Death Row Stories (2014–…): Season 2, Episode 4 - Murder in Paris - full transcript
On this episode
of Death Row Stories,
a triple murder execution-style...
They shot them like they were nothing.
And the crime is caught on tape.
Most significant piece of evidence
I've ever seen in a case.
But clear images of guilt...
The evidence establishes
that Seth Penalver committed the crime.
There's your guy.
It's a slam dunk for the prosecution.
Only deepen the mystery.
You're going to kill somebody.
It's not even a sure conviction.
What they didn't have is,
they didn't have any physical evidence.
There's no doubt in my
mind that he's innocent.
There's a body in the water.
He was butchered and murdered.
Many people proclaim their innocence.
In this case, there are
a number of things that stink.
This man is remorseless.
He needs to pay for it with his life.
The electric chair
flashed in front of my eyes.
Get a conviction at all costs.
Let the truth fall where it may.
On a Sunday morning
in the summer of 1994,
a Palm Beach police officer noticed smoke
curling across the sky near Belle Glade,
Florida.
As the officer drew closer,
he noticed a car engulfed in flames
by the side of the road.
There's a lot of isolated land
out near the Everglades.
The car was found burning, no one in it.
The black Mercedes
had a pungent odor of gasoline
but no signs of being in an accident.
Once the fire was under control
and various forensic people
began to look for evidence
to see if they could
identify who it belonged to,
from there,
that's how the case got started.
Police discovered the car
belonged to Casimir Sucharski
of Miramar, Florida.
Sucharski was better known
to locals as Butch Casey,
the manager and former
owner of the popular nightclub
Casey's Nickelodeon.
Casey's attracted hard-partying locals
with bikini contests, ladies' nights,
and hours until dawn.
Butch was a charming womanizer.
Girls loved him.
Butch Casey lives
in the Miramar city limits,
and so the Miramar Police Department,
once they were notified
that his car was found,
they sought to locate him.
A quick knock on the door. No response.
No answer.
The Miramar policeman
left his card in the door,
unaware of the gruesome
scene that lay just inside.
The same Sunday that Butch
Casey's charred Mercedes
was found in the Everglades,
police were notified by the families
of two aspiring models,
Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers,
that both women were missing.
So I remember it was June 26th.
It was a Sunday.
My mom called,
said she hadn't spoken to Sharon,
and I thought, "Well, she's 25."
She liked to go out and have a good time.
But I could hear in my mother's voice
that something was not right.
Police discovered the two women
had been at Casey's Nickelodeon
the previous night.
They were there up
until around closing time.
Casey, being a ladies' man,
flirted with them and invited them to come
to his home.
By late Sunday,
with no sign of Casey,
Anderson, or Rogers,
police returned to Casey's home.
This time,
the officer actually walked
around the entire perimeter of the house,
worked his way into the backyard,
looked through a sliding glass door.
You could see the bodies.
Inside the home,
Butch Casey, Sharon Anderson,
and Marie Rogers
had all been shot in the head
at point-blank range.
Detective Craig Scarlett
was one of the first officers at the scene.
When I saw it, it was...
You know, it was pretty hard to look at.
It wasn't some random,
"I'll shoot you here,
and I'll shoot you there."
They were all laid out in a row.
Certainly a gruesome scene.
Bloody, killed execution-style.
The home itself was ransacked
and some items missing... jewelry.
Butch Casey was licensed to carry a gun.
You could see that that gun was missing.
They had cornered off a
giant area of the property.
Police officers, police cars.
Chief was on his way.
I believe there was already news there.
Around 2:30 this morning,
Casimir Sucharski was found murdered
in his Miramar home
along with two other people.
All three here at Sucharski's Miramar home
the morning of June 26th,
all shot execution-style.
And my mom called,
and she was very weird on the phone.
And I thought... I'm really
trying to keep it together.
I said, "Is she dead?
I just need to know. Is she dead?"
She said, "Yes."
To homicide detectives,
the murders appeared to
be a robbery gone wrong.
Police found bullet casings
and a bloody footprint
near the bodies
but little else to go on.
Sometimes Butch Casey was known
to carry a lot of money
as well as he was thought to perhaps
maybe have access to drugs,
but the primary thought,
since the house was ransacked...
That someone was looking for something.
As police investigated,
curious neighbors gathered outside.
Some of those citizens
were coming up to me
and talking to me, telling me stuff.
One neighbor named Gary Foy
said he'd seen something suspicious
the morning of the murders.
Gary Foy told me that he saw
these two guys in Butch's
Mercedes convertible.
Foy thought it was odd
that two young men
would be driving Casey's car.
They took off out towards
Hollywood Boulevard.
Gary Foy followed them,
and he looked at them.
He said one of them looked Latin,
and the other guy... he said,
"I really couldn't see,
but he wasn't Latin."
I'm thinking, like, this guy is gold now.
You know, he's actually saw them.
Police were convinced
that if they found the
men who drove that car,
they had their killers.
As investigators continued to comb
through Butch Casey's house,
they discovered a cache of videotapes
hidden in the bedroom.
They appeared to be sex tapes
filmed from a secret camera
mounted above Casey's bed.
An officer then noticed
a souvenir film slate
on a high bookshelf in the living room.
He looked behind it,
and it was a camera.
And he discovered that
it was attached to a VCR.
I was outside.
They were like,
"Come here. You got to see this."
And took the tape.
Popped it into the TV, and it starts up.
And there's Butch Casey walking around
the night before,
getting ready to go to work.
We start fast-forwarding it.
He goes out the door.
Then the sun comes up.
The room gets bright.
Then he comes walking in with the girls.
And we go, "We're gonna
watch this crime unfold on video,"
and it did,
right in front of us.
Detectives on the scene
of a brutal triple murder in Miramar,
Florida,
had made a stunning discovery:
a hidden surveillance camera
had videotaped the entire crime.
It was really amazing,
because, you know,
back in 1994,
not many people were
hooking their houses up
with all kinds of video.
On the video,
the girls are sitting at the kitchen table.
They grabbed a bottle of wine or champagne.
They're sitting there and talking.
And lo and behold,
after a substantial amount of time,
in walks the murderers.
Two men enter Casey's house
from the back,
one brandishing a large
semiautomatic weapon.
It appears to be
a TEC-9 machine gun.
- Butch is, like,
- stunned for a minute,
It looks like.
He knows he's got a gun in the other room.
One of the girls runs into the bedroom.
Miss Anderson tried to get away,
go to another room,
and the second intruder
then immediately chased her.
The intruder with the gun came
and took the butt-end of his gun
and just struck Butch Casey.
And then they just
start beating on him
with the gun across the face.
Whack.
The other intruder who
had chased Miss Anderson
secured her.
You can see that he came out of the bedroom
with a gun that he didn't have before,
which turns out to be Butch Casey's gun,
laid her down on the floor.
Minutes pass.
The criminals appear to
be searching for something
as Casey and the two
women huddle on the floor.
At one point, Butch Casey seized a moment
when he thought that he could overcome
the intruder with the gun,
so he grabbed the gun
and began to struggle.
He's not in the best
position to put up a fight,
and eventually,
the suspect shot him in the back
to make him let go.
And he did.
Finally came time to leave.
I guess they didn't get what they wanted.
Now that Butch was shot,
they just lined them all up.
Boom.
Boom. Boom.
The second intruder
uses the TEC-9
to finish the job.
Then the other guy comes
and puts it right to back of the head.
Boom. Moves over to the next one.
Boom.
As the men prepare to leave,
one of them makes a fateful mistake.
One... one perpetrator
removed a cover from...
What appeared to be a
towel or shirt of some sort
from over his head.
You got a fairly and
particularly clear picture
of his face.
The other intruder continued at all times
to wear a baseball cap and sunglasses.
From start to finish,
the crime lasted 22 minutes.
As gruesome as it was,
the video was probably
the most significant piece
of evidence I've ever seen in a case.
The shocking news
of her sister's murder
sent Deborah Bowie,
who was nine months pregnant, into labor.
It forced my delivery.
Best moment of my life...
Completely robbed of that experience...
To have a baby
three days after being told
your sister was murdered.
So the day that I came out of the hospital
was the day of her funeral.
The first thing that
the police did with the video
was to see if it could be
enhanced in some way
where you could get a clearer view
of the perpetrators.
They utilized the FBI to find
the best images of the face,
put it on a still photo,
and they put it on flyers just...
And passed it around
to different law enforcement agencies.
- But there was little movement
- in the case
Until two weeks later.
There was a home-invasion
robbery in Dade County.
Three men come in, tie the people up.
Asking for drugs, money.
Same type of MO.
It was very violent.
This time, one of the victims
managed to call police,
who arrived at the crime still in progress.
The police corral the place
and grab the three of them.
The three men
were Alberto Rincon, 24,
Alex Hernandez, 20, and Pablo Ibar, 22.
Dade County police look at the flyers,
look at their three suspects, and go, "Hey.
"Pablo Ibar and Alex Hernandez,
these are the two guys."
Metro-Dade called us up and said,
"I have somebody you
should at least come look at."
That was Pablo Ibar.
I'm saying, "This... this is great.
This is the guy."
Gary Foy,
Butch Casey's neighbor,
came in and positively ID'd Ibar
as the man he saw driving the Mercedes
the morning of the murder.
He doesn't pick Alex Hernandez
as the passenger,
but he says he looks very similar,
but he does pick Ibar.
He says, "I'm sure that was the driver."
Ibar seemed a good match
for the mustached killer,
and police soon got a second ID
from Ibar's roommate, Jean Klimeczko.
Were you sure right away that
that was Pablo on that tape?
Yeah.
Klimeczko also claimed
to recognize
the other man on the video
as someone named Pentlover.
Police determined that
Klimeczko was referring
to 21-year-old Seth Penalver
of Fort Lauderdale.
Penalver and Ibar traveled
in the same circle of friends,
and on the morning of the murders,
Klimeczko said the two grabbed
a TEC-9 gun from the house
and later returned driving a new black car.
To get a second ID on Seth Penalver,
detectives went to an ex-girlfriend,
Melissa Munroe.
They tell her they're there about Seth.
Eventually they take her
back to the police station.
They show her the two same pictures,
and they're saying to her, "Who is this?"
Melissa Munroe had also seen
Seth and Pablo together
at Casey's bar on the night of the murders.
You had all these witnesses
that corroborated and connected
Seth Penalver and Pablo Ibar
to Mr. Butch Casey, the TEC-9 gun,
and his car.
Seth Penalver,
a high school dropout
with a previous robbery to his name,
soon learned he was wanted for murder.
I actually seen all this
stuff in the newspaper.
They want to question
me about a triple murder.
They had a description of my car in there.
"If you know his whereabouts,
please contact us."
Seth decided to turn himself in.
Because I didn't commit this crime.
I mean, what person in their right mind
is gonna turn theirself in
knowing that you did a triple murder?
Seth claimed innocence,
but when detectives asked him where he was
on the night of the murders,
he couldn't be sure.
It's like you're talking 30 days later.
They want to speak to me.
Why would you remember
where you're at 30 days ago?
You have no reason to remember.
Police latch on to it.
Matches the build of the killer,
they think.
They realize Seth has a history,
and he's violent.
And then the game's on for the police.
Seth was about to realize
he looked very similar
to the killer on the video,
and soon,
he would be facing the death penalty.
In August 1994,
authorities announced
they would seek the death penalty
against Pablo Ibar and Seth Penalver
for triple murder.
Veteran death penalty defense attorneys
Hilliard Moldof and Pat Rastatter
were appointed to represent Penalver.
The general consensus was,
here's a triple homicide on video.
There's your guy. This case is closed.
We're just going through the motions.
You're left with, "Well,
the video looks like Seth."
It was an uphill battle the whole way.
Ibar and Penalver
were tried together
beginning on June 23, 1997.
Prosecutors played the
entire 22-minute video
for the jury.
When they finally play
that video for the first time,
it may as well be watching the nuclear bomb
go off in Hiroshima.
I mean, you know, your guts are wrenching.
The courtroom was silent.
There's people crying
by the end of that video.
Prosecutors also produced
a set of tire tracks
found near Butch Casey's
burned-out Mercedes.
The tracks were left by a getaway car,
which the State said matched
Seth Penalver's Oldsmobile.
- You know, it was
- damning evidence,
And it was evidence that,
on top of everything else,
probably hurt us.
Finally the prosecution
called their witnesses
against Seth, including Kimberly San,
one of Seth's former roommates.
Kim San... she and
Seth were living together
in a house in Sunrise, Florida.
She said Seth had come to the house
with Pablo Ibar, a black Mercedes.
Came in, had blood all over his clothes.
He and Pablo took their clothes off,
washed them in the washing machine.
Red bubbles had come
out of the washing machine.
And she said
she saw him with Ibar,
changing clothes, taking a shower,
and driving off in the Mercedes.
Kim's saying I come home.
I see bloody bubbles just flying
out of the washing machine.
But crime scene technicians
went to that house.
They actually lifted the washing machine
and Luminol tested it, you know,
for any type of DNA,
and they came and testified in our trial,
said, "If this story was true,
what she said,
"it would've been there.
I would've found it."
After months of testimony,
the case went to the jury,
but after three days of deliberations,
the jury was deadlocked.
What they didn't have is,
they didn't have any physical evidence.
They didn't have any DNA.
They didn't have any fingerprints.
They didn't have any of
that thing that juries want.
Witness stories had also changed
since the murders.
For instance,
Pablo Ibar's former roommate Jean Klimeczko
now said he didn't
remember identifying Ibar,
and Melissa Munroe said
police had pressured her
into ID'ing Seth and Pablo.
They asked me,
do the pictures resemble
anybody that I know?
I told them no.
They proceeded to keep badgering me,
and they said, "Listen,
we're just gonna tell you,
"we know these are
pictures of Seth and Pablo.
We want to know which
one would be which one."
I was young. I was scared.
I had no clue of who was in the picture,
you know?
I was dealing
with a situation in which
my witnesses are changing their testimony.
Clearly the motive there was protection.
Not going to convict your friend.
With the jury unable
to break their deadlock,
a mistrial was declared for both men.
A second trial lasted seven months
with the same witness testimony
and the same damaging video,
but this time,
Pablo and Seth were tried separately.
Finally on November 11, 1999,
the second jury reached a verdict.
You know, they came back and said guilty.
I just stood there. I couldn't believe it.
You know, after all that fighting,
after all that time, to come to that...
To come to that conclusion
was earth-shattering.
A hearing was held
to determine Seth Penalver's sentence,
life in prison or death
by lethal injection.
Seth's attorneys wanted to
argue that his tumultuous childhood
should be taken into account.
Seth had a terrible childhood.
His mom was a drug addict,
and he was raised somewhat homeless.
Had to rely on himself.
He was a middle-school dropout.
His dad is deceased,
and his mom is a heroin addict.
He had no siblings.
I told my attorney, "No,
you're not gonna get up there
"and argue any of this.
"I'm not gonna beg for my life
for something I did not do,"
because, yeah,
I might've had a messed-up childhood,
but that doesn't mean
I committed this crime.
They gave me three death sentences,
two life sentences, and a 15-year sentence.
And they close that door behind you,
and then it's like, "Damn.
"This is real now.
"This is for real.
I'm not supposed to die like this."
Seth's co-defendant Pablo Ibar
was also found guilty
and sentenced to death.
I thought that the sentence
of death for both of them
was fair.
And I've heard people say, "Well, you know,
the death penalty is not a deterrent."
Well, it's not meant to be.
It's called justice.
From the time of his arrest
through years of trials,
one of Seth's childhood friends
had been following his case from afar.
After Seth was sentenced,
she went to visit him on death row.
Most American people think
that the criminal justice system works.
They think that when you're innocent,
you're gonna be found not guilty.
But that's not really how it works.
Renee worked as a paralegal
and decided to take a
fresh look at Seth's case.
When coming into this,
I didn't know what to expect
or what I was gonna find,
but I just found things that
had never been disclosed.
All the evidence was hidden.
There are so many leads
that have gone unanswered.
There's no doubt in my mind
that he's innocent.
After being sent to death row
for triple murder,
Seth Penalver appealed his conviction
to the Florida Supreme Court.
In their appeals, Seth's attorneys argued
that no physical evidence
linked Seth to the crime
and that all of the witnesses against Seth
had changed their stories over time.
At the second trial,
prosecution argued
that I was tampering with witnesses,
that I tampered with Melissa Munroe,
changed people's testimony,
and there wasn't a sliver of evidence.
That was so damning to
let a prosecutor argue that
without anybody ever being charged,
without no type of physical evidence,
no audio, no nothing.
- A decision
- from the Supreme Court
Would take three years to come down,
but in 2006,
Seth got word from his
former co-defendant Pablo Ibar,
also on death row.
Pablo sent word.
He's like, "Your appeal's been granted.
Congratulations,
you got another chance at life."
And I was just in such shock.
The Florida Supreme Court
had unanimously granted Seth a new trial.
Appeals are really about,
does the judge make errors?
We were able to reverse that case on appeal
and be granted a new trial
for what the court calls cumulative error.
I was disappointed for the family.
It was gut-wrenching
that you have to go through this again.
But for Seth's lawyers,
who spent more time arguing Seth's case
than any attorneys on any
case in Broward County history,
the prospect of a third trial was daunting.
It was just so draining,
especially the third time.
I'm not the young man I used to be.
I do respect what Hilly does,
but there's just not enough time in the day
to dedicate all his time to
such a humongous case.
Knowing his third trial
would likely be
his last chance at freedom,
Seth turned to a childhood friend for help.
Me and Renee...
You know, childhood friends.
We were young, 15, 16.
That's how we met,
and I wound up finding
out she was a paralegal.
So this is the first time
I've seen Seth in 20 years.
And I didn't find out until later on
that his mom, dad,
and his grandmother all died
while he was in prison.
After that, I started to go see him,
'cause I figured, you know, he's all alone.
He's fighting for his life.
I've seen the video,
and I never thought it was him.
The guy is too big to be him.
Renee read
Seth's trial transcripts
and decided to help.
I got a phone call from Hilliard.
"Seth wants to go through his file.
"Will you go down and
take all the boxes down
and just let him go
through them one by one?"
I said, "Sure, no problem."
Renee, a single mom
with two kids,
worked on the case for
free in her spare time.
I'd clock out at 5:30 at work,
and I'd just pick up the box
and start at the first folder,
and I would go see Seth on the weekends
and go through the boxes with him.
One by one, I'd look at it and look at it,
all through a visitation
booth with big Plexiglas,
and the stuff that we saw, it floored me.
We get to a box where it says that
Alex Hernandez was a
suspect in an affidavit.
I heard there were no
other suspects in this case.
Well, if he's not a suspect,
how is there an affidavit
stating he's a suspect?
Seth and I sat back and said,
"Well, what else is it that we don't have?"
As Seth's third trial loomed,
his team caught a break.
Seth's former co-defendant Pablo Ibar
had gained access to files
police deemed irrelevant to the case
and, thus, never disclosed.
He gets 50,000 pages of public records,
everything we've gotten
and a lot that we haven't.
That made all the difference in the case,
I think.
Seth and I, at this point, start going
through the documents,
and I just found things
that had never been disclosed.
There are so many leads
that have gone unanswered.
Some of those leads
concern the man at the
center of the murders,
Butch Casey.
Butch's reputation of being a playboy
also included reputed ties to the mob.
- You have
- confidential informants saying,
"Hey, man,
this guy just got beat up by the mafia.
"They put him in the back of the car.
These are the guys who did it."
There has been statements given
that the morning of the murders,
there were two Latin men
that came into the club,
and they say to Casey,
"We'll see you at the house later."
An hour later, he's dead.
Now, as a detective,
that would be important to me.
Renee was also about to learn
about a man named Johnny McGill.
McGill would confess to police that,
after the murders,
he was the one who drove
Butch Casey's Mercedes
to the Everglades and set it on fire.
Just before Seth Penalver's
third trial in 2012,
he received dozens of boxes
of previously undisclosed
files related to his murder case.
- Seth and I
- go through those documents
On Plexiglas page by page.
The documents
included a lead sheet
containing a confession to police
by a man named Johnny McGill.
In both of the trials, the State's theory
is that Pablo and Seth drove the Mercedes
to Palm Beach County,
but going through the documentation
from the Miramar Police Department,
we find a lead sheet.
Johnny McGill walks
into the Broward County Sheriff's Office
and says,
"My boss ordered me to drive the Mercedes
to West Palm Beach
County and set it on fire."
You've just walked in
and admitted that you've committed arson
in a triple homicide,
and the Broward County Sheriff's Office
let you walk out.
You have witnesses
who all put Seth and Pablo
in Sunrise with the Mercedes
and Seth's car.
The theory was that they were together,
but it doesn't add up; it doesn't match.
A few days after talking
to police,
Johnny McGill was murdered
at a nightclub in Miami.
Police never verified McGill's claims
and never told the defense.
Other documents police withheld
included an inventory of
security camera footage
seized from Butch Casey's bar.
Butch Casey had a number
of cameras in his club.
One of the tapes showed the bar area.
Another one showed the entryway.
So those tapes would have possibly shown
if Ibar came in the club,
if he came in with Seth,
or he came in with Rincon or Hernandez.
They always said
that me and Pablo
were in there that night
at Casey's Nickelodeon.
The general manager came in there and said,
"If you were in that club,
you were on the video."
- The defense
- has always been told
These videotapes don't exist,
they don't have them,
and they were presumed to
have burned up in the Mercedes.
But we find that those
tapes had been sitting
in the Miramar Police
Department for 18 1/2 years,
no property receipt, no chain of custody.
Seth's defense now petitioned
to see the tapes.
We put them in the machine. They're blank.
They're snow.
We send them down
to the sheriff's crime lab.
They come back up and say,
"These are blank,
"but they're not blank because they're new.
"They're blank because they've been
intentionally erased."
The police department
took out the evidence
that put anybody else as a suspect,
and they basically molded this case
to how they wanted it to be read.
Other police files
pointed to Pablo Ibar's associates,
Alex Hernandez and Alberto Rincon,
who were caught red-handed with Ibar
at a robbery in Dade County.
One report referenced Butch
Casey's next-door neighbor
who saw a man in a white
car outside Butch's house
on the morning of the murders.
It was a Miramar
major crime summary,
and in it lists all the witnesses,
including Mr. and Mrs. Branyi.
They lived next door to Casey.
At 7:00 in the morning,
they heard two males'
voices outside their window.
The wife saw a white car
with a stocky male outside it.
That's the first time
we'd ever heard of them.
A witness says that they see a white Toyota
outside the house with a stocky male
getting into the white Toyota.
Alberto Rincon owns a white Toyota
and is a stocky male.
So if it was Alberto Rincon in the Toyota,
he's now at the scene,
and if he's at the scene,
he could be one of the intruders.
When Rincon was arrested
in Dade County,
police had also found evidence
that seemed to link him
to Butch Casey's house.
The footprints at the crime scene
were never, ever tied to Seth,
but that home-invasion robbery
that happened in Dade County,
when Rincon gets arrested,
he is wearing sneakers
that match footprints
that are found at the crime scene.
There was certainly
enough evidence
to portray Rincon as a suspect,
especially since he's wearing the shoes,
he has a vehicle that's the same color
as a vehicle that's seen
outside the residence
the morning of the murders.
So there are so many leads
that have gone unanswered.
- Yeah, I remember the first time
- I seen some of that stuff.
I cried. I cried.
I was so angry.
How could our government hide this evidence
that I'm not the man?
After spending months
working together,
Seth and Renee's relationship
grew into more than friendship.
She always has had a fighting spirit,
doesn't like to lose.
After, I think, reading all that material,
seeing the injustice and
seeing my innocence,
that was a drive.
And during the time of our friendship,
we began to have a bond
closer than friendship,
so it began to be the love, the friendship,
and the injustice all combined into one.
It was just raw emotion.
One of the things that I've
always loved about Seth
is that he was so positive.
In one of the darkest places,
in the darkest time in his life,
he was always very upbeat,
happy, smiling, energetic.
At some point,
the Broward County Sheriff's Office
finds out that him and I
have a personal relationship,
and we had to have a hearing
because they didn't
want me coming in the jail
and working on his case anymore.
So there was a three-month period
where I continued to work on the case,
but I wasn't actually
allowed to go see Seth.
But with the trial
about to begin,
the State stood firm,
vowing to reconvict Seth
and put him to death.
Seth Penalver's third trial
began on July 30, 2012.
Once again,
he was facing the death penalty.
Chuck Morton,
by now chief prosecutor of Broward County,
could reassign the case
but decided to try it himself.
It's usually best to preserve continuity,
and plus, I wanted to.
I wanted to stay in court.
But 18 years after the crime,
Morton was facing a much tougher battle.
Years later,
memories change and fade.
The persuasive value of the case now
was much stacked against me.
And this time,
Seth's defense tried
an unconventional strategy
with the crime scene video.
We approached it much, much differently.
We embraced the video
and didn't run from it.
We decided that we were
gonna make the video our ally.
We had a giant board with
the picture of the intruder
and just put it next to him
and said, "This is not this guy."
Our defense was, it's a mistaken identity.
You definitely have the wrong person.
And we also argued how law enforcement
manipulated and tricked
and pressured people.
The defense
also presented documents
Renee had uncovered
showing payment to an anonymous tipster
who used the last name
Pentlover to finger Seth.
The only person who
called Seth by that name
was Jean Klimeczko,
but Klimeczko and police
had both denied payment
of a reward.
The lead detective, Paul Manzella,
denied it under oath
twice in front of a jury,
and Jean Klimeczko... naturally,
when I had him on the stand,
I said, "Did you ever get a tip
Make"
"No, no, no."
I call Paul Manzella to the stand,
and I put those documents in front of him.
I said, "Did you pay a Crime Stoppers tip?
You know,
it's your handwriting. It's your notes."
And he says, "Yeah."
So when that testimony finished,
what the jury realized
is that Paul Manzella
and Jean Klimeczko were prepared
to swear under oath to something
that they were lying about
in order to have Seth Penalver convicted.
In the end,
the defense argued
police had fixated on Seth
as the man in the video,
ignoring other suspects and evidence
that failed to implicate him.
Our theory at trial
was... obviously it was...
It was Ibar and either Rincon or Hernandez,
'cause why wouldn't it be?
They were his buds.
Can't they be the image just
as easily as Seth Penalver?
I think the defense is
just throwing stuff up
to make people feel doubt.
If you saw your brother
walking down a street
on a video, even if it was blurry,
you'd know it's him.
After ten nerve-racking days,
the jury finally returned on December 21,
2012.
You're fraught with just
every emotion in the world.
The moment was captured
by cell phone video.
It kicks in that
I'm not guilty."
I don't know what happened.
I left my body.
I was crying like a baby.
It's too much emotion. It's just too much.
I could not believe it.
Like, is this even real?
I got right on my knees
right in the middle of the courtroom,
and I went to praying
and praying and praying.
Later that night,
Seth Penalver walked
away from prison a free man.
Seth's case brought up serious questions
about the use of video as
evidence in murder trials.
Video is not 100%.
Sometimes video can create more issues
than one would guess.
The video is powerful
for the emotions
it wrenches in you,
but it doesn't always tell the whole story.
The video is the truth...
It is what happened...
But it's everything
else that was the story.
You may have known the ending,
but you had to create the beginning of it.
You had to create the middle of it.
It doesn't portray the whole picture.
But just as Seth claimed
his prior guilty verdict
didn't match the truth,
so, too, does the prosecutor.
I was very disappointed
because I do believe that the evidence
establishes that Pablo
Ibar and Seth Penalver
committed the crime.
Not guilty doesn't mean innocent.
Seth's co-defendant,
Pablo Ibar,
is still on death row.
In 2012, he wrote a letter to Seth
that raised questions
for the victim's family.
There's this handwritten
letter that's full of rage
from Pablo Ibar.
It basically tells him,
"You're not a victim.
"Man up.
Take responsibility for your actions."
For Deborah Bowie,
the letter and the video of the crime
can only mean one thing.
I know that Seth Penalver
is a murderer.
He may pretend with anybody else
that he's talking to
and tell whatever story
and thump whatever
Bible he wants to bring in,
but that man is a cold-blooded murderer.
And he may be acquitted,
and he may be free,
of Death Row Stories,
a triple murder execution-style...
They shot them like they were nothing.
And the crime is caught on tape.
Most significant piece of evidence
I've ever seen in a case.
But clear images of guilt...
The evidence establishes
that Seth Penalver committed the crime.
There's your guy.
It's a slam dunk for the prosecution.
Only deepen the mystery.
You're going to kill somebody.
It's not even a sure conviction.
What they didn't have is,
they didn't have any physical evidence.
There's no doubt in my
mind that he's innocent.
There's a body in the water.
He was butchered and murdered.
Many people proclaim their innocence.
In this case, there are
a number of things that stink.
This man is remorseless.
He needs to pay for it with his life.
The electric chair
flashed in front of my eyes.
Get a conviction at all costs.
Let the truth fall where it may.
On a Sunday morning
in the summer of 1994,
a Palm Beach police officer noticed smoke
curling across the sky near Belle Glade,
Florida.
As the officer drew closer,
he noticed a car engulfed in flames
by the side of the road.
There's a lot of isolated land
out near the Everglades.
The car was found burning, no one in it.
The black Mercedes
had a pungent odor of gasoline
but no signs of being in an accident.
Once the fire was under control
and various forensic people
began to look for evidence
to see if they could
identify who it belonged to,
from there,
that's how the case got started.
Police discovered the car
belonged to Casimir Sucharski
of Miramar, Florida.
Sucharski was better known
to locals as Butch Casey,
the manager and former
owner of the popular nightclub
Casey's Nickelodeon.
Casey's attracted hard-partying locals
with bikini contests, ladies' nights,
and hours until dawn.
Butch was a charming womanizer.
Girls loved him.
Butch Casey lives
in the Miramar city limits,
and so the Miramar Police Department,
once they were notified
that his car was found,
they sought to locate him.
A quick knock on the door. No response.
No answer.
The Miramar policeman
left his card in the door,
unaware of the gruesome
scene that lay just inside.
The same Sunday that Butch
Casey's charred Mercedes
was found in the Everglades,
police were notified by the families
of two aspiring models,
Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers,
that both women were missing.
So I remember it was June 26th.
It was a Sunday.
My mom called,
said she hadn't spoken to Sharon,
and I thought, "Well, she's 25."
She liked to go out and have a good time.
But I could hear in my mother's voice
that something was not right.
Police discovered the two women
had been at Casey's Nickelodeon
the previous night.
They were there up
until around closing time.
Casey, being a ladies' man,
flirted with them and invited them to come
to his home.
By late Sunday,
with no sign of Casey,
Anderson, or Rogers,
police returned to Casey's home.
This time,
the officer actually walked
around the entire perimeter of the house,
worked his way into the backyard,
looked through a sliding glass door.
You could see the bodies.
Inside the home,
Butch Casey, Sharon Anderson,
and Marie Rogers
had all been shot in the head
at point-blank range.
Detective Craig Scarlett
was one of the first officers at the scene.
When I saw it, it was...
You know, it was pretty hard to look at.
It wasn't some random,
"I'll shoot you here,
and I'll shoot you there."
They were all laid out in a row.
Certainly a gruesome scene.
Bloody, killed execution-style.
The home itself was ransacked
and some items missing... jewelry.
Butch Casey was licensed to carry a gun.
You could see that that gun was missing.
They had cornered off a
giant area of the property.
Police officers, police cars.
Chief was on his way.
I believe there was already news there.
Around 2:30 this morning,
Casimir Sucharski was found murdered
in his Miramar home
along with two other people.
All three here at Sucharski's Miramar home
the morning of June 26th,
all shot execution-style.
And my mom called,
and she was very weird on the phone.
And I thought... I'm really
trying to keep it together.
I said, "Is she dead?
I just need to know. Is she dead?"
She said, "Yes."
To homicide detectives,
the murders appeared to
be a robbery gone wrong.
Police found bullet casings
and a bloody footprint
near the bodies
but little else to go on.
Sometimes Butch Casey was known
to carry a lot of money
as well as he was thought to perhaps
maybe have access to drugs,
but the primary thought,
since the house was ransacked...
That someone was looking for something.
As police investigated,
curious neighbors gathered outside.
Some of those citizens
were coming up to me
and talking to me, telling me stuff.
One neighbor named Gary Foy
said he'd seen something suspicious
the morning of the murders.
Gary Foy told me that he saw
these two guys in Butch's
Mercedes convertible.
Foy thought it was odd
that two young men
would be driving Casey's car.
They took off out towards
Hollywood Boulevard.
Gary Foy followed them,
and he looked at them.
He said one of them looked Latin,
and the other guy... he said,
"I really couldn't see,
but he wasn't Latin."
I'm thinking, like, this guy is gold now.
You know, he's actually saw them.
Police were convinced
that if they found the
men who drove that car,
they had their killers.
As investigators continued to comb
through Butch Casey's house,
they discovered a cache of videotapes
hidden in the bedroom.
They appeared to be sex tapes
filmed from a secret camera
mounted above Casey's bed.
An officer then noticed
a souvenir film slate
on a high bookshelf in the living room.
He looked behind it,
and it was a camera.
And he discovered that
it was attached to a VCR.
I was outside.
They were like,
"Come here. You got to see this."
And took the tape.
Popped it into the TV, and it starts up.
And there's Butch Casey walking around
the night before,
getting ready to go to work.
We start fast-forwarding it.
He goes out the door.
Then the sun comes up.
The room gets bright.
Then he comes walking in with the girls.
And we go, "We're gonna
watch this crime unfold on video,"
and it did,
right in front of us.
Detectives on the scene
of a brutal triple murder in Miramar,
Florida,
had made a stunning discovery:
a hidden surveillance camera
had videotaped the entire crime.
It was really amazing,
because, you know,
back in 1994,
not many people were
hooking their houses up
with all kinds of video.
On the video,
the girls are sitting at the kitchen table.
They grabbed a bottle of wine or champagne.
They're sitting there and talking.
And lo and behold,
after a substantial amount of time,
in walks the murderers.
Two men enter Casey's house
from the back,
one brandishing a large
semiautomatic weapon.
It appears to be
a TEC-9 machine gun.
- Butch is, like,
- stunned for a minute,
It looks like.
He knows he's got a gun in the other room.
One of the girls runs into the bedroom.
Miss Anderson tried to get away,
go to another room,
and the second intruder
then immediately chased her.
The intruder with the gun came
and took the butt-end of his gun
and just struck Butch Casey.
And then they just
start beating on him
with the gun across the face.
Whack.
The other intruder who
had chased Miss Anderson
secured her.
You can see that he came out of the bedroom
with a gun that he didn't have before,
which turns out to be Butch Casey's gun,
laid her down on the floor.
Minutes pass.
The criminals appear to
be searching for something
as Casey and the two
women huddle on the floor.
At one point, Butch Casey seized a moment
when he thought that he could overcome
the intruder with the gun,
so he grabbed the gun
and began to struggle.
He's not in the best
position to put up a fight,
and eventually,
the suspect shot him in the back
to make him let go.
And he did.
Finally came time to leave.
I guess they didn't get what they wanted.
Now that Butch was shot,
they just lined them all up.
Boom.
Boom. Boom.
The second intruder
uses the TEC-9
to finish the job.
Then the other guy comes
and puts it right to back of the head.
Boom. Moves over to the next one.
Boom.
As the men prepare to leave,
one of them makes a fateful mistake.
One... one perpetrator
removed a cover from...
What appeared to be a
towel or shirt of some sort
from over his head.
You got a fairly and
particularly clear picture
of his face.
The other intruder continued at all times
to wear a baseball cap and sunglasses.
From start to finish,
the crime lasted 22 minutes.
As gruesome as it was,
the video was probably
the most significant piece
of evidence I've ever seen in a case.
The shocking news
of her sister's murder
sent Deborah Bowie,
who was nine months pregnant, into labor.
It forced my delivery.
Best moment of my life...
Completely robbed of that experience...
To have a baby
three days after being told
your sister was murdered.
So the day that I came out of the hospital
was the day of her funeral.
The first thing that
the police did with the video
was to see if it could be
enhanced in some way
where you could get a clearer view
of the perpetrators.
They utilized the FBI to find
the best images of the face,
put it on a still photo,
and they put it on flyers just...
And passed it around
to different law enforcement agencies.
- But there was little movement
- in the case
Until two weeks later.
There was a home-invasion
robbery in Dade County.
Three men come in, tie the people up.
Asking for drugs, money.
Same type of MO.
It was very violent.
This time, one of the victims
managed to call police,
who arrived at the crime still in progress.
The police corral the place
and grab the three of them.
The three men
were Alberto Rincon, 24,
Alex Hernandez, 20, and Pablo Ibar, 22.
Dade County police look at the flyers,
look at their three suspects, and go, "Hey.
"Pablo Ibar and Alex Hernandez,
these are the two guys."
Metro-Dade called us up and said,
"I have somebody you
should at least come look at."
That was Pablo Ibar.
I'm saying, "This... this is great.
This is the guy."
Gary Foy,
Butch Casey's neighbor,
came in and positively ID'd Ibar
as the man he saw driving the Mercedes
the morning of the murder.
He doesn't pick Alex Hernandez
as the passenger,
but he says he looks very similar,
but he does pick Ibar.
He says, "I'm sure that was the driver."
Ibar seemed a good match
for the mustached killer,
and police soon got a second ID
from Ibar's roommate, Jean Klimeczko.
Were you sure right away that
that was Pablo on that tape?
Yeah.
Klimeczko also claimed
to recognize
the other man on the video
as someone named Pentlover.
Police determined that
Klimeczko was referring
to 21-year-old Seth Penalver
of Fort Lauderdale.
Penalver and Ibar traveled
in the same circle of friends,
and on the morning of the murders,
Klimeczko said the two grabbed
a TEC-9 gun from the house
and later returned driving a new black car.
To get a second ID on Seth Penalver,
detectives went to an ex-girlfriend,
Melissa Munroe.
They tell her they're there about Seth.
Eventually they take her
back to the police station.
They show her the two same pictures,
and they're saying to her, "Who is this?"
Melissa Munroe had also seen
Seth and Pablo together
at Casey's bar on the night of the murders.
You had all these witnesses
that corroborated and connected
Seth Penalver and Pablo Ibar
to Mr. Butch Casey, the TEC-9 gun,
and his car.
Seth Penalver,
a high school dropout
with a previous robbery to his name,
soon learned he was wanted for murder.
I actually seen all this
stuff in the newspaper.
They want to question
me about a triple murder.
They had a description of my car in there.
"If you know his whereabouts,
please contact us."
Seth decided to turn himself in.
Because I didn't commit this crime.
I mean, what person in their right mind
is gonna turn theirself in
knowing that you did a triple murder?
Seth claimed innocence,
but when detectives asked him where he was
on the night of the murders,
he couldn't be sure.
It's like you're talking 30 days later.
They want to speak to me.
Why would you remember
where you're at 30 days ago?
You have no reason to remember.
Police latch on to it.
Matches the build of the killer,
they think.
They realize Seth has a history,
and he's violent.
And then the game's on for the police.
Seth was about to realize
he looked very similar
to the killer on the video,
and soon,
he would be facing the death penalty.
In August 1994,
authorities announced
they would seek the death penalty
against Pablo Ibar and Seth Penalver
for triple murder.
Veteran death penalty defense attorneys
Hilliard Moldof and Pat Rastatter
were appointed to represent Penalver.
The general consensus was,
here's a triple homicide on video.
There's your guy. This case is closed.
We're just going through the motions.
You're left with, "Well,
the video looks like Seth."
It was an uphill battle the whole way.
Ibar and Penalver
were tried together
beginning on June 23, 1997.
Prosecutors played the
entire 22-minute video
for the jury.
When they finally play
that video for the first time,
it may as well be watching the nuclear bomb
go off in Hiroshima.
I mean, you know, your guts are wrenching.
The courtroom was silent.
There's people crying
by the end of that video.
Prosecutors also produced
a set of tire tracks
found near Butch Casey's
burned-out Mercedes.
The tracks were left by a getaway car,
which the State said matched
Seth Penalver's Oldsmobile.
- You know, it was
- damning evidence,
And it was evidence that,
on top of everything else,
probably hurt us.
Finally the prosecution
called their witnesses
against Seth, including Kimberly San,
one of Seth's former roommates.
Kim San... she and
Seth were living together
in a house in Sunrise, Florida.
She said Seth had come to the house
with Pablo Ibar, a black Mercedes.
Came in, had blood all over his clothes.
He and Pablo took their clothes off,
washed them in the washing machine.
Red bubbles had come
out of the washing machine.
And she said
she saw him with Ibar,
changing clothes, taking a shower,
and driving off in the Mercedes.
Kim's saying I come home.
I see bloody bubbles just flying
out of the washing machine.
But crime scene technicians
went to that house.
They actually lifted the washing machine
and Luminol tested it, you know,
for any type of DNA,
and they came and testified in our trial,
said, "If this story was true,
what she said,
"it would've been there.
I would've found it."
After months of testimony,
the case went to the jury,
but after three days of deliberations,
the jury was deadlocked.
What they didn't have is,
they didn't have any physical evidence.
They didn't have any DNA.
They didn't have any fingerprints.
They didn't have any of
that thing that juries want.
Witness stories had also changed
since the murders.
For instance,
Pablo Ibar's former roommate Jean Klimeczko
now said he didn't
remember identifying Ibar,
and Melissa Munroe said
police had pressured her
into ID'ing Seth and Pablo.
They asked me,
do the pictures resemble
anybody that I know?
I told them no.
They proceeded to keep badgering me,
and they said, "Listen,
we're just gonna tell you,
"we know these are
pictures of Seth and Pablo.
We want to know which
one would be which one."
I was young. I was scared.
I had no clue of who was in the picture,
you know?
I was dealing
with a situation in which
my witnesses are changing their testimony.
Clearly the motive there was protection.
Not going to convict your friend.
With the jury unable
to break their deadlock,
a mistrial was declared for both men.
A second trial lasted seven months
with the same witness testimony
and the same damaging video,
but this time,
Pablo and Seth were tried separately.
Finally on November 11, 1999,
the second jury reached a verdict.
You know, they came back and said guilty.
I just stood there. I couldn't believe it.
You know, after all that fighting,
after all that time, to come to that...
To come to that conclusion
was earth-shattering.
A hearing was held
to determine Seth Penalver's sentence,
life in prison or death
by lethal injection.
Seth's attorneys wanted to
argue that his tumultuous childhood
should be taken into account.
Seth had a terrible childhood.
His mom was a drug addict,
and he was raised somewhat homeless.
Had to rely on himself.
He was a middle-school dropout.
His dad is deceased,
and his mom is a heroin addict.
He had no siblings.
I told my attorney, "No,
you're not gonna get up there
"and argue any of this.
"I'm not gonna beg for my life
for something I did not do,"
because, yeah,
I might've had a messed-up childhood,
but that doesn't mean
I committed this crime.
They gave me three death sentences,
two life sentences, and a 15-year sentence.
And they close that door behind you,
and then it's like, "Damn.
"This is real now.
"This is for real.
I'm not supposed to die like this."
Seth's co-defendant Pablo Ibar
was also found guilty
and sentenced to death.
I thought that the sentence
of death for both of them
was fair.
And I've heard people say, "Well, you know,
the death penalty is not a deterrent."
Well, it's not meant to be.
It's called justice.
From the time of his arrest
through years of trials,
one of Seth's childhood friends
had been following his case from afar.
After Seth was sentenced,
she went to visit him on death row.
Most American people think
that the criminal justice system works.
They think that when you're innocent,
you're gonna be found not guilty.
But that's not really how it works.
Renee worked as a paralegal
and decided to take a
fresh look at Seth's case.
When coming into this,
I didn't know what to expect
or what I was gonna find,
but I just found things that
had never been disclosed.
All the evidence was hidden.
There are so many leads
that have gone unanswered.
There's no doubt in my mind
that he's innocent.
After being sent to death row
for triple murder,
Seth Penalver appealed his conviction
to the Florida Supreme Court.
In their appeals, Seth's attorneys argued
that no physical evidence
linked Seth to the crime
and that all of the witnesses against Seth
had changed their stories over time.
At the second trial,
prosecution argued
that I was tampering with witnesses,
that I tampered with Melissa Munroe,
changed people's testimony,
and there wasn't a sliver of evidence.
That was so damning to
let a prosecutor argue that
without anybody ever being charged,
without no type of physical evidence,
no audio, no nothing.
- A decision
- from the Supreme Court
Would take three years to come down,
but in 2006,
Seth got word from his
former co-defendant Pablo Ibar,
also on death row.
Pablo sent word.
He's like, "Your appeal's been granted.
Congratulations,
you got another chance at life."
And I was just in such shock.
The Florida Supreme Court
had unanimously granted Seth a new trial.
Appeals are really about,
does the judge make errors?
We were able to reverse that case on appeal
and be granted a new trial
for what the court calls cumulative error.
I was disappointed for the family.
It was gut-wrenching
that you have to go through this again.
But for Seth's lawyers,
who spent more time arguing Seth's case
than any attorneys on any
case in Broward County history,
the prospect of a third trial was daunting.
It was just so draining,
especially the third time.
I'm not the young man I used to be.
I do respect what Hilly does,
but there's just not enough time in the day
to dedicate all his time to
such a humongous case.
Knowing his third trial
would likely be
his last chance at freedom,
Seth turned to a childhood friend for help.
Me and Renee...
You know, childhood friends.
We were young, 15, 16.
That's how we met,
and I wound up finding
out she was a paralegal.
So this is the first time
I've seen Seth in 20 years.
And I didn't find out until later on
that his mom, dad,
and his grandmother all died
while he was in prison.
After that, I started to go see him,
'cause I figured, you know, he's all alone.
He's fighting for his life.
I've seen the video,
and I never thought it was him.
The guy is too big to be him.
Renee read
Seth's trial transcripts
and decided to help.
I got a phone call from Hilliard.
"Seth wants to go through his file.
"Will you go down and
take all the boxes down
and just let him go
through them one by one?"
I said, "Sure, no problem."
Renee, a single mom
with two kids,
worked on the case for
free in her spare time.
I'd clock out at 5:30 at work,
and I'd just pick up the box
and start at the first folder,
and I would go see Seth on the weekends
and go through the boxes with him.
One by one, I'd look at it and look at it,
all through a visitation
booth with big Plexiglas,
and the stuff that we saw, it floored me.
We get to a box where it says that
Alex Hernandez was a
suspect in an affidavit.
I heard there were no
other suspects in this case.
Well, if he's not a suspect,
how is there an affidavit
stating he's a suspect?
Seth and I sat back and said,
"Well, what else is it that we don't have?"
As Seth's third trial loomed,
his team caught a break.
Seth's former co-defendant Pablo Ibar
had gained access to files
police deemed irrelevant to the case
and, thus, never disclosed.
He gets 50,000 pages of public records,
everything we've gotten
and a lot that we haven't.
That made all the difference in the case,
I think.
Seth and I, at this point, start going
through the documents,
and I just found things
that had never been disclosed.
There are so many leads
that have gone unanswered.
Some of those leads
concern the man at the
center of the murders,
Butch Casey.
Butch's reputation of being a playboy
also included reputed ties to the mob.
- You have
- confidential informants saying,
"Hey, man,
this guy just got beat up by the mafia.
"They put him in the back of the car.
These are the guys who did it."
There has been statements given
that the morning of the murders,
there were two Latin men
that came into the club,
and they say to Casey,
"We'll see you at the house later."
An hour later, he's dead.
Now, as a detective,
that would be important to me.
Renee was also about to learn
about a man named Johnny McGill.
McGill would confess to police that,
after the murders,
he was the one who drove
Butch Casey's Mercedes
to the Everglades and set it on fire.
Just before Seth Penalver's
third trial in 2012,
he received dozens of boxes
of previously undisclosed
files related to his murder case.
- Seth and I
- go through those documents
On Plexiglas page by page.
The documents
included a lead sheet
containing a confession to police
by a man named Johnny McGill.
In both of the trials, the State's theory
is that Pablo and Seth drove the Mercedes
to Palm Beach County,
but going through the documentation
from the Miramar Police Department,
we find a lead sheet.
Johnny McGill walks
into the Broward County Sheriff's Office
and says,
"My boss ordered me to drive the Mercedes
to West Palm Beach
County and set it on fire."
You've just walked in
and admitted that you've committed arson
in a triple homicide,
and the Broward County Sheriff's Office
let you walk out.
You have witnesses
who all put Seth and Pablo
in Sunrise with the Mercedes
and Seth's car.
The theory was that they were together,
but it doesn't add up; it doesn't match.
A few days after talking
to police,
Johnny McGill was murdered
at a nightclub in Miami.
Police never verified McGill's claims
and never told the defense.
Other documents police withheld
included an inventory of
security camera footage
seized from Butch Casey's bar.
Butch Casey had a number
of cameras in his club.
One of the tapes showed the bar area.
Another one showed the entryway.
So those tapes would have possibly shown
if Ibar came in the club,
if he came in with Seth,
or he came in with Rincon or Hernandez.
They always said
that me and Pablo
were in there that night
at Casey's Nickelodeon.
The general manager came in there and said,
"If you were in that club,
you were on the video."
- The defense
- has always been told
These videotapes don't exist,
they don't have them,
and they were presumed to
have burned up in the Mercedes.
But we find that those
tapes had been sitting
in the Miramar Police
Department for 18 1/2 years,
no property receipt, no chain of custody.
Seth's defense now petitioned
to see the tapes.
We put them in the machine. They're blank.
They're snow.
We send them down
to the sheriff's crime lab.
They come back up and say,
"These are blank,
"but they're not blank because they're new.
"They're blank because they've been
intentionally erased."
The police department
took out the evidence
that put anybody else as a suspect,
and they basically molded this case
to how they wanted it to be read.
Other police files
pointed to Pablo Ibar's associates,
Alex Hernandez and Alberto Rincon,
who were caught red-handed with Ibar
at a robbery in Dade County.
One report referenced Butch
Casey's next-door neighbor
who saw a man in a white
car outside Butch's house
on the morning of the murders.
It was a Miramar
major crime summary,
and in it lists all the witnesses,
including Mr. and Mrs. Branyi.
They lived next door to Casey.
At 7:00 in the morning,
they heard two males'
voices outside their window.
The wife saw a white car
with a stocky male outside it.
That's the first time
we'd ever heard of them.
A witness says that they see a white Toyota
outside the house with a stocky male
getting into the white Toyota.
Alberto Rincon owns a white Toyota
and is a stocky male.
So if it was Alberto Rincon in the Toyota,
he's now at the scene,
and if he's at the scene,
he could be one of the intruders.
When Rincon was arrested
in Dade County,
police had also found evidence
that seemed to link him
to Butch Casey's house.
The footprints at the crime scene
were never, ever tied to Seth,
but that home-invasion robbery
that happened in Dade County,
when Rincon gets arrested,
he is wearing sneakers
that match footprints
that are found at the crime scene.
There was certainly
enough evidence
to portray Rincon as a suspect,
especially since he's wearing the shoes,
he has a vehicle that's the same color
as a vehicle that's seen
outside the residence
the morning of the murders.
So there are so many leads
that have gone unanswered.
- Yeah, I remember the first time
- I seen some of that stuff.
I cried. I cried.
I was so angry.
How could our government hide this evidence
that I'm not the man?
After spending months
working together,
Seth and Renee's relationship
grew into more than friendship.
She always has had a fighting spirit,
doesn't like to lose.
After, I think, reading all that material,
seeing the injustice and
seeing my innocence,
that was a drive.
And during the time of our friendship,
we began to have a bond
closer than friendship,
so it began to be the love, the friendship,
and the injustice all combined into one.
It was just raw emotion.
One of the things that I've
always loved about Seth
is that he was so positive.
In one of the darkest places,
in the darkest time in his life,
he was always very upbeat,
happy, smiling, energetic.
At some point,
the Broward County Sheriff's Office
finds out that him and I
have a personal relationship,
and we had to have a hearing
because they didn't
want me coming in the jail
and working on his case anymore.
So there was a three-month period
where I continued to work on the case,
but I wasn't actually
allowed to go see Seth.
But with the trial
about to begin,
the State stood firm,
vowing to reconvict Seth
and put him to death.
Seth Penalver's third trial
began on July 30, 2012.
Once again,
he was facing the death penalty.
Chuck Morton,
by now chief prosecutor of Broward County,
could reassign the case
but decided to try it himself.
It's usually best to preserve continuity,
and plus, I wanted to.
I wanted to stay in court.
But 18 years after the crime,
Morton was facing a much tougher battle.
Years later,
memories change and fade.
The persuasive value of the case now
was much stacked against me.
And this time,
Seth's defense tried
an unconventional strategy
with the crime scene video.
We approached it much, much differently.
We embraced the video
and didn't run from it.
We decided that we were
gonna make the video our ally.
We had a giant board with
the picture of the intruder
and just put it next to him
and said, "This is not this guy."
Our defense was, it's a mistaken identity.
You definitely have the wrong person.
And we also argued how law enforcement
manipulated and tricked
and pressured people.
The defense
also presented documents
Renee had uncovered
showing payment to an anonymous tipster
who used the last name
Pentlover to finger Seth.
The only person who
called Seth by that name
was Jean Klimeczko,
but Klimeczko and police
had both denied payment
of a reward.
The lead detective, Paul Manzella,
denied it under oath
twice in front of a jury,
and Jean Klimeczko... naturally,
when I had him on the stand,
I said, "Did you ever get a tip
Make"
"No, no, no."
I call Paul Manzella to the stand,
and I put those documents in front of him.
I said, "Did you pay a Crime Stoppers tip?
You know,
it's your handwriting. It's your notes."
And he says, "Yeah."
So when that testimony finished,
what the jury realized
is that Paul Manzella
and Jean Klimeczko were prepared
to swear under oath to something
that they were lying about
in order to have Seth Penalver convicted.
In the end,
the defense argued
police had fixated on Seth
as the man in the video,
ignoring other suspects and evidence
that failed to implicate him.
Our theory at trial
was... obviously it was...
It was Ibar and either Rincon or Hernandez,
'cause why wouldn't it be?
They were his buds.
Can't they be the image just
as easily as Seth Penalver?
I think the defense is
just throwing stuff up
to make people feel doubt.
If you saw your brother
walking down a street
on a video, even if it was blurry,
you'd know it's him.
After ten nerve-racking days,
the jury finally returned on December 21,
2012.
You're fraught with just
every emotion in the world.
The moment was captured
by cell phone video.
It kicks in that
I'm not guilty."
I don't know what happened.
I left my body.
I was crying like a baby.
It's too much emotion. It's just too much.
I could not believe it.
Like, is this even real?
I got right on my knees
right in the middle of the courtroom,
and I went to praying
and praying and praying.
Later that night,
Seth Penalver walked
away from prison a free man.
Seth's case brought up serious questions
about the use of video as
evidence in murder trials.
Video is not 100%.
Sometimes video can create more issues
than one would guess.
The video is powerful
for the emotions
it wrenches in you,
but it doesn't always tell the whole story.
The video is the truth...
It is what happened...
But it's everything
else that was the story.
You may have known the ending,
but you had to create the beginning of it.
You had to create the middle of it.
It doesn't portray the whole picture.
But just as Seth claimed
his prior guilty verdict
didn't match the truth,
so, too, does the prosecutor.
I was very disappointed
because I do believe that the evidence
establishes that Pablo
Ibar and Seth Penalver
committed the crime.
Not guilty doesn't mean innocent.
Seth's co-defendant,
Pablo Ibar,
is still on death row.
In 2012, he wrote a letter to Seth
that raised questions
for the victim's family.
There's this handwritten
letter that's full of rage
from Pablo Ibar.
It basically tells him,
"You're not a victim.
"Man up.
Take responsibility for your actions."
For Deborah Bowie,
the letter and the video of the crime
can only mean one thing.
I know that Seth Penalver
is a murderer.
He may pretend with anybody else
that he's talking to
and tell whatever story
and thump whatever
Bible he wants to bring in,
but that man is a cold-blooded murderer.
And he may be acquitted,
and he may be free,