughter of two Peruvians.
She was very ambitious, represented the culture,
and tried to bring the culture into her work as much as she could.
I was, you know, working in New York,
and, um, we would spend all our holidays together,
and, you know, we had a great relationship.
I met with the detectives.
I had to identify my sister through photos.
You always have a hope that there's, you know,
some untruth to what you're being told.
Until you actually see it, right?
You… You can't ever really fully recover.
[Moller] As morning got on, it was now the reporters coming,
television cameras, and trucks pulling up everywhere.
[Panuccio] My lieutenant came in.
And he was like, "You got a circus downstairs."
"Go take a look."
And there were news trucks from one end of the block to the other.
When the body is taken by the medical examiner
over to the ME's office,
everybody's out there with cameras.
[reporter] Thirty-three-year-old fashion designer Sylvie Cachay
was found dead in the uber-chic Soho House.
[Panuccio] Think about it.
A successful, attractive young woman
found dead in a bathtub at the Soho House.
It's a public-interest story. I get it.
The tabloids thrive on it.
I went on almost every news channel.
It's an added layer of pressure, and…
I'd rather that they hadn't known for another six or eight hours
to give everybody a leg up on getting the investigation rolling.
[tense music pulsing]
[Jones] Later in the morning, Nicholas finally wakes up.
He came out, and he said, "Detective, can we talk?" I said, "Sure."
Nicholas was telling me that Sylvie and him,
they had been going out six months.
Their relationship was on and off,
and it wasn't a good relationship.
Nicholas told me that
that night he was supposed to meet Sylvie at her apartment to have some dinner.
He went there.
Said they had sex.
After that, he lit some candles on the back of her bed
and placed them on a platform that were right behind it.
[Titus] She had taken her sleep medication.
He went to take a shower.
He heard the smoke alarm going off.
[alarm beeping]
[Titus] When he came out, the place was full of smoke.
The whole bed was on fire.
So he jumped on Sylvie, and he jumped on the bed,
and put it out the best he could.
It actually singed her hair.
She said, "Look, I'm a member of the Soho House."
"We can't stay here. The smell of smoke is not good for us."
[foreboding music playing]
[Titus] He also mentioned that she was having a hard time
going down the stairs from the apartment down to the street
because the medication had started kicking in that she took.
[Jones] They jumped into a cab and left.
I really wanted to know, "What was your demeanor like?"
"Did you guys fight?"
And he said she was agitated, cursing at him the whole way.
"I can't believe you're such a stoner. You lit the whole place on fire."
She was upset.
Got to the Soho House.
He said, "We went up to the room, maître d' put her in bed."
"She had talked about maybe taking a bath."
"I wanted to get something to eat,
so I went upstairs to the restaurant, ordered."
And went back downstairs into his room, told Sylvie he was gonna go out.
I says, "Okay. You told me she was gonna take a bath. Did she?"
He says, "I don't know. I… I left."
"Did you touch the tub?"
"Did you put the water on for her?"
If she was gonna take a bath, maybe you were being a nice guy.
He goes, "No." He goes, "She was in bed still."
According to Nicholas, he left the hotel room.
And then he left the hotel to go partying at a bar nearby,
with a guy he just met downstairs in the lobby named David Raleigh,
until he came back in the hotel when we saw him.
[Jones] I asked him, "Did you do anything to Sylvie
before you left to go out with this guy?"
And he said, "No."
There was no concern in his voice, no concern that he might be in trouble.
He was just straight-laced, stone-cold.
I just felt like he… he did something.
But we don't know exactly what happened in that room yet.
So Nicholas is staying at the precinct for the time being.
Our investigation turns to David Raleigh,
the individual Nicholas Brooks said
he hung out with that particular evening.
[ominous music playing]
[muffled banging]
[man] I hear a banging on my door.
I mean, it was loud.
I jumped out of bed and ran to the door.
And I opened it, and it was two detectives.
And they asked me, "Do you know Nicholas Brooks?"
And I went, "Oh!"
"Yeah, yeah, I met him last night. We had a drink."
And they informed me
that a girl had been found dead in the bathtub at Soho House,
and that her boyfriend was Nicholas Brooks.
The detectives wanted me to come down to the station and talk to them.
That night, the Soho House bar is closing,
and I kinda was still in party mode.
So I stopped down at the front desk.
A guy got off the elevator.
He said to the attendant, "I'm looking for a place to have a drink."
"The bar's closed. Know anywhere I could have a drink?"
Guy behind the desk looked at me, looked at him, and said,
"He's going out for a drink. Go with him."
I was like, "Do you want to go?" He goes, "Yeah, sure."
We got to the bar, and we were having a drink and chatting.
Then he proceeded to tell me about his girlfriend
and chatted with me about his undying love for her.
And he told the story of the fire in their apartment.
And he said his girlfriend, she was sleeping in the hotel room.
He said, "I should call my girlfriend and make sure she's okay."
He called the number, and it rang and rang.
And he goes, "She's not answering."
And I went, "Of course, because she's sleeping."
But he said he was gonna leave, we said good night, and he walked out.
I mean, it was nothing unusual.
[Titus] It kind of confirmed Nicholas Brooks's story.
At least, it made it seem like that part of what he was telling us was the truth.
And there's still a possibility that this is a suicide.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Titus] I need to know who Sylvie Cachay was.
What was her state of mind?
I interviewed Sylvie Cachay's family and friends,
and I knew on the other side that they were emotional.
They told me that she had been depressed.
[woman] I knew Sylvie Cachay in 2009
'cause she hired me as an intern at Anne Cole Swimwear.
When Sylvie hired me, we immediately got along.
We would go and, you know, split a bottle of wine and just chitchat.
Sylvie to me was a friend, a boss, a mentor.
I looked up to her, thought she was brilliant.
[shutter snaps]
In 2006, she launched her own swimwear.
She was featured in Vogue, InStyle, Sports Illustrated.
Our family celebrated every achievement.
We were very proud of her.
To launch your own line as a designer is like a dream come true.
Sadly, Sylvie had to dissolve her company
because of the 2008-2009 economic crash.
[Orlando] The investor that was funding her
had other investments,
and people were being very cautious with new investments.
She had to go back to work at Anne Cole. And she loved working at Anne Cole.
We had a great time,
but, you know, you personally feel like you're taking a step down
from where you had gotten.
I think every day it was on her mind.
[Orlando] I think she did have a lot of stress. She had a lot of anxiety.
She was on medication that was working to improve her life
and make her more productive.
[Hadwen] They asked if Sylvie was suicidal.
The answer would be a hard, immediate no.
Absolutely not.
The setback of Syla closing, it caused some depression and sadness,
but never, you know, in an incapacitating way for her.
There was always a plan for the future.
While we were working during the day at Anne Cole,
we'd go to a print studio and select prints for Anne Cole.
We'd also be collecting some for Syla.
It was never dead to her. It was just "paused."
[Titus] Interviewing her intern Heather was very interesting.
She was able to give me some very specific information
about Sylvie's relationships and who she was seeing.
Around 2008, Sylvie had broken off an engagement.
She ended up ending her relationship with her fiancé
because it was too much to deal with
along with what she was also dealing with with her business.
[Hadwen] After that, Sylvie was dating a little bit.
And she first met Nicholas in June 2010 when she was going out,
hanging out with friends, doing the nightlife scene.
Not long after, they were going on a walk near her house in SoHo.
Her dog Pepper had gotten hit by a car.
Nick had to scoop her up off the ground and wrap her in the coat.
He was there for her in that moment.
She was devastated.
I really think that that became like a trauma bond for her.
Otherwise, I don't think she would've ended up dating him
outside of that, 'cause he was really young.
She was 33, and I think he was 24.
They started spending almost every day together.
He was spending the night.
Essentially one of those quick move-in situations
where he's always sleeping over.
But there were red flags popping up, probably month two.
That he didn't have a job was baffling to her.
She was just getting sick of him smoking weed all day long,
not working.
I remember her complaining
about the fact she was always paying for everything.
She called him "the child."
Her friends were saying, "Dude, you gotta lose this guy."
"Break this off. It's dimming your light."
And she did break up with him. I think that was hard for her.
[Hadwen] The last memory I have of her was on the morning before she died.
She's like, "He's asking me to see him."
"I'm just gonna meet him at my house and we're gonna sit on the stoop."
"Apparently, he has a letter for me. I'm not even gonna let him up."
[Titus] Knowing Nicholas Brooks and Sylvie Cachay met up at her apartment,
and how turbulent the relationship was,
I felt more like, "There's something wrong here."
[Jones] It's important to go to that apartment,
see what happened during the night there.
[Titus] When we went inside the apartment,
there was clear evidence that there was a fire.
[Moller] You smell the smoke.
The bed was… was really burnt up.
There was a clump of hair, burnt hair on the bed.
What Nicholas Brooks was telling Tommy actually did happen that night.
And then we discovered the notes they left to each other.
She was telling him that, "If you don't start being more romantic,
you're not gonna be in my life anymore."
She had a long list of requests,
simple things like "cuddle me after sex,"
"take me on dates," "if you use something, replace it."
"Don't smoke pot all day." "Don't drink all day."
She basically was almost like a mother telling him that,
"You better get yourself straightened out, or else this isn't gonna work."
[Titus] The letters from Nicholas were asking for forgiveness,
promising to do better, asking her not to give up on me.
It gave us an example of what she was falling for over and over.
[Moller] There was also another note she wrote that basically stated
she suspected him of stealing money from her.
We found Sylvie Cachay's bank statements.
[Jones] He had ordered prostitutes using her credit card.
He had complete nerve, in my eyes,
thinking about getting a prostitute and using her money to pay for it.
[Titus] And then we find an email,
and we call it the "fuck you" email.
She wrote to Nick, and she was very upset.
She said, "I found out about you, I know what you've been doing,
and I'm turning you in to the police and the credit card companies."
It definitely leads to a certain type of motive.
That could have been the catalyst
that caused him to make the decision that he has to take her out.
We did a canvass of her apartment building to try to get a picture of
if anybody heard anything going on that night.
We had one of the neighbors stating that they heard an argument.
They heard someone crying, and they heard a lot of banging,
like someone falling to the floor or something going on.
[Titus] You have fighting and arguing, fire.
A few hours later, Sylvie Cachay is found deceased.
[Moller] A picture is starting to emerge.
We're thinking, "This might be a homicide,
but we can't charge a person with half of a picture painted."
We still have to turn over every stone, find out exactly what happened.
We started to look into Nick's background.
It put a little bit more color into the picture.
We learned that he was a trust fund baby.
His father, a writer-composer named Joseph Brooks,
he had written the song and the movie You Light Up My Life,
and it won Academy Awards.
It was a well-known song.
♪ You ♪
♪ You light up my life ♪
I think it's one of the worst songs of all time.
It was on the radios, on every station, 24/7.
♪ You light up my life ♪
I'm like, "Oh God." [scoffs]
[Titus] And although he was known for that,
there was also a dark side that he was known for.
[Panuccio] Around 2008, I'm in the 19th Precinct.
I'm the number two guy in the detective squad.
Part of my job is to review all the complaints that came in.
Joe Brooks's name starts coming across my desk.
I'm seeing a lot of complaints for rape.
Special victims squad handles those cases.
I finally called the special victims squad.
I'm like, "Do we have a mad rapist running loose
in the confines of the 19th Precinct that I should be concerned about?"
They were like, "This guy's a serial rapist."
"This is part of an ongoing investigation."
[reporter] The Manhattan District Attorney indicted Joseph Brooks
on 91 counts of rape.
[Moller] Joseph Brooks was putting ads on Craigslist.
He was trying to get up-and-coming female, uh, actresses
to come be coached by a Academy-Award-winner.
He convinced them to come to his house.
He'd drug them, and then would have his way with them.
Joseph Brooks was charged with sexual assault on numerous women,
and he was awaiting trial.
Knowing Joseph Brooks's background
made me wonder if I was dealing with
the same type of individual in Nicholas Brooks.
Character-wise, the apple may not fall too far from the tree.
[mysterious music playing]
[Titus] During the background check, we also learned that Nicholas's father
had set him up with an apartment when he was in high school.
His father used to get him escorts.
He learned from his dad how to pick these prostitutes up
because his dad had been doing that.
[Titus] It painted a very strange relationship
between him and the father,
but we also found out that his father was somewhat controlling him
through the money.
Joseph Brooks's stipulations to Nicholas
was that he could not make contact with his mother or his sister.
[Moller] And the minute that he found out that Nicholas contacted his mother,
Joseph Brooks cut him out of the will and took him off the trust fund
right around 2009, 2010.
So here is a young man out in the world
without any of the financial means that he's used to living with.
So now if he wanted money,
he needed to, one, either work, or mooch off somebody.
When he met Sylvie, she had money, and she was cutting him off.
He may have felt like the gig was up
and that he had to do something
because she threatened to go to the police.
Adrenaline's going with cases like this.
I'm probably up a good 24 hours, if not more.
You don't feel tired.
It's really the momentum of the case that keeps you going.
We all returned to the 6th Precinct.
[Moller] We have to look at all the evidence,
so we started to look at the surveillance footage again,
and started to really look at the timeline.
[Titus] Was there something we missed, something we're not seeing?
We confirmed that Nicholas Brooks left the hotel room at 2:18,
and then went down into the lobby and met David Raleigh.
Until the manager came to check on the leak at 2:51,
no one else had entered the room or exited the room.
We need evidence that when Sylvie died, Nicholas was still inside the room.
[Titus] So we got access to the hotel phone records,
and Nicholas Brooks's alibi falls apart.
Once we started to look into the call records to the front desk,
we started to realize that it wasn't that he just left at 2:18.
Before he left,
there was a call coming in to the front desk
that was very interesting.
[phone ringing]
We saw that the phone call about the leak from the hotel room below
came in at 2:11.
We check the card swipes into the room,
which tells us that Nicholas Brooks was in the room
when the leak was occurring.
[Moller] There was water overflowing. It was already on the floor.
It was already seeping into other apartments.
So he was there when she was in the tub.
He's been lying to us the whole time.
[Jones] So in this case, with the autopsy,
we're gonna know a lot more about what happened to Sylvie.
[examiner] The significant findings on this autopsy were
finger marks on the neck, bruises.
And she had petechial hemorrhages under the eyelids.
That means that she had to have obstruction of blood flow
at the neck in some way.
And then lungs full of water, indicating she was alive when she drowned.
And of course, when toxicology came back,
it shows each of those medications in her system were at therapeutic levels.
It was prescribed medication.
There was nothing there that could have killed her in an overdose.
So that tells me definitely not suicide, definitely not an accident.
The manner of death was a homicide.
[Jones] We had also gotten the DNA reports back.
DNA was found on the tub, and it did come back to Nicholas Brooks.
[Butcher] DNA profile on the tub could mean nothing.
He's in the room. He could have used the tub.
But he specifically denied ever going near the tub.
[Moller] What we believe happened
is when they finally got to the Soho House,
there was some sort of fight between them.
One thing led to another, and then he snapped.
Brooks grabbed her by the neck,
pushed her into the bathtub, held her underwater.
She inhaled the water.
She drowned.
And she was strangled.
[camera shutters snapping]
[reporter 1] Did you strangle your girlfriend?
-[reporter 2] Did you do it? -[reporter 1] Did you kill Sylvie?
[Moller] We arrested Nicholas Brooks,
and we transport him down to our central booking facility.
He said to me, "You know, I have money."
I'm thinking, "Is he trying to bribe me here or something?"
I go, "What do you mean, you have money?"
He goes, "Yeah, but I can't get to it until the morning."
And I go, "Well, you don't really need money now."
And he goes, "Well, I need it to pay for protection."
And I go, "What kind of protection are you talking about?"
He says, "Well, the white supremacists."
I said, "Why would you say that?" He goes, "I'm a big fan of Oz."
I guess he was talking about the TV show Oz.
And I was like, "You're not going to Oz."
"You're going to New York City Central Booking, you know?"
I definitely realized that he really didn't know how life was
or how life worked.
I just thought it was odd.
At that point, Corrections took control of him,
and it was the last time I spoke with him.
[Titus] After the arrest of Nicholas Brooks,
we found out that his father was coming up for trial.
However, he committed suicide.
[Moller] Joseph Brooks's attorney took on Nicholas Brooks's case.
[Titus] The defense's position was that Sylvie suffered from depression.
She was on medication.
She overdosed on that medication after she got into the tub and drowned.
[reporter] Her mother and father flew in from their home in Virginia
to look Nicholas Brooks in the eye.
I didn't see any remorse. He didn't look at me or my husband.
He didn't face us. He didn't care.
[Orlando] My sister was an incredible person,
and her life was taken absolutely inexplicably
by this parasite to society.
He has to pay for my daughter's life, for her beautiful life.
We got a call from the DA's office that the trial was over.
Nicholas Brooks was found guilty and given 25 years to life.
I feel very sorry for the Cachay family.
She should not have died.
People should be wearing her swimsuits.
She should be big in the fashion industry.
New York loves her, and she is New York.
[Orlando] My sister added to the fun of life.
Myself and others around her were better off
and did greater things because she was around.
I miss the happiness and the light that she brought.
She just was so sweet and just a soul-level beautiful human.
She will forever be my mentor.
[Jones] Sylvie's case was my last case as a detective.
I retired shortly after this.
And I have two girls.
It just hits home.
To take someone's life and be so stone-cold about it afterwards…
It could be his upbringing,
but it was no excuse to kill somebody,
especially somebody that you loved.
In April of '89, we had the infamous Central Park jogger case.
It was a jogger that was raped and seriously assaulted.
[detective] It was a huge case 'cause it was Central Park
and because of the horrendousness of the crime.
Five young males were convicted.
These boys were known as the Central Park Five.
The injustice that was perpetrated needed to be undone,
but that's not the whole story.
There are other victims of what we now put under the umbrella
of the Central Park jogger case.
He made her choose, "Your eyes or your kids?"
[Rivera] "Your eyes or your kids"
is something I've never heard any other perpetrator say before.
He started cutting under and above my eyes.
He was just all about the violence.
It was a beautiful afternoon. You just don't think it will happen then.
Everybody talks about the case that haunts you.
That's the case that haunted me.
[dramatic outro music pulsing] .