Original subtitles

There is very little random murder.

Most murder takes place between people who know each other.

So then the question becomes, why?

What we do know is that he is OK with being violent.

He doesn't hesitate to use violence for his own ends.

This person has got some serious psychological problems.

This isn't the first time he's been involved with law enforcement.

Somebody who she loved, who she brought into her home,

around her whole family, trusted with her life,

was capable of doing something like this to her and her loved ones.

Her throat had been cut.

There was no blood around the body,

so indicating that the body had been moved.

The crime is an interconnected sequence of events.

And when you stage an event, you never get the exact sequence.

It's a salacious case.

A double murder of a wife and mother-in-law

does draw some attention.

When they examined the trunk of the car,

they also found two lots of blood

and that linked to both of the victims.

It does appear that he has a motive to silence the people who

may know about this affair.

He's someone who clearly doesn't have a conscience

and was able to do something truly unfathomable.

San Diego is a great area. There's lots of things to do here.

There's beaches. There's a lot of surfing, mountains.

It actually snows in the mountains sometimes during the winter time.

So you can go from one extreme to the other all in one day.

A lot of people come here for vacations.

Thao Richardson and her husband, Michael,

and their seven-year-old daughter lived in Chula Vista,

which was just below San Diego, in a nice house.

The neighbourhood that they lived in was known as a melting pot,

was a really beautiful area.

It was definitely a desirable place to live.

They were considered a normal family, just like everyone else.

Thao was working as an automation clerk at USPS.

It was a place she had been at for a while,

and seemed like she really loved her job and loved her coworkers.

At the time, Michael owned a mechanic shop.

They seemed to be doing quite well.

They were reasonably well off

and seemed like they kind of had everything they wanted.

Thao's mother, sister and niece came over from Vietnam

and moved in with Thao and Michael,

and they all seemed to live together very harmoniously.

They were just a multi-generational home.

And, you know, everything seemed to be great.

San Diego is a major metropolitan area,

and it has crime that any other large metropolitan area has.

Crime, in and of itself,

is frequently driven by trauma or neglect, poverty.

So we have all of those influences

the same as any other major community.

There's everything here.

You go from petty thefts.

You go from minor burglaries to heinous murders.

I got a call that there had been what was believed to be

a traffic collision with a couple of fatalities.

When the scene was discovered, they called the highway patrol

to investigate the case initially,

because it looked superficially like it was an automobile accident.

So the first reports that I got

were the kind of reports you would expect to see in a traffic accident,

where they're taking measurements and they're looking for skid marks,

and they're creating scale diagrams of the roadway

and the location of where the vehicle was.

And you have bodies on the hillside, which is consistent.

We see that all the time in traffic fatalities.

Car doors opened and bodies get flung out. I mean, it happens.

Highway patrol officers would be quite experienced in crash scenes.

The objects that the car strikes can damage the vehicle.

So you might find plastic from broken indicator lenses.

There may be smashed glass.

In this instance, there was no trail of damage

or debris that indicated the car left the road at high speed.

There was a relatively clear, continuous trail

from the edge of the highway to the vehicle,

and the broken glass was right beside the vehicle,

which essentially indicated that it had been broken

while the vehicle was at rest.

My sergeant was on call,

so he contacted me as I was the lead detective for it.

So then he also contacted other detectives on my team,

then we responded to the scene.

There was tyre marks on the curb line,

and then there was where a path of the vehicle went down and over

the embankment, and you could see where the grass was matted flat.

My partner and I walked down the embankment

and we were again looking at the matted grass.

So we got down there and we saw the vehicle was upright

and there was two deceased women.

They were already in body bags and that's where they were placed

for the medical examiner.

We actually had our helicopter search the area to make sure

that there weren't any additional potential victims visible,

because if there were then we would have sent search and rescue down

to try to recover the bodies.

Out in that rural area, it's a common known area where

things are disposed of, just for trash.

If people want to get rid of whatever they have,

just to throw it off the road, and hopefully it goes down far enough.

So when people saw it, initially, they didn't think anything of it.

They thought it was just another vehicle being dumped off the road.

We're very lucky because we knew who the victims were.

We had their names.

So once you have their names, you can go back

and start figuring out who they related to.

Where do they live? What do they do?

Thao's sister and the rest of her family get the phone call

that her and her mother were found dead on the side of the road.

It's absolute shock.

It was unfathomable.

Property owner reported that there was a vehicle

that had ran off the road and was over the side of the embankment

here on the east side of the roadway.

It's been discovered that there were two occupants in the vehicle.

However, both occupants were fully ejected

and came to rest outside the vehicle.

Usually, a car gets going at a rate of speed

that takes it off the road is going to launch.

And this car didn't.

If you have a vehicle launching, it's going to go up.

And there was absolutely no indication of that whatsoever.

If there was a traffic collision, you see seat belt trauma,

you see head trauma.

The younger lady had some trauma to her head, but she wasn't

really visible injuries because she was so decomposed at the time.

But the elderly lady, her throat was slit from ear to ear, basically.

Then you could also see

there was a lot of blood in the trunk of the vehicle.

And that's not common in a traffic collision.

The thing that caught everybody's attention was looking at the car

and realising that the keys weren't inside,

and the car had been put in park.

Well, that's not consistent with a car involved in an accident.

One of the key things that jumps out in this case

is the kind of incoherence of the location of the vehicle

versus other factors at the crime scene.

So it would have been immediately obvious to them,

I suspect, that this vehicle had rolled down this verge.

As you see here at the scene there's no skid marks,

there's no physical evidence,

apparently nobody heard it, nobody saw it.

The two bodies were not in the car,

and the car rolled down a verge at low speed,

you would expect the bodies still to be in it.

There is no driver in the car.

The two bodies have got wounds that are completely inconsistent

with being caused by a vehicle incident.

One of the victims has their throat cut

and another victim has been suffocated or strangled.

Now, you would expect someone who was found in the position

where the throat had been cut

to have bled a great deal around the body.

There was no blood around the body,

so it indicated that the body had been moved.

And in fact they are clearly signs of a double homicide.

After the Highway Patrol alerts the detectives

that this is inconsistent, now we're looking at this as a homicide.

So now we're going to do the same thing.

Now we're going to do the crime scene.

Now they're going to look at the vehicle

and start with the same process.

The first thing that the police want to do

is look to see who owns the car.

Who are the victims?

What relationship do they have with the car?

Do they own it? Does somebody else own it?

The car tracks back to Michael Richardson

and so he's a person of interest.

It doesn't mean he's a suspect in anything.

But they want to know, how is he related to the two victims?

One is his wife, one is his mother-in-law.

And Michael Richardson has to be approached carefully,

just to watch what kind of story he tells.

What does he say about this car? What does he say about the victims?

How is he going to react when he finds out that they're dead?

Clearly at least one has been murdered.

So he's the chief suspect in this, and they need to know, where was he?

Is his car stolen, so that he called it in?

You know, what's his story?

The investigators conducted an investigation from the inside out.

Why would someone kill these people?

And why would someone take the extra step to make it

look like a car crash?

So they will start always with people closest to the deceased.

When you're looking for a motive, there's a very wide range.

Typically, it's going to be monetary.

I mean, insurance or something like that.

But it could be also something as simple as I want to be free,

I don't want to be married again.

Once we've established Richardson

as being the husband and the son-in-law,

the most likely crime scene is going to be at the family residence.

I sent a couple of my detectives from the team to the residence.

They knocked for several minutes, got no answer,

so they forced entry into the house by kicking the door in.

When they got inside,

Mr Richardson was walking down the stairs

holding his child in front of him.

It appeared to them that he was using her as a shield.

Basically, acted like he didn't know what was going on.

So they brought Mr Richardson and the daughter

back to the Sheriff's homicide unit for an interview.

He said he wanted a lawyer, so he didn't talk.

Then I asked him afterwards.

I said are you aware your wife is dead?

And he said yes.

And he changed his mind real quickly and said no.

So at that point, we didn't know what happened,

if they had been kidnapped, murdered, or if he was involved.

We had absolutely no idea.

That's when we contacted Chula Vista Police Department

to learn more about Mr Richardson

and about his prior arrest

of child molestation charges with his niece.

One day Thao found some text messages on Michael's phone

that seemed to indicate that he had been engaging

in an inappropriate relationship with her 17-year-old niece.

It made her feel sick, and she confronts Michael about it,

and she tells her sister that she's going to do something about it.

The sister then files a temporary restraining order against Michael,

and they file a case to make sure that he stays away from them.

But they were unable to move forward with all of the charges

against Michael because Thao's niece was uncooperative

and so it kind of fizzles out.

The case and the charges are dropped.

So it does appear that he has a motive to silence the people

who may know about this affair.

Police arrest Michael Richardson

for having a relationship with an underage girl,

and that helps them to be able to investigate this more fully.

They'll want to determine if he had any resentment,

if there was some impending event like a divorce,

or is there anything he wanted to stop them from finding out

or stop them from revealing.

So they're going to be looking for anything like that.

If Michael Richardson were innocent, he would be horrified,

and he would want to help investigators

to find the person who did this.

He would have a ready explanation for why

he didn't submit any kind of missing persons report.

He would say, "Oh, they went on a trip,"

and you would have some reason why he hadn't missed them.

That was, in a sense, a tactical arrest.

He was then in custody.

They then obtained a search warrant to search his home.

What would they be searching for?

One of the victims had their throat cut.

So an obvious thing to search for

is the weapon which was used to cut the throat.

That would have shed a great deal of blood.

And whether there was any blood there.

Interviews with the seven-year-old daughter were very important,

because she describes a particular stain that appears during the time

when she would have disappeared.

The daughter told the detective from Chula Vista Police Department

that there was a large stain in the grandmother's room

that had not been there the last time she saw them,

so that was enough for us to get probable cause

to get the search warrant.

And once we made entry into the room and began searching,

there was a large dark stain in the corner of the room.

When we stepped on the carpet,

there had been a large rug placed over top of a portion

of the carpet that was partially under the bed to be held down.

So when you stepped on it,

there was a sinking feeling like there was a hole in the carpet.

So we pulled the rug up

and there had been portions of the carpet removed,

a large cut-out area,

and then filler pieces kind of thrown in there.

So from that we found large red stains on the carpet there as well.

So we knew there was more to it than just an argument.

There had been a large amount of blood spilled in that room.

On a hard surface, you can wipe blood away.

If the blood is on a fabric, or say a carpet,

it is quite difficult to completely get blood out of a carpet.

If it's a dark carpet, the blood would be very difficult to see.

But you can use very simple tests to locate blood that you can't see.

So you can screen a whole carpet,

and then you locate an area,

even though you can't see any blood on it

that indicates there's blood there.

You can sample that area.

You can confirm it's blood,

and you can very often get a DNA profile from it.

The blood in itself was a great deal of suspicion,

but the fact that he tried to clean it up would probably convince them

that he was directly involved.

Oh, he became an instant suspect because he obviously was involved

in this because he tried to do a major clean-up

and it just didn't work.

The car was reported by some local people

when they returned from holiday, but the pathology examination

showed that the bodies had been dead for a number of days.

Yet Michael Richardson had not reported either his wife

or his mother as being missing

and therefore drew even more suspicion onto himself.

What had happened after the ladies were dumped down off the embankment,

there was a dirt road that I don't believe that the suspect

thought was down there.

I believe he thought it was going to go down two or three hundred feet,

and if it had been a traffic collision,

then the vehicle would have gone down there and probably never found.

I think that's what he was hoping for.

Michael Richardson also had an auto shop.

Well, he's staging an auto accident.

So to me it would be critically important to go back

to look at the auto shop just to see what could have been done

in order to facilitate the staging of the traffic accident.

He was also a mechanic,

so at some point he probably had access to a tow truck.

That's how we believe the vehicle

was deposited off the side of the road.

There was a large tyre mark on the curb line

that looked like some type of vehicle backed into it.

And it'll be quite perfect for a tow truck to raise the bed,

let the vehicle slide off and go right down the hill.

That's what we believe happened.

When he heard the collision from the 50 feet down,

I'm sure he realised this isn't going to go far enough.

That's when I and we believe that he went down,

took the bodies out, if they hadn't been ejected

already from the trunk, and then tried to throw them down the hill.

But fortunately for us, a large bush caught them

and stopped them from going any further down the hill.

Not only was it disturbing enough that Michael was already

potentially involved with Thao's niece,

but once Thao's family finds out that Michael

may be involved in actually killing her and killing her mother,

that was something that they had never even thought possible.

It also became known to the police that he was the boyfriend of a woman

who had died many years ago,

and was a person of interest in that case.

This person, Mr Richardson,

has got some serious psychological problems.

This isn't the first time he had been involved with law enforcement.

Physical evidence shows the vehicle ran off the roadway.

We have two fully ejected occupants

that appear to have been out there for quite some time.

This person isn't immune to killing people

or making them disappear.

Richardson was serving, I believe, in the US Air Force,

and he committed a carjacking of a taxi driver,

and he ended up shooting the taxi driver.

Fortunately, the taxi driver didn't die

and was able to identify Richardson.

He was arrested, charged, and he was sent to prison,

I believe it was in North Carolina.

And at some point he escaped from custody and came out to San Diego.

He met a woman, and that woman had a child.

He began molesting the child

after having a sexual relationship with her.

And then the woman, when she confronted him,

she was never seen again. She was reported missing.

So when Mr Richardson was contacted

by the National City Police Department,

he was taken into custody, sent back to North Carolina.

He did a little while longer in custody,

and somehow he was released.

And he came back out to the San Diego area

and ultimately met his now deceased wife.

He doesn't hesitate to use violence when he needs to.

It is part of his background and when we try to predict if someone's

going to be violent in the future, past violence is a very big factor.

As more of Michael's history starts to come to light,

the fact that he was a fugitive for the last 18 years,

there begins to grow some frustration, you know,

within the various police departments who have become involved

and with the community and with Thao's family,

that, you know, this is a person with a criminal past.

Could this crime against Thao and her mum have been stopped?

With all homicides,

the important thing is any witnesses outside of the event;

these are the ones that are going to tell us

about what was going on in their life.

Any observations of Michael? Any observations of anybody else?

Any observations of the mother-in-law and the wife?

All that is critical information

that they should be diving into right now.

Because, again, nothing happens in a vacuum.

There's always a before, during and after.

One of the most important things to establish is,

when's the last time the wife and mother-in-law were seen alive?

That's critical.

You talk to the neighbours.

That's when we learned that Mr Richardson had dropped off

his daughter at their house for a birthday party.

And when he came back in the afternoon,

apparently he was all sweaty and he looked dishevelled.

So that was probably the day of the murders.

The bodies had decomposed a bit.

They want to try to pinpoint the time of death.

What they're doing is pinpointing time since death.

So the time at which the bodies were discovered,

trying to get it back to around when they had died.

So then what was he doing at that time? Where was he?

And trying to find out his proximity to them

at the time that they were killed.

Detectives should be focusing on what happened

during that particular time,

because crime is an interconnected sequence of events.

When you stage an event, you never get the exact sequence.

So now we want to go back in that particular sequence.

That becomes critical,

because that's when the actual staging down the hill took place.

When they examined the trunk of the car,

they found two lots of blood and that linked to both of the victims.

That completely ties everything together,

because you then have the site of attack

where the two women were killed,

and then you have both of their bloods in the rear of the vehicle,

indicating the vehicle had been used to transport the bodies

to the incident where the car was found,

and then they had been removed from the trunk of the car and laid out.

While he's in jail, Mr Richardson is charged with two murders,

after which he is taken before the court to be arraigned

and his case proceeded.

There's murder and there's premeditated murder.

There's manslaughter in the heat of passion.

So, you know, in your mind, as an attorney,

when you're looking at a murder case, you're thinking,

what can I do to negate some of the elements of it?

This case had its own danger in the sense that as we were

investigating the staged area and the home where allegedly

the murders took place,

we became aware of the fact

that they were investigating a case from the past as well.

So there was a tension in our mind

as to whether moving the case along quickly would help us.

I think we came to a conclusion that

we needed to just do our work on what we can do,

and not worry about things that we could not control.

Murder cases move pretty slowly to allow the defence

an opportunity to conduct a robust investigation

of both of the crime scene, investigate witnesses,

and to do their own defence.

The hiring of forensic experts is a slow process.

Any expert worth hiring is busy, and you also have to wait.

So, for instance, if the case involves DNA like this one did,

you have to wait for the prosecution to be done doing their work.

Then you have to hire a lab.

DNA work is done by computer programs,

so you have to wait for the data to be available.

Takes months and months and months.

So unless there's a reason to move quickly,

perhaps witnesses have disappeared,

or you think that the case is going to get worse over time,

you take your time in the case.

Any time the prosecution has an airtight case,

yes, it's a challenge.

So we're talking about a double homicide,

which leaves you exposed to the death penalty.

Then an additional homicide charge was added to the case.

When detectives in National City heard that Richardson

had been charged with two homicides,

they remembered him in a missing persons case

that he had been a suspect, but he had never been charged.

So they reopened the case and found evidence,

enough evidence to go ahead and charge him with a third murder.

So now we have two different investigations to take care of,

going on simultaneously with death on the table.

Michael Richardson is the man waiting for trial on charges

he murdered his wife and mother-in-law

and another woman decades ago.

A staged scene is, in and of itself,

circumstantial evidence of guilt.

So the fact that the person

is accused of having staged this scenario

is a frustrating aspect to the case

from the criminal defence attorney's point of view,

because the staged event is only one of the scenes,

because it was clear that the victims in this case -

the two women - did not die at that location.

He ultimately just decided to plead guilty out of the blue.

Pled guilty to all three of the murders.

Michael pleads guilty to all three murders:

Phan, Thao and his previous ex-girlfriend.

All of the families are able to get some solace

in knowing that the person who did commit this horrible crime

against their loved ones is finally being put to justice

and held behind bars.

And so, you know, at least they are given those answers.

I'm not sure if they went forward with the child molestation charges

because if there's child molestation charges when they go to prison,

one thing the prisoners in prisons have,

there's a little bit of ethics when it comes to child molestation.

And at times they'll take matters into their own hands.

The case consumes you

because the death penalty brings out the worst in everyone.

When you're talking about the death penalty,

you're talking about trying the case in front of 12 people

who in California have to be death-qualified.

Death-qualified means that they're willing to impose the death penalty.

So people that have a moral opposition to the death penalty

are excluded from the panel.

People who would have a hesitation in imposing death

in any particular case are excluded from the panel.

So you're talking about a group of jurors that are already predisposed

to imposing the death penalty.

So you're facing an uphill battle to begin with.

The death penalty is a forum where justice is least likely

to be attained,

and is a fiction to the families of the victim.

Because the truth is that there is never closure.

We can never undo the trauma that you have suffered.

In fact, I think the death penalty litigation just perpetuates it,

because then what happens, of course,

if a person receives the death penalty, is that they are involved

in a lengthy appeal process which keeps the wound open for decades.

It's a horrible, false myth.

The case proceeds to sentencing,

and this is where Mr Richardson's attorney

presents mitigating evidence,

and the prosecutor presents aggravating evidence

for the judge to determine what is the appropriate penalty.

You have a meeting with the district attorney where you try to

convince them to not seek death.

So you are presenting the mitigation that you've discovered over time.

If you don't want to go to trial and risk the death penalty,

you have to bring the district attorney's office an offer that

compels them to take the offer and not go to trial.

In this particular case, in order to avoid trial,

the prosecution wanted six consecutive

life without the possibility of parole sentences,

one each for the victims,

the wife, the mother-in-law, and the girlfriend from 20 years prior,

doubled because of the prior record.

Richardson has just been sentenced

to six consecutive life sentences without parole.

The judge decided that the sentence was life in prison,

and he imposed six consecutive life sentences.

Consecutive means one sentence has to end before the next one begins.

So by putting life sentences consecutively,

that insures against the possibility of, let's say he was only charged

for one but was responsible for six,

if some procedural error were to be found in his case

that overturned a conviction, he's still in jail.

He's still in prison,

he's still serving life for the other convictions.

So it ensures that he stays in prison.

It's a nice feeling that you actually

were able to complete the case, give justice to the victims.

Hopefully, the family will get a little bit of peace

and not have to worry about it.

Also, it doesn't make them go through a trial

because if they have to sit through a trial and see photographs

of their mother, their daughter, or their loved ones,

whatever you want to word it as,

it's hard for some people to sit through that.

They don't have to hear all the details.

It's better for people sometimes.

You know, it's hard to put myself into a criminal's mind

exactly what they're thinking.

Generally speaking, a criminal like Michael Richardson is only

thinking what's best for him.

So in this particular case, by admitting his guilt,

he probably got a much better deal.

Just now molestation charges were dismissed

in the plea bargain.

But in both cases, we can tell you the murders followed accusations

that he molested underage girls.

In this case, having the sex charges dropped,

it spares the family from having to go through a trial.

It spares the victim from having to relive the incident,

having to tell their story over and over.

And the families in this case

were OK with the sex charges being dropped.

When you're a family faced with considerable loss,

and there's a plea deal on the table that allows this person

to escape the death penalty but get life in prison,

it's a personal decision as to how you feel about that,

whether you want to fight for going to court or you just want to take

what's being offered and be done with it.

So I don't know why they were OK with that,

unless they just knew that they didn't have the resources to fight,

or they were fine with the finality of the plea deal.

This case is an example of what we call the top four themes

used to stage a homicide.

One of them is accident.

I go back to: this is his first murder, but it's not ours,

so we recognise it right away.

The things he did. And that's the whole problem.

When a suspect is staging a scene,

they don't really know what it's supposed to look like.

The attempt to cover up one's crime can be situational

and explained in the heat of the moment,

but the longer and more elaborate the process is,

all of those are opportunities to stop.

The fact that Michael transported the dead bodies of Thao and Phan

from their home all the way to the side of the road,

meticulously setting them up in a way

to make it look like a car accident,

all of these efforts that he put in were just especially horrific.

They really just indicate that he's someone who clearly doesn't have

a conscience and was able to do something truly unfathomable.

I don't know, I've never been a victim or never had anyone

in my family be victimised like that.

I personally don't believe there's ever closure,

because Kathy has lived the rest of her life without her mother

and now without a father.

So I personally believe you just learn to live with it.

But I think some people have forgiveness in them.

I'm not one of those,

and I would have a problem with it for the rest of my life.

There is very little random murder.

Most murder takes place between people who know each other.

So then the question becomes, why?

So the reasons for murder are well known and well documented

in every culture, and they don't change between cultures.

This was a tragic event because Mr Richardson

thought it was necessary to kill his family,

and it was all to save his own dignity or to save his own skin.

It's really sad the kind of crime when a family can't deal with

a problem, like a man engaging in sexual contact with his niece.

They can't deal with the problem without the man exploding and

just killing the people who confront him and trying to cover it up.

So it's very tragic for everyone involved.

It might bring a little closure, knowing that the perpetrator

has been caught and that he will suffer a sentence for it.

But the legal system is not going to bring closure in and of itself,

and it's just simply tragic.

There's no emotional closure

when people have been ripped from a family with violence.

I don't know why people keep talking about closure for the victims.

They don't get closure. They never feel whole again.

And we need a better word.

One of the people who is suffering the most from this horrible crime

is Thao's daughter, who now has to grow up without a mum,

without a grandmother,

and without her key family members

that she needed to nurture her and love her.

And that's something that Michael took away from her.

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