Original subtitles

I was on my regular routine patrol route.

I noticed a vehicle that was parked.

These people have been shot ten, 12 times.

An astonishing murder in orange county.

Who would want to kill the doctor and the optometrist?

It's just unbelievable.

An enviable couple

stolen from their loved ones.

Was it a random act?

Maybe it was a-- some type of a carjacking gone bad.

It could've been a murder-suicide.

Basically the whole team, the whole homicide unit,

was working this high-profile case.

A cracked o.C. Fašade would reveal

illicit ties and deplorable motives.

Just because you're rich doesn't mean that you don't have

skeletons in your closet.

Michael the investigation has a new lead

from the orange county that most people don't know about.

The orange county that people envy is southern orange county.

The houses are new, the cars are new.

The body parts are new. Everything here is new.

Ken and Carolyn stahl

were the quintessential o.C. Power couple,

living their best life

on the sparkling shores of huntington beach.

This was a case about

the haves and have-nots

with disastrous and tragic results.

The desire to be so perfect

creates enormous stress, enormous pressures.

And for some people, they just snap.

Of the nine girls in my class

from southern college of optometry,

there was one from Michigan, and that was Carolyn oppy.

There had been stories that she'd been

a former beauty pageant person.

She was beautiful. Everybody wanted to be around Carolyn.

She lit up e-every room she was ever in.

She's another transplant to orange county.

An optometrist, very smart, well-educated.

She and Ken met,

and she really liked him because he was fit,

he took care of himself, he was an anesthesiologist.

I never had a friend like Ken,

like, you know, a doctor,

or anything like that.

Most of my friends are from the street.

But with him, he was just like talking to one of my buddies.

So we'd go work out together.

For a guy at his age, he was in great shape.

Carolyn had found her match in Ken,

and together, they built a wave-kissed lifestyle to envy.

They both looked like they were having a really good connection

and a good relationship, and I was like, "you know what?"

Like, "i-i wish I had something like that,"

you know, like the way they are.

She just seemed like everything was normal

and everything was going good with her job,

and that was her life.

Everybody thought

Ken and Carolyn were the perfect orange county couple.

And then things changed.

Because of the affluent image of orange county,

people assume nothing bad ever happens.

But behind the scenes, just because you're rich

doesn't mean that you don't have skeletons in your closet.

And some individuals out here in south orange county,

can have that sense that they may be above the law.

In 1999, one of the areas I patrolled

was along the Ortega highway.

The Ortega highway runs about 44 miles

from San Juan capistrano into the riverside county line.

At night, it'd be very desolate, very dark.

It has always been my opinion that

Ortega highway was nothing but a dumping ground

for criminal evidence.

Such as murdered victims.

On November 20, 1999,

I was on my regular routine patrol route.

At about 10:00,

just as I was approaching the eight-mile marker,

I noticed a vehicle that was parked

near the call box.

I noticed the passenger front door was ajar.

I-I kept on thinking that, you know,

there's something about that vehicle that doesn't look right.

As I approached the, driver's side of the vehicle,

I noticed the driver's side window was blown out.

There was a male subject slumped over to his right.

And I noticed a female subject

that was slumped over to her left,

kind of positioning her head on his lap.

One of her shoes was lying on the ground.

And I also noticed that there was a large smear of blood

running alongside the right rear quarter panel

leading back in to the passenger's side.

There was no signs of moaning. No groaning.

There was just a large amount of blood splatter

on the inside of the door.

I got on my, radio and called it in to a dispatcher.

In the '90s, I was working

a number of murders off of Ortega highway.

When I got there, there was a male in the driver's seat

that had been shot and he was deceased.

Then there was a female that was in the passenger's seat,

and she also had gunshot wounds and was deceased.

We preliminarily identified them with their identification.

It was Kenneth stahl and Carolyn oppy-stahl.

While I processed the crime scene,

I made note of the fact that Ken stahl

was in the driver's seat-- still had his seat belt on--

and didn't seem to have tried

to get out of the way or do anything.

He just was slumped over--

had been shot and slumped over.

Unlike Carolyn, who-- apparently, it looked like--

had got out of the car and tried to flee at one point,

and then turned around and retreated back into the car.

Well, the shoe was back here by the back,

so probably she got at least that far.

So the two of them had completely different reactions

to the shooting.

First thing we thought is it could've been a murder-suicide.

We ruled that out fairly early on.

There was no firearm in the car.

So obviously, someone had-had shot

and killed them and then left.

When I found out they were actually murdered, I thought,

"well, maybe it was a-- some type of a carjacking gone bad."

When we looked into it further,

you can see her purse is still on the floor intact.

Mr. Stahl had his watch and his-his wallet and everything.

So it didn't look like a robbery.

It looked like something else had happened.

They see those shell casings...

...which suggest it's a revolver.

Which means a six-shooter,

and these people have been shot ten, 12 times.

So that means somebody shot them, reloaded,

and shot them some more.

This is a-a level of violence

and, you know, cruelty

that you don't see in southern orange county.

The stahls' desirable orange county dream life

was cut cruelly short, leaving only fragments

of grief and helplessness for their loved ones to grasp.

The image they once reflected

suddenly splintered on the pavement

into a thousand untouchable pieces.

If it were a normal death,

I could accept it.

But the violence of it and the uncertainty of it

and the puzzlement of it is-- it's very distressing to me.

And it's hard for me to accept that.

I miss her not-not still being around.

I just remember how kind she was.

That was a fun trip, when we went to Tijuana.

Back when we were all much thinner.

And younger.

She was beautiful.

When you hear something like,

you know, "your friend died," it's always a shock,

but when you find out she was murdered,

it's-it's just unbelievable.

You know, I was tripped out. I just couldn't believe it.

I was like, "I've just seen Ken."

You know? "We just spoke."

I just could not believe it. I was in disbelief.

There was a lot of sadness and wonder.

Crime scene photos. They're still hard to look at.

Y-You wouldn't be human if they, if they were,

but it shows you that these are human beings

who really died and-and who really suffered.

You know, if a wife is killed, you can look at the husband.

If the husband's killed, you can look at the wife.

But why are they both killed?

Who would want to kill the doctor and the optometrist

and leave all their money and jewelry behind in their car?

It just made absolutely no sense.

The reality is, in the beginning,

it was a cluster.

Everybody was chasing this story.

I think people were a little on edge.

Because of the location and the lack

of physical evidence or eyewitnesses,

they had to start from ground zero with the strongest piece

of evidence that, in many cases, we have,

which is motive.

But what could possibly motivate

such a horrific act against this model o.C. Couple?

Perhaps that perfection was only on the surface,

and a deeper look would reveal dark secrets hidden beneath.

There was no inkling, on my end at all,

that there was anything between her and Ken that was bad.

I had no clue.

As we looked into Ken's background,

and what Ken was doing, and we talked to their friends

and people that worked with them,

and one of the things that we came up with

was that he was possibly having an affair.

This wasn't the only girlfriend that he had,

it wasn't the only affair that he'd had through the years.

Maybe Ken was not really Ken, you know,

wasn't the Ken that I knew.

It turns out that Ken and Carolyn keep

keep this very, very typical orange county veneer

of sunshine and happiness

over a very, very troubled marriage.

Detectives dug into the stahls.

They found that Ken was living a double life.

Some people live by appearance only

in south orange county,

keeping up with the joneses.

I was associated with a gang.

I'm not part of that anymore.

"Why is he asking me this?"

He wasn't sure that,

any of this was serious,

until he read in the paper that they were killed.

Ken and Carolyn stahls' seem

was cut brutally short

when an evening drive on a lonely highway

ended in a nightmare.

But the stahl's false fairy tale

fractured against the scrutiny of investigation,

revealing a marriage

that had been secretly decaying for years.

Near the end,

after about ten or 11 years,

things seemed to have really gone cold.

And it appears to be a loveless and sexless marriage.

He just wanted someone to talk to.

He didn't have any friends.

And he would use, like, electrical work

to get me over there.

This is when I started figuring out

that he was really going through a bad depression.

At some point in 1998, Carolyn went to Ken's office

and went through some folders and some drawers and stuff

in front of patients, and she just went off.

And I was like, "well, there's got to be a reason, man.

Come on."

He's like, "well, no, there's nothing.

I don't know what-what-- she thinks I'm cheating."

I didn't suspect it about Ken,

that he would ever, like, even be with any other girls,

or anything like that,

because of the relationship that I'd seen

that him and Carolyn had.

The philanderer.

Well, that's Ken stahl.

He has one, two, three... I...

No one seems to know how many affairs.

Things don't seem like they're working out.

I said, "well, I thought you guys were doing good,

"you know, and everything was cool with you guys.

"But I didn't know you were going through some stuff.

Get a divorce if you're not happy."

And he goes, "we are. It's not that big of a deal.

You know, whatever."

Detectives realized

that Ken had been leading a double life,

one as the happy huntington husband,

the other as a habitual cheater.

Carolyn seemed to have had heartache

in a prior marriage as well.

So why did she stay with Ken?

William: For many reasons, I prefer to be not identified on camera.

I remember things going through the yearbook,

but it almost doesn't seem real.

It's been so long.

Carolyn's first husband, before Ken,

must have started seeing someone else.

It resulted in him sending her

a single piece of paper through an attorney

where she only had to sign on one line to be divorced.

With a failed marriage in her past,

despite the infidelity,

Carolyn is determined to make her next marriage work.

I don't think she went into a marriage

thinking about divorce.

I think she was probably always thinking,

"it's gonna get better.

"It's-- I can make it better.

I can fix it."

That's the Carolyn I know.

Carolyn finds other distractions,

and ways of dealing with her pain.

She goes on buying sprees.

"Money doesn't give you happiness,"

is what everybody says, but, it sure makes it nice.

Keeping up with the joneses, per se.

Some people live by appearance only

in south orange county.

When we did a search warrant on Ken and Carolyn's house,

we found a multitude of very expensive items.

There was, like, $30,000 in clothing.

The tags, and in the plastic, just hanging up in her closet.

Carolyn would buy herself beautiful gifts

for Christmas, birthdays, Valentine's,

and she would tell her friends that they were all from Ken,

when in fact, they weren't.

And it was just Carolyn keeping up persona

that her life was great,

keeping up with the affluent people

in south orange county.

I think Ken was afraid to get divorced,

because he was afraid of the disruption

to his life that that would cause.

Even though people knew about Ken's philandering,

he still had a lot of freedom to do what he wanted.

Had Ken's womanizing ways

finally caught up with him

and given someone a motive for murder?

Most times, I-If an affair is gonna be

a motive for a murder, it's gonna be something current.

So, we were out trying to track down

any current girlfriends he had, maybe put some perspective

into why he was in the middle of nowhere

on the Ortega highway that night.

The investigation followed a path

as dark and winding as the Ortega highway itself,

as detectives tried to shine some light

on who was behind the midnight murders

and the hidden life of Ken stahl.

I was sitting at my desk

and I got a phone call incoming

from, Richard Anaya.

Towards the end of 1998,

he called me over.

And I was like, "you sure you want me to come over?

It's 12:00 A.M."

"Yeah, you know, p-plus my smoke detector lights,

it's bugging me."

And I was like, "all right, well,

I'll come over and check it out, you know."

While he was working,

Dr. Stahl noticed some gang-related tattoos

that he still had,

and asked him if he had ever

been involved in drive-by shootings

or anything like that.

And I said,

"I was associated with a, with a gang,

"way back in the day.

I'm not part of that anymore."

And he was like, "okay. So, now what?"

And he goes, "well, no, no, now just,

you know, just bear with me."

He's like, "I just need someone to talk to."

And then, finally he asked me if I knew anybody

that would kill his wife.

And if I did, he would give me $75,000.

And I was, I kind of tripped out about that.

You know, I was thinking, why is he, why is he asking me this?

You know, but he said it in a joking way.

Why is he joking about this?

Never would I think that he would ever even think of that.

You know?

And I was like, "man, Ken."

I said, "I don't know what it is you're doing,

but you need to stop, man."

Richard Anaya wasn't sure that, any of this was serious

until he read in the paper that they were killed.

Now at least we had an idea

that he was soliciting someone

to kill his wife in the past.

So it started looking more and more like this was,

in fact, a murder-for-hire scenario.

Ha

had once allowed a disturbing offer

from Ken stahl to slide.

But news of the stahls' double homicide made Anaya wonder:

Could Ken's dark proposal back then have been for real?

At the time when he did tell me that, he was laughing.

He goes, "I'm just playing with you."

He goes, "you know I would never do that."

He goes, "we joke about everything."

He's like, "you know I would never say that."

He never brought it up again after that.

Well, as soon as I found out about Ken and Carolyn's death,

it crossed my mind that maybe he found somebody

that would kill his wife.

But why would he be there with her?

Didn't make a lot of sense

that someone would hire someone

to kill their wife and then get themselves killed.

We were missing something.

You always feel a-a pressure to solve a case.

The pressure I've always felt is for the family.

US losing her was beyond any of our control.

Just happened.

I felt a really true emptiness

because I had so many questions unanswered.

I think Carolyn deserved better,

sadly.

You're really doing the investigations for the family

as much as, justice for the victim.

We didn't go home for several days.

We were continually chasing leads,

because there's really nothing I can say

to make it any better.

We can at least try to tell them what happened.

The detectives were working around the clock,

but at this point in the investigation,

there wasn't close to enough

to explain a murder for hire.

And so detectives looked deeper into their lives.

At the crime scene, one of the things

we collected was Ken's cell phone.

And it had a call record of calls that were received

and calls that were made the day of the murder.

And a number of the calls were to and from,

a woman by the name of Adriana vasco.

When I talked to Adriana, she seemed to be

upset at the news.

She told me that she was a receptionist,

and that she worked for Ken stahl at his

pain management clinic-- nothing more than a friend.

That she just had a platonic relationship

with the doctor.

Adriana vasco is from the orange county that

most people don't know about.

She comes from the grittier, working-class orange county.

She said at the time, they were talking

about a computer that she was having repaired.

Ken was helping her out with the money for this

computer repair. She said that she had

no idea where they were going that night, other than,

than Ken had told her he was taking Carolyn

out for her birthday.

And we just thought that was nonsense.

My gut was telling me she was being deceptive.

So we decided we needed

to sit down and talk to her.

We just showed up at her work.

She was startled at first, but she agreed to talk to US.

So we-we transported her up to one of our s-substations.

She continually said that the only communication

was about the computer.

She would not tell US anything, really.

We got to really start digging.

Then we started, like, pushing a little harder on her.

And then we went into their relationship.

And she finally admitted that they were having an affair.

In a place like orange county,

the only thing deeper than the ocean

are the pockets of the privileged.

It turned out that Ken stahl wasn't the only man

that Adriana vasco was dating

during the months leading up to his tragic demise.

Back in 1999, I was a very different person.

I was going through a divorce.

So I wanted what I didn't have.

I wanted a bad girl.

And I met Adriana vasco...

In the summer of 1999.

Adriana was quite the femme fatale.

She hung out with seedy characters.

And was kind of a seductress.

What I believe that Adriana

was looking for was somebody who was extremely wealthy,

where she'd never have to work.

So she could have the finer things in life.

My take on Adriana is:

She's got a lot of street smarts and she's a master manipulator.

One of her gifts is making her way through life using people,

particularly men.

Ken was just another in a long line of people.

Detectives wondered if Adriana saw Ken stahl

as a golden ticket to the charmed life

of a south orange county Princess.

During my relationship with Adriana,

I believe she was good friends

with her ex-boyfriend, Dr. Stahl.

She thought that he was actually gonna divorce his wife

and marry her.

I don't know what world she was living in.

That's a fairy-tale life.

Adriana was like, "look, why don't you leave your wife,

and be with me all the time?" And Ken won't do it.

And this creates a lot of anxiety

and a lot of hurt for Adriana.

Adrianna wanted Carolyn taken out of the picture.

Once Adriana fessed up to her affair with Ken stahl,

a possible motive was right there in plain sight.

Her insatiable thirst

for a taste of the orange county good life.

And detectives knew she'd been in touch with Ken

on the day of the murder.

Everything we did circled back to Adriana.

What we believe is she wanted to take Carolyn's spot,

and we felt that she was the key.

All of a sudden the investigation has a new lead.

The shock of Ken and Carolyn stahl's slaying

still lingered nearly a year after they were snatched

from the sunny shores of huntington beach,

and their hopes and dreams along with them.

Carolyn missed out on a lot.

She would've been an awesome mom.

She was a giving kind of person.

She was really good about sending my kids birthday cards.

She sent me Halloween cards, Thanksgiving cards.

She was so thoughtful,

enough for me to always know she was there and remember her.

That's really sad that we have to talk about her as a memory.

Although the case had been open for nearly a year,

detectives were now closing in on Adriana vasco,

as they continued to interview her.

She was quick to play victim, crying to the cops

over the loss of her lover boy and his wife,

but detectives pried her to come clean

about the layers she had not yet chosen to reveal.

Adriana told US she was having an affair with Ken stahl,

but it came to an end because he wouldn't divorce his wife.

And then we found out that she was now

with a guy named Greg Stewart.

Adriana moves on sexually.

She stops having a physical relationship with Ken,

but they remain close friends and confidants,

and Ken remains her sugar daddy.

For a five year period,

he was basically providing everything for her.

Money for rent, money for food.

Bought her two cars.

He was constantly taking care of her,

and Greg was okay with it.

It becomes almost creepy.

Adriana moves on to another guy,

yet Ken keeps coming over.

It's like this weird threesome.

We finish the interview with Adriana,

and we decided to take her home.

And she leads them to this house in westminster,

and this is the home of Greg Stewart.

Greg Stewart came from the opposite side

of the oc tracks as Ken stahl.

This was Adriana's world-- the rough side of orange county.

I don't know, it just got into my head.

I just said, "you know, I'm gonna ask him something."

So I go, "Greg." I go, "if you were me,

who would you be looking at for these murders?"

I wanted to see what his reaction would be.

And he goes, "I'd be looking at Tony."

We were like, "Tony? Who's Tony?"

So he goes, "Tony's Adriana's boyfriend."

He was a maintenance guy

at the apartments she was living up, up in anaheim.

And basically, the whole team, the whole homicide unit

was working this case,

and nobody had heard about Tony.

From that point on, it completely turned.

Police also run Adriana's criminal record.

Find out she had, a traffic stop, a dui or something,

and the passenger is Tony satton.

We sent a couple of investigators

over to the apartment to try to find out who Tony was.

They ended making contact with the managers.

He's a handyman.

He blows into town from north Carolina,

talking about how he's killed people,

and, you know, building himself up

as this real bad guy.

We end up pulling phone records

from the home where Adriana was staying,

and we learned that the very first day we interviewed her,

she made about five or six phone calls

to Greenville, north Carolina.

So now we're thinking,

okay, Greenville, north Carolina. Maybe it's Tony.

So, we take that photograph that we have,

and we fax it to the pitt county sheriff's department.

The bulletin arrives, lands on the desk at a station house

at a station house in north Carolina.

Deputy comes in for work.

He sees the picture, and he recognizes Tony satton

as somebody he knows as Dennis godley.

Dennis Earl godley clearly had something to hide

by using the alias Tony satton.

This was the Mark of a career criminal.

Dennis Earl godley was a very bad guy.

Weapons possessions, narcotics possessions,

robberies, larcenies.

He was in custody in Virginia

for a robbery that he'd done in a convenience store.

At this point we thought,

this could be the individual that killed the stahls.

We decided to talk to Adriana again.

See what she had to say.

The suspected love triangle was made more sinister

with the inclusion of Tony satton, aka Dennis godley.

This looked like a recipe for murder,

and Adriana was at least aware of the plan

if not the mastermind herself.

Either way, it was time to crack open this case.

Adriana agreed to have a computer voice

stress analyzer test.

It's a basic form of a lie detector,

or it'd be somebody being deceptive.

She did fairly well with most of them,

but there was one question that she showed

an influx of anxiety.

But that was deceptive, because her voice went off the charts.

And that's when my partner Brian said,

"tell US about Tony satton,"

and her face went completely white.

And her eyes...

You could tell we hit a, we hit a nerve.

There's something there.

And she started crying,

and when she started crying,

we couldn't get anything else out of her.

It's like a coping mechanism that she has to--

when she's under stress-- to kind of withdraw.

We could tell we weren't getting anywhere with her.

We had to make a judgment call, so we decided to arrest her.

We decided to arrest her for the traffic violation warrants

that she had out of la county.

While Adriana's locked up on these traffic warrants,

the cops are now scrambling to build the case.

That's when my partner and I,

we flew to Virginia.

It's time. Let's go speak to Dennis Earl godley.

Unless the prosecutors can come up with some new evidence,

she was gonna walk free.

The case is in jeopardy of collapsing.

A pair of cold, dark eyes stared back at detectives

from Dennis Earl godley's mug shot.

Were those eyes the last to see poor Carolyn stahl

crumple and die beside her husband Ken?

And had Ken's philandering

brought this awful end upon them?

Had godley killed them in a fit of jealousy?

Detectives knew it was time to make godley talk.

Me and my partner, we flew out to a jail in Virginia,

and we sit down with Dennis Earl godley.

This is a... A really cold character.

And the detectives look at him, and he's just got dead eyes.

It was kind of like a chess match.

He was kind of wanting to know what we knew,

as much as we were trying to find out what he knew.

But he made a lot of admissions.

He admitted that he was in California

at the time of the murders,

he admitted that he had had a relationship

with Adriana vasco.

He admitted that he had met Ken stahl.

Lot of admissions, but no confessions.

But one thing that was strange,

right at the end of the interview, godley says,

"if I was to admit that I did this,

could you not put me to death?"

We can't speak for the district attorney's office,

and we kind of left it at that, but we thought that was strange,

why he would say something like that.

So we fly back

and we think it's him, but we need more.

Ken was a womanizer,

but did that call for his murder?

And Carolyn seemed to have no hand

in her own unjustified execution.

Detectives pushed on to deliver justice

for their grieving families.

The clock is ticking. They know they have

to jump on this lead.

Adriana's gonna get out of jail at any minute,

on those traffic violations.

They decide to scare Adriana

through her sometime boyfriend Greg.

The detectives go to Greg's house,

and they say, "you know what?

"We found Tony. And I don't want to scare you,

but maybe your life and Adriana's life's at risk."

And one day, we get a phone call.

I pick it up, it's a collect call from L.A. county jail

and it's Adriana on the other line

and she wanted to talk.

So we drive to L.A. county jail

and we interview her.

Finally, Adriana cracked.

With no one left to manipulate, and no way of knowing

whether godley had already implicated her,

Adriana's only possible way out

was to tell cops her side of the story.

Adriana's very apologetic.

She's trying to do the right thing.

Now, at this point, she laid everything out.

She told US everything.

The truth was the most depraved explanation possible,

a nightmarish reality that detectives had considered

but hoped wasn't the stahls' true fate.

Ken wanted his wife killed.

Adriana says that he would hound her

over and over and over and over and over for years.

Dr. Stahl had inartfully

and-- consistent with him having no street smarts--

clumsily approached people and asked them

if they would do a hit for him.

He even asked her to kill his wife.

She refused.

So Adriana introduces Ken

and godley.

They met at a parking lot in huntington beach.

Ken hands Adriana an envelope full of cash,

$20,000 or $30,000,

and Adriana hands it to Dennis.

The plan is now set in motion.

So, the night of November 20, 1999,

Dennis Earl godley shows up at Adriana's apartment.

He says, "let's go. We got a job to do."

Ken takes his wife out for her 44th birthday dinner,

to a Mexican restaurant in San Juan capistrano.

Adriana and godley depart

at a gas station that's just right off the 5 freeway

and the Ortega highway.

And the plan is to wait for Ken to come by

with Carolyn in their car.

As soon as Ken and Carolyn drive by, they pull up behind them,

they follow them up the Ortega highway.

As Ken stops...

...Dennis says, "keep going and make a u-turn."

They park on the other side of the road

and godley gets out of the car.

Crosses the-the Ortega highway

and approaches Ken's car.

All of a sudden, she hears

gunshots.

One of the most shocking and disturbing things Adriana said

was that Carolyn was still alive

after Dennis had unloaded his weapon.

Carolyn was able to exit the car,

horrified, probably, 'cause she'd just been shot

by some unknown subject in the middle of the Ortega highway.

We think that maybe godley pushed her down,

and she crawled back in the car.

Then godley walked up...

...executed Carolyn.

Shot her in the back of the head.

Tony gets back in the car with Adriana

and he tells her, "well, I killed them."

She says, "well-well, what do you mean 'them'?"

So, he killed both Ken and Carolyn.

The plan was for Carolyn to get killed,

not Ken.

She says, "well, that wasn't

"what was supposed to happen.

Why did you kill Ken?"

And Tony says, "well, he didn't follow directions.

Our theory is, godley's a savvy criminal.

He knows that if he allows

Ken to live, there's a potential witness right there.

He's not gonna leave a witness alive.

Godley's calculation is, "this guy's not gonna hold his mud,

he's gonna crack."

And the guy's stupid enough to have paid him

most of the money before the murders.

Ken got shot in the face and in the shoulder.

He was mortally wounded pretty much instantly.

I think he just saw the gun, probably heard the sound...

...and then that was it.

Ken stahl was the master manipulator all along.

His solicitation of Richard Anaya held just a glimpse

into the conspiracy he had fostered for years.

Was he the guy that I thought he was

or was he just being nice to me because he was gonna ask me

to take care of Carolyn?

Later on,

godley forced Adriana to go with him

down to huntington beach pier.

He dropped the gun in the ocean there.

With Adriana's confession, detectives now

finally have enough evidence to arrest

Dennis godley, aka Tony satton,

and Adriana vasco

for the murders of Ken and Carolyn stahl.

She gets transported back to orange county

to await trial.

Well, the defense filed a motion

to suppress our interview with Adriana.

Adriana's lawyer says it was coerced.

And that her Miranda rights were violated,

that she had indicated she wanted a lawyer

and she never got a lawyer.

This is the lynchpin of the prosecution's case.

They can't link her in any other way

except through her own words.

And the judge

throws out the confession.

So now, the prosecution doesn't have

a statement where she puts herself in the middle of it.

And unless the prosecutors can come up

with some new evidence, she was gonna walk free,

the next day, as I recall.

At this point, the case is in...

Jeopardy of collapsing.

The judge threw out Adriana's confession.

All of it was wiped out.

She could've walked freely out the door,

so now we d-- we didn't know what we were gonna do.

Adriana vasco's twisted o.C. Fairy tale

had shattered when her bad boy boyfriend killed her rich lover

along with the intended target, his wife.

But will the judge's ruling

give the guilty wannabe Princess a way out?

Not all is lost.

The prosecutors, they have a backup.

On January 2, 2001,

I got a jailhouse interview

with Adriana vasco.

Getting suspects to talk to you

in a double homicide case...

...just didn't happen.

I can't say what was inside of her head when she talked to me.

Maybe she thought she could,

if she put this side of the story out,

it would make everything go away.

I don't know.

Adriana has no idea

that the orange county register jailhouse interview

is going to come back and haunt her.

She provided a lot of detail about the murders.

Adriana told me

that godley was jacked up and that

he was threatening her.

She said she tried to stop it,

she said, you know, she covered her eyes.

She didn't pull the trigger,

but she put herself at the scene

when her boyfriend, Dennis godley, gunned the couple down.

And she's smart,

but she's not smart enough to know that even though

she paints herself as a, a-an innocent lambikins

that got forced into this by godley,

putting herself there in the middle of it

is a really critical piece of evidence.

That wasn't all the prosecution dug up on Adriana.

Her ex-boyfriend Scott kasoff

revealed another slip of the tongue.

She told me that she was involved with the shooting.

Dr. Stahl, Adriana and Tony got together,

formulated that Tony was gonna kill her,

and she wanted to be there to witness it,

to make sure that it happened.

The following day, I went to the sheriff's department

and I reported all the information.

And after that, I was requested

to testify in open court.

So now they have Adriana's Internet lover

who can also back up what she said to the newspaper.

So two secondhand confessions.

So, a few months later,

the jury trial for Adriana commences.

Adriana and her lawyer have to roll the dice

and they have to rely on sympathy for Adriana.

And that means she has to take the stand.

And one of the challenges in this case is you're trying

a-a female defendant for a double murder

that didn't pull the trigger,

that's a mother of two.

She was up there and she cried for three hours.

I know there is not anything that I can do to bring them back

and I wish there was.

Forgive me, please.

The jury did not sympathize with Adriana vasco.

She is convicted of double murder

and sentenced to life in prison

without the possibility of parole.

Miss vasco, of course, didn't take it so well.

There was, you know, a flood of tears.

She wanted to take Carolyn's place.

And now she's in prison for the rest of her life.

Dennis struck a deal.

And the deal was he would confess

to the murders, in exchange for a life prison term,

and that's what he took.

The irony of the whole thing

is that Dennis Earl godley never did a complete life sentence.

He ended up dying in prison from cancer.

At the sentencing, family members come forward

to give victim impact statements.

And people talked on behalf of Carolyn

and much they loved and missed her.

Nobody came on behalf of Ken stahl.

Every day I think about, you know, what their options were.

He just manipulated people

to get what he wanted.

If he would've filed for divorce,

he'd still be alive today.

What goes around comes around, and guess what?

Karma's a bitch.

Beneath the fašade of palm trees

and ocean spray in south orange county,

privileged playboys may hide dangerous motives.

But trying to get away with murder might just put you

on the wrong end of a gun on a dark and twisting highway.

Carolyn oppy, real special girl,

beautiful girl.

Beautiful in heart, beautiful in spirit.

And she was a good friend to me.

It's just too bad she's not with US.

Through this whole investigation,

Carolyn was the only true victim.

That was very satisfying,

to bring closure to Carolyn's family.

'Cause like I said, she was their--

her family was devastated.

I certainly believe justice has been served here.

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