Original subtitles

Who set it up?

Telling you the truth about this.

Everybody else is pointing their finger at you.

What people think when they watch Murder for Hire, your show on TV,

is that it's glamorous, it's a professional hit person,

it's a lot of money, and so on and so forth.

Many times, that's not the case.

We had three people killed in one location at one time.

What the heck? I just left there.

The more victims, the bigger the case becomes.

If there was an intended target, why take two more?

They were looking at the wives.

There was some embezzling going on.

And then it came out, oh, he was having an affair.

He was a Romeo.

He was a player.

A flashy person.

Like Fabio on the horse with the long hair.

But it wasn't like she was going out with Brad Pitt.

Just cold-blooded to execute three people.

Coincidences?

Coincidences?

I don't believe in coincidences.

We all knew who it was, but the only question in my mind was...

My shift for that day started at 3 o'clock.

When I went to work, I found out that my car was over at B&B Automotive being repaired.

They repaired our police cars.

They had the account.

B&B Automotive.

It was almost like a little bit of a center hub for motor vehicle mechanical work.

It was in Windsor Locks.

When we mention Windsor Locks, we always say, oh, we're Bradley, as Bradley International Airport.

A lot of farmland, beautiful homes, you know, nice little community.

So after roll call was over, I drove over to B&B.

I arrived there probably around 3.20.

They said about 25 more minutes.

So I hung out there talking with those guys.

After my car was ready, I left.

I think it was 4.20.

And 10 to 20 minutes had passed since I had left there.

When dispatch reported that there was a call at B&B Automotive,

there was a report of three bodies on the ground with blood around them.

What the heck?

I'm like, I just left there.

The scene was a garage with multiple bays.

When we first went to the scene, there was a long driveway.

And we saw a red pickup truck was parked in the driveway.

Door opened, you know, keys are still there.

At that point, it kind of led us to believe that that vehicle was stopped, approached,

and then somebody was taken out hastily.

They just took back to that building.

We walked down the rest of the driveway.

We go to our right, and it's three gentlemen.

Pools of blood.

It was more like they were gathered in one place, told, keep your head down, don't look

at me, and they were shot and killed.

It was a nine millimeter, it was execution style type of murder.

That's a real cruel manner of death.

This was a major crime.

The victims are determined to be employees of this automotive repair shop.

Robert Steers, Barry Rossi, and Lauren Stevens.

Now, Barry and Bobby were owners of the B&B automotive garage.

Lauren was an employee of theirs.

They were outgoing guys.

They were, you know, great businessmen, great mechanics.

In fact, Bobby was the boomer of the red pickup truck.

So when I got there, the ambulance was already on scene.

And Bob was making some kind of moaning noise, like he was in pain.

He was hurt, and he was transported to the hospital by ambulance personnel.

He succumbed to his injuries later on.

He died at the hospital.

At the time, 50 million things were running through my head as to what happened to these

guys.

You know, I just literally talked to these guys, and it was sad.

Talking to other witnesses who worked in the area, they gave us the timeline.

I think it was somewhere in the E5 area, you know, that the murder took place.

So that was my first murder scene in my career.

After that, you know, I didn't know if I wanted to be a police officer anymore.

It was difficult to deal with for a little while.

And some of the things that ran through my mind, too, was were they waiting for me to leave?

Did they see me go in there?

Did they see me leave?

What if I had stayed there just a little longer?

Could I have helped these guys, you know?

When I look at a case like this, think of a puzzle where you're trying to develop a picture

of what happened.

Number one, you've got to find out who the relatives and relationships that that victim

had, who their friends are, who their enemies are.

There are just so many questions that you need to answer for each individual person.

There were three victims, and you realize all the ancillary things that you're going to

have to do, not just once, not just twice, but actually do three times, and then some.

I'm Karen Ranney, previously Steers, older sister to Robert.

And I'm younger sister to Robert.

We were a family of six.

My name is Debbie Haught, and I'm Bobby Steers' older sister.

I don't think we had a problem growing up.

We had our differences, but, you know, it wasn't anything major where we were pulling

our hair out of each other's heads.

Except for the bathroom.

When I think of my brother Bobby, he had lots of friends.

He had things that I had in common with him, cars in particular.

We found a picture of him when he was 17, and my parents had given him a gift to work

on cars.

He did really well in school with automotive.

It was his passion, and he found the right people to work with.

Barry and Bobby were in a class for mechanics together, bonded, and went to work for their

teacher until they decided, you know, they're going to branch out on their own.

They were going to start their own business together.

That's where they ended up with B&B, Barry and Bobby.

And, yeah, like a married couple.

They were the perfect pair.

How often in life do you come across people that not only become business partners together,

and be friends outside of work as well?

Well, a good 20 years in business together, and I don't think they ever had a fight.

I don't think they ever argued.

Barry, to me, was a more jovial guy.

Bob, to me, he seemed more business, you know, like more direct.

And their business was so lucrative that they took on more employees because of the business

growth.

Lauren Stevens was the goofball.

Lauren always had a grin on his face, always making some kind of joke.

Stories were Lauren would hide, like, Playboy magazines in some of the cars that would come

in to get repaired, of customers that he knew really well.

So I think Lauren was the biggest prankster out of the three of them.

Tell me about the pins you're wearing.

These were pins created at the wedding of Barry.

And they were all...

The three best men, the three guys.

The three guys.

The three stooges.

Because they were always together.

Mm-hmm.

You know, they were always enjoying life together.

And having fun and enjoying life together.

So, you know, God brought them into this world together.

God took them out together because it was meant to be at that point in their lives to be together.

So it happened together because they loved each other.

Shelly was Robert's wife.

They had three children that day.

And I answered the phone, and this girl's on the other end, and she's hysterical.

And it was Shelly, and that's when she told me my brother had been shot.

What breaks my heart, what kills me to this day, is just visualizing the way it happened.

Execution style.

Oh, God, my brother did not deserve that.

Neither one of these guys deserved that.

July 30th, the phone rang at 5.30, and it's my youngest sister saying there's been a murder.

And what?

It's just surreal.

It was a very horrible, horrible night.

Why this happened?

Why did this have to happen?

It was needless.

It was wrong.

When I found out it was at the garage, I just figured it had to be a robbery.

What else could it possibly have been?

And, you know, at that point, we walked through the rest of the garage just to look at the

offices, the safes, the desks where, if money was kept, looking for different motives.

It didn't look like they would have known the person.

There was no other signs of struggle.

There was no ransacking of the offices or anything.

There was money all over the place.

The cash register was full.

Nothing touched.

We kind of, like, looked around.

Their pockets weren't turned inside out.

Everything seemed in order.

It definitely was not a robbery, and it definitely had the markings of a hit, if you will.

I think that if they were shot in the face, it was somebody angry.

But it wasn't somebody angry.

It was somebody who knew what they came to do and did it and was out of there within minutes.

When I was in the garage that day, I usually spoke to Barry.

They were joking around, basically, just chit-chat guy stuff.

I remember we heard the phone ring.

I remember Bob coming out of his office, and he looked a little upset.

And he said to Barry, he goes, can you believe it?

That guy called me.

So Barry just kind of shook his head in disbelief.

And then Bob went back to his office, and I said to Barry, I go, what's that all about?

And he goes, oh, you don't want to know.

So I said, okay.

You know, I'm not going to get into their personal business.

But to me, it seemed like it was an ongoing issue that they had with somebody.

I don't know at the time if it was a pissed-off customer or what was going on.

And that's all I recall.

He was saying, this could be some angry person with a car.

Then it was like they had a, you know, they would hold cars for non-payment.

So was it a disgruntled customer who wanted their car back and couldn't get their car back?

Was it a disgruntled customer who didn't like the way they fixed their car?

At first, we didn't know who were they after, all of them, one of them?

But if there was an intended target, why take two more?

You were scared out of your mind of who's next.

We just didn't sleep.

There was a 24-hour watch at the house.

We took shifts.

So it's very frightening.

The only question in my mind, it was like, who?

There was a mechanic who was not there that day.

So B&B Automotive, they had approximately four people working in there.

Bob, Barry, Lauren, and Les at the time.

But he wasn't there when this happened.

Les was a conservative guy, serious about what he did.

He worked with these guys five days a week, maybe more.

And he probably loved them like they were his brothers, his families.

When I know about Les' he raced cars.

B&B sponsored him.

But then things changed.

They did stop supporting him at one time because money was getting tight, so it could be a motive.

So detectives wondered if Les was involved.

He could have been a suspect or he could have been part of the planning.

That's why he wasn't there.

He could have been the shooter.

We did look into him quickly, and he had a dentist appointment, so he cut out early.

But we've seen before where people will set up the alibi.

They'll make sure they're seen somewhere, or they go to a restaurant.

There is a receipt.

They go through a toll booth.

So that's something that one, as an investigator, would look very, very seriously at.

But it wasn't just your normal type investigation.

A lot of questions, a lot of interviews, a lot of different angles.

And then also, we went to the family side, and we started looking in family members.

The more victims, the bigger the case becomes, because you certainly have a great deal of work that needs to be done for each individual victim.

They would take Barry and find nothing that would raise a red flag, so to speak, in his life.

Same with Lauren.

Bobby, they dissected his life.

And there were some things that caused some very concerning information that needed to really be looked into.

Bobby was married to Shelly Steers.

She just looked like the normal, you know, Winsor Locks married woman.

After they started B&B Automotive, she was working at the shop.

She would go in and take care of all their business side of the scheduling and the bill collecting and the deposit.

She did all that.

Shelly was extremely friendly.

I would just say she's average.

I wouldn't say that she was not like a model person.

She was just average.

She didn't wear a lot of makeup.

She didn't wear a lot of fancy clothes.

Not a lot of jewelry.

I mean, she just wasn't ostentatious about anything.

My assumption is that they met in school, and they got married when she was pregnant.

And I don't think that was something that was planned.

I think it's something that happened.

And they took the course to be responsible and get married.

I think they were married by the time they were 19, 20 years old.

I didn't really know her real well.

But when she was around at family events, she was always cordial.

She was never ugly, mean, or disrespectful.

Bobby and Shelly seemed to me to get along really well.

Now, once did she ever say, like, you can't come over, or we're not having you over for a birthday party or a picnic?

You never felt like you weren't welcome.

I went with her to a crazy, like, heavy metal concert.

She wasn't just like my sister-in-law.

She was like my sister.

We were friends.

I thought everything was fine until about two weeks before the incident at the shop.

I had gone down to my brother's boat, and that was the only time I ever saw my brother really distraught.

And he said, I'm almost bankrupt.

And he shared that he found all these charge cards and loans, and he was, she had gotten him into a lot of debt that he was not aware of.

Where all that money was going, I don't know.

I think Shelly had a little bit of a problem at the office.

I'm not sure exactly what, but there was something that, you know, she was no longer working there.

Then, you know, information started to come out that Shelly, his wife, was stealing money from the business because she did control the office side.

It's a speculation.

It's nothing that we can actually say definitively, but this was something out of the norm.

There was something that just wasn't right when it came to Shelly.

What I can tell you about Barry is Barry wanted the business saved and protected.

And so the day after the murders, Barry and Bobby were scheduled to go to the lawyer to put everything in Barry's name.

But they never got to go to that appointment.

Because they were murdered the night before.

What would that make anybody think?

Coincidences?

I don't believe in coincidences.

We interviewed Shelly, his wife.

She was very evasive.

She said she wasn't happy in the marriage, that things weren't working out, that she felt lonely.

She had confided in me that she had seen someone.

I didn't really know anything about the man, other than Shelly met him online.

Trying to get on the internet in the early 2000s, that was a mess.

There wasn't Wi-Fi.

It was dial-up, and it would make all these weird sounds before it got you connected.

Once you turned the computer on, it would be a strange, buzzing-type sound.

Eeeeee.

Woo-woo-woo-woo.

Eee-ee-ee-ee.

Shelly said she reached out to someone, and it started to develop into stronger feelings.

His name was Benedetto Cipriani.

Cipriani or Cipriani?

In Italy, it's Cipriani.

I believe people here called him Cipriani.

We didn't know who he was.

You know, Cipriani's a big name.

Is he tied to the big Cipriani family in Italy?

They own hotel chains and restaurant chains.

He worked in the area.

He was married before, but did not have children.

You know, we figured some Italian good-looking guy, like Fabio on the horse with the long hair.

And then when we saw him, we were kind of set back, like, wow.

He looks old.

He's frumpy.

He was out of shape.

He was short and chubby.

It wasn't like she was, like, going out with Brad Pitt.

And it didn't make sense to us why Shelly would do this.

And it's like she wasn't abused, she wasn't neglected, but it's just that he had a way about him.

They knew each other for two weeks and then met in a hotel.

That's where they, you know, had sex.

Should have never got to that point anyway.

Should have never got that.

No.

If she wasn't happy with their relationship, she should have just done the right thing, the moral thing, and leave.

It wasn't something I would have expected out of it.

She said roughly around a year that she was seeing him.

To listen to this story from the outside, you would just say, you know, were you stepping up?

Like, is it somebody above, like, what you have?

It was none of that.

But what was it?

Speculative could be.

That she was drawn to his money.

He comes off as a flashy person.

He's in business.

He knows people.

He had money.

You know, everything that she doesn't have right now is something that appeals to her.

We were working class families.

None of us had that taste of what money can get you.

We learned Shelly and Cipriani built a house together.

The plan was supposed to have been that once the house was built and ready, she was going to leave.

But it takes a long time to build a house.

I can only surmise he probably figured my brother would leave at that point, and then he would get her.

And that's not how it happened.

It was 2002.

She called the whole affair off, citing that she had children, she had a husband.

She had realized what she had done, and she wanted to go back to her normal life.

And he just wasn't having it.

He wouldn't accept it.

He kept pursuing her.

He kept trying to contact her, called her.

She was telling me Ben was calling her and calling her and calling her on the phone.

Apparently, like, he sent her flowers.

He brought her clothes.

He bought her jewelry for Ben Cipriani.

He hadn't invested a lot into this relationship.

He was not going to go out unless he was kicking and screaming.

It was almost a year before my brother lost his life.

Ben Cipriani called my brother to notify him that him and Shelly had a relationship and that she had taken money from B&B Automotive to help contribute to building this house together.

He was at work when he got the call, so I'm sure that he needed the time to process, but he was concerned about his family.

Just to reach out to the husband was just, you know, set us back like, wow, this guy definitely wants to break up the marriage.

Now, we weren't sure, we were just surmising that Shelly Steers had half a business, and Shelly Steers had a nice home and a nice area in Windsor Locks, and his wheels must have been turning like a divorce.

How much could she get out of the whole thing?

Benedetto looked at her as being that brass ring that he grabbed onto somebody, you know, is this what he was looking for?

It was at that time that I got a call from Shelly to tell me that my brother had gotten this call at work, and I called Robert, and Robert's response to me was, please go to my house and make sure my family's okay.

I said, are you okay? He says, I'm fine. He says, but just go there.

After the call to my brother at work, my brother didn't leave her, and she obviously didn't leave my brother.

I assumed she was working on her marriage, that she made the decision to not be with him anymore.

As soon as this day hit, it changed the whole family dynamic.

That bond with Shelly and Robert and us ended.

So on the day of the murder, when Bob got that phone call, and, you know, he seemed a little distressed about it,

and I don't know if Benedetto was calling to see if he was still there at work.

I have no idea what's going on, so.

Investigators went through a lot of facts and circumstances, and they focused in on Benedetto Cipriani finding out every single bit of information.

He could find out who he's friends with, who he has relationships with, where he works, what he does, where he travels to.

And from what we learned, he worked at some lapel bottling cap company, and I think he was just a customer service associate in Long Island.

And so, somebody that has money is not going to drive that every day.

He said he was in business.

I'm sure he probably said that to three or four different women, you know.

This is what a guy does.

If you're a real player and you're a real con man, that's how you're going to draw somebody in.

We interviewed his work companions, the people in the office, especially females.

They said that every time he would come in, it was close quarters, arm around the shoulders, you know, a lot of cologne, flashy jewelry.

He thought he was a Romeo.

Then we did talk to him, and that's where he started just one denying it, telling us we're wrong.

You don't have anything on me.

He gave an alibi.

He was at work.

I didn't know what to think.

Something had to be wrong.

It had to be skewed.

What shocks me is that police didn't do anything at that point, because I guess they didn't have enough information to take him in.

He asked Benedetto, can we see your phone?

Can we see your phone records?

And, you know, he says, I have my own privacy.

We're like, okay, we'll get you another way.

And we started just getting warrants for phone records, but it would take months.

The lead detectives, I bug them probably five times a day.

What are you going to do about solving this case?

You're going to get this guy back here?

You're not going to let him get away?

There was quite a bit of boots on the ground in the area of the garage.

Talking to all ancillary businesses to what they saw, what they heard, what they may have heard.

There was one gentleman that did happen to see something.

It was just before the murder took place.

He thinks he saw someone approach the vehicle and then talk to Bobby Steers.

More of an aggressive type talk, and then all of a sudden Bobby getting out.

And then they walked down towards the garage.

He gave a description, you know, as good as he could.

We were just shocked.

From the witness, we were told that it was a dark hair, Hispanic type male.

When you hear, probably it was a Hispanic that came in and shot them, it's like, okay, that makes no sense.

It just confused things more.

We looked at Cipriani, but we knew he didn't fit the description of the witness who saw the young man.

So he got ruled out as being the shooter, but not as far as being a suspect for the homicide.

There was an individual who was arrested by another local police department in Connecticut.

It was for unrelated charges.

He had information to what had occurred at the automotive shop at Linger Locks.

He said he was the uncle of Eric Martinez.

He, just a young kid in Hartford.

Benedicto Cipriani was seeing his mother and was living with Eric Martinez in his house, which kind of really solidifies that this is how much of a player he is.

He's with another woman trying to pursue a woman who's married.

We find out only later on that Eric is the product of a rape.

And this is where Benedetto knows how to get into people's heads.

And then he starts explaining to Martinez that he has a guy, Robert Steers, that raped a Hispanic girl.

And Martinez being Hispanic, unfortunately, he believed it.

I don't understand how people can take people's word for that without having proof.

I think he was a sick individual.

Can't imagine what Shelly had seen in that man.

I think Cipriani knew what he was looking for.

He was looking for somebody to do a job for him.

So he used the dating site to say, oh, who's got teenage kids?

Who can I meet up with?

Because he was approaching those kids with the plan to kill somebody.

Benedetto tells Martinez that he wants Bobby's killed.

And then Eric knew a friend.

Jose Guzman was the shooter.

He is the guy that had the gun.

And then the person that drove was Michael Castillo.

When these two get there, Guzman approached Bobby Steers coming out in the red pickup truck.

Bobby Steers was the motive.

Unfortunately, instead of just killing him when he brought Bobby to the garage, then he discovered Barry and Lorne.

And that's when he just shot all three.

Benedetto gives money.

Martinez's uncle said it was $7,000.

And everybody, you know, got some of the proceeds to murder three people.

It wasn't a heck of a lot of money to take three lives.

That just breaks my heart that people don't value people's lives as they should.

You know, they could have gone to the police about him.

They could have done a hundred things.

They could have called the shop to say, hey, somebody's trying to hire me to kill you.

But they didn't do anything.

They just went along with it.

It was exciting.

It was like, wow, you know, it's like a home run.

It was nice that somebody came forward.

This picture of the murder for hire, it all comes together.

We've harassed Jose Guzman, Eric Martinez, Michael Castillo.

But we didn't have, you know, enough probable cause to take Cipriani into custody to approach him.

We're just here to say that it's not going to get us anywhere.

When we looked into Cipriani more, we found that he had purchased phone cards.

And Martinez was on the other side with that phone card.

It was that transaction there.

Then we knew that Benedetto was connected to other people.

Once there was an arrest warrant, the detectives started to look for Cipriani.

He was gone.

After the murder took place, he told the people his, you know, employment and that he was going back to Italy to take care of his mom.

And he flies to Italy.

How'd you let him out of the country?

He's a suspect.

He's a suspect.

I was livid.

I was absolutely livid that they couldn't at least take his passport away because he was a person of interest.

But legally, there was nothing they could do to stop him.

And he's got dual citizenship.

Italy did arrest him.

But Italy did not want to release Benedetto to us.

Italy was a country that would not return someone to the United States if the death penalty was on the table.

So it was working with the federal government, working with the Italian government,

and then proving to the Italian government that he was not going to be executed for committing these heinous crimes.

And it took time.

It's not something that happens instantaneously.

It took a great deal of time.

The phone rang, and it was the state investigator who said, he's on the plane.

I was like this, and then I'm like, I gotta call my sister.

And we were just jumping and screaming, like, oh my God, oh my God.

It's just incredible.

So this tragedy pulled our three families kind of together.

We felt a bit of relief that the justice system is doing its job.

And I was just thankful that it was coming closer to closure.

It was just excitement of, oh my God, he's on American ground.

We got him.

He's going to be held accountable.

When we brought Cipriani back, he lawyers up immediately.

So, you know, it left a wide open scope at that point.

I always thought that there may be one more arrest.

I didn't know if Benedetto was going to say that Shelley was aware of his plan all along.

I don't know if she knew all along or not.

You know, and he kept quiet about it.

I always had a lingering thought, who else was involved in this?

We never really felt Shelley was upfront and truthful from the start.

We interviewed her.

She said that she broke it off, like, months and months before the homicide occurred.

But also, she said that a week before the murder took place, Benedetto and Shelley go to his house.

And Benedetto shows three bank statements saying he depletes his stock, puts it in her account.

Apparently, he gave her $18,000.

And he just wanted Shelley to go with him.

And they had sex again.

I'm angry.

And, you know, once we found the phone records, we saw he did reach out to her.

Benedetto called her at least 30 minutes after the murder took place.

You know, it's unusual.

Was she still part of the plan?

We don't know.

They say money is the root of all evil, and it is.

This really wasn't about love and jealousy.

It was about money, plain and simple.

Cipriano stood trial for the crimes in which he was accused.

He was convicted by a jury of 12 of his peers in Superior Court, and the judge sentenced him to 200-plus years in prison.

We knew he was going to die here.

Now he has to remember and live this every day of his life.

I'm sure every morning when he gets up, he realizes that, you know, this is not worth it.

It's a sad life.

In court, I stared right at him, and I made sure I let him know I'm going to live to see him die in an American prison.

I looked him right in the eye, and he couldn't look back.

He couldn't look back.

Shelly Steers was someone that was looked at very heavily.

It was never determined that she had any firsthand knowledge or involvement.

Through the trial, she said she had no knowledge that this was going to occur.

And the only people that know that for sure is Ben Cipriani and Shelly.

Nobody else knows that for sure.

All the families, they were angry as to why.

Why was there not more blame put?

We were told,

you don't arrest somebody on circumstantial evidence

because you can't go back again.

And that's where it ended.

For us,

we just have to let it go.

If he's able to manipulate people to murder her,

do you think he was manipulating her?

Very possible.

Very possible.

But I don't know.

I may not have gotten all the true answers.

And, yeah, we'll wait.

One day it'll come out.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Two things you learn through a process such as this that are very hard lessons are patience.

There's only one person I have not been able to forgive and they're not the people in prison.

And I leave it to my faith and to God to handle that in the appropriate time.

In a you,

No.

There's only one.

I leave it to my life and that's what you want.

But all the times I want to hold your mind,

especially for you for that for us,

I love you.

Yes.

Maybe I don't know.

No.

Hey.

Bye.