Original subtitles

Fullerton in the midst

of orange county is not used

to violent crimes.

One pleasant evening, an orange county family's

idyllic dreams

were suddenly destroyed.

I observed a car that had been fully engulfed in flames.

In the back seat,

there were two dead, naked bodies.

He was struck multiple times.

I thought it was quite vicious.

I really think this world

is out of control.

A dark secret

cut through the family

and the very fabric of their community.

This doesn't happen in a vacuum.

This built up over years.

They had problems,

and people get desperate

and do desperate things.

It's one thing to lose your money,

but now we're talking murder.

Orange county's a fascinating place.

What's most famous about it

would be its affluent coastal cities,

places like Newport beach. Communities like emerald bay.

You find flashy money.

Fullerton, in the center of the county, a little different.

Fullerton people

are a little more low-key and maybe...

Not so flamboyant with their wealth.

The people there more would be old money

rather than new money.

In fullerton, roots count for something.

And a family home would be treasured.

Everything that takes place

in this neighborhood takes plac behind closed doors.

It's a place that's steady and calm,

but it's also got this entrenched affluence to it.

It's not a community where you would expect

to read headlines like these.

Families in the old money neighborhoods

of fullerton enjoy a privileged o.C. Lifestyle.

Successful parents who pass on trust funds

to aspirational children.

Edward and Dolores Charles

built their perfect family life ensconced

in this safe and prestigious suburb.

I lived across the street

from the Charles family for 15 years.

They seemed like just normal people.

I knew he was an engineer.

Edward Charles ii,

the father, had that kind of success

that could allow you to live very well.

That's how he lived.

Dolores, who is Edward's wife,

became one of those glue figure in the community.

Dolores

ran a secretarial service that I used all the time.

She was very up on technology. She could do anything.

I mean, she couldn't have been more lovely.

I had the impression

that Dolores was very happily married

to Edward. Her face would light up

when she would talk about her husband.

I mean, she just came to life.

They had a comfortable life

I thought that was nice.

I just thought it was a lovely family.

I mean, really perfect family.

Dolores and Edward had two sons

Danny, the younger, is 19

and is a, sophomore at usc.

He is an opera singer.

He is a real talent, a prodigy

from a young age, and the futur looks very, very bright.

His vocal instrument

has become stuff of legend in the neighborhood.

Periodically, I would hear

Danny from in the house, believe it or not, singing

with his loud voice.

It was magnificent.

The older brother, Edward, has a dream himself.

He wants to compete in the Olympics

as a boxer to try to get

a chance to bring home a gold medal.

And he has a job. He's a mechanic

working at a gas station in fullerton.

Eddie's a good guy.

At the gas station, he had a very nice

set of tools,

and they were all engraved

with a yin-Yang symbol.

He was very into his martial arts. Very physically fit.

I bet the guy didn't have an ounce of fat on his body.

Eddie lives

with his girlfriend,

Tiffany.

She was one of the original baywatch girls.

He really was into her.

Um, she was definitely, like,

a California beach girl that you would assume-- blonde hair.

He seemed to be in love.

Also part of the family is Bernard severino.

That's Dolores's father.

And he lives there with the family

at their home on terraza place.

By all appearances, the Charles were

a happy, wealthy family living the orange county dream

with a bright future on the horizon.

But the o.C. Was built on often unstable fortunes,

and the Charles legacy was about to go up in flames.

November 6, 1994, less than a week after Halloween,

all the members of the Charles family

come together for a calm scene

of domestic tranquility.

Around 8:00 P.M., after a meal of pasta,

Eddie and Danny say good night, turn to leave,

and Danny heads back toward los Angeles to go back to campus.

And his mother

begins to get concerned around 9:00

because Danny should be back at usc by now

and he always calls, and he didn't call tonight.

She mentions it to her father.

Around 11:30, he goes to bed, and she's still worried,

and she's still waiting for that call.

The next morning, November 7, 1994,

Bernie severino wakes up about 5:30 A.M.

The house is empty. There's no one else there.

And no sign of his daughter, no sign of his son-in-law.

The dogs are locked in the basement, which is unusual.

And what was unusual was Dolores's car

was still out in the driveway.

He could not understand why that would be.

He just waited all day, and never heard from anybody.

Except Eddie did come by.

Eddie arrives back at terraza place

and his grandfather

quickly tries to find out what's going on.

"Where is everybody? What is happening?"

These are not people that just disappear

as part of the normal course of their life.

This is an unusual circumstance.

And they're very, very concerne at this point.

Bernie offers the young man some food. He says no.

He declines, and he heads out.

These unsettling circumstances

had disrupted their picture-perfect o.C. Family,

and the two hoped for a simple explanation.

Unfortunately, this was just a mere glimpse

of the more horrifying news to come.

Late on Monday, November 7th,

a suspicious fire is reported

near El camino high school,

which is just over the county line in Los Angeles county.

Los Angeles county sheriff's deputy sergeant royer,

he is dispatched, he gets to the scene,

and he makes a grisly discovery.

So, I arrived there at about 11:00

at night.

I observed a car that had been

fully engulfed in flames.

The car was a gray Honda civic.

Badly burnt.

There was extensive damage to it.

The fire department had put out the fire.

Inside the burning car,

in the back seat, it appears there are two

dead, naked bodies.

I observed

a male body on top of a female body.

Very badly burnt. Both of them were.

In the trunk, there was another body,

of a young man that was not so seriously burned.

This one, wearing clothes,

and in the fetal position, there in the trunk.

And it's a disturbing sight

that will get even more disturbing.

We finally realized,

upon seeing the scene that it was triple homicide.

It's a grisly, grisly sight.

The idea of these bodies

stacked like cord wood in the back seat and then

the fetal victim in the trunk, it's a nightmare.

It's a horrific sight, with the smell of charred flesh

it was very clear

that a major crime had taken place.

Shortly before midnight, sergeant royer

runs the plates of the Honda and he gets a hit.

It turns out that this car

belongs to the Charles family of fullerton,

Dolores and Edward ii.

The two burned bodies in the back seat

were presumed to be Edward and Dolores Charles,

and the lesser-burned body in the trunk

their son Danny.

It really struck the strings of your heart,

to see a whole family being wiped out.

Very vicious, very cold murders.

You wondered how all three of them got in a car,

same car, why two of them were stripped naked.

You don't know.

You know, could've been kidnapping

or it could've been carjacking.

We didn't know at that point.

I mean, this is a scenario that's chilling.

And then, the most sociopathic aspect

of this twisted case:

It's not over yet.

These people were killed in different ways, and each one

more disturbing than the last.

There had been a call.

The discovery of an affluent orange county family

found burnt in one of their own cars was completely unheard of

in this well-heeled pocket of fullerton.

Detectives wondered if this was a robbery gone wrong

and headed to the Charles house

to search for signs of a struggle.

We knocked on the door at 2:30 in the morning.

An elderly gentleman,

Bernard severino, opened the door.

The police want to know what Bernie knows.

They're trying to ascertain, "is this a suspect?"

At that point, though, he's 73 years old,

and he's a guy that's been dealing

with a lot of major health issues.

And he was fully dressed,

he was wide awake.

He said he was just extremely worried

about his family.

We set him down, told him we were there

because we had found

the Honda civic

and that everybody was deceased.

It really,

really hit him hard.

We were worried about him.

He took it very hard, naturally.

Bernard consented to a search,

and investigators looked through the house

for evidence of a burglary or any signs

that the Charles had been force from home to meet their death.

The house was empty.

He didn't notice anything out of place.

There was no obvious sign of a struggle

or a break-in or anything.

Detective royer looks in the master bedroom

and he's greeted by an unusual sight.

The bed is made,

but there's only one pillow on it.

And I remember severino's statement to this day.

"My Dolores would never make a bed with one pillow."

So...

That was the first thing that started coming

to our mind, that usually burglars

don't make the beds.

Investigators ruled out a botched burglary

as cause for the murders,

and prepared to notify Eddie Charles

as the autopsy of his parents and brother continued

through the dark of night.

The bodies had been found

in neighboring Los Angeles county

over the county line.

So, the L.A. county medical examiner's

investigation would unpack

a peculiar type of horror.

First of all,

they were able to

match the dental charts

of Edward, Dolores and Daniel.

I was able to determine that all of them

had been killed before the, car was set on fire,

and that was because there was no evidence

of smoke inhalation.

And it was obviously brutal.

These people didn't die easily.

Danny's head trauma

was caused by an instrument

that had a small striking surface.

He was struck multiple times.

I thought it was quite vicious.

Not only did he have multiple skull fractures.

The bone was actually driven into the brain.

Our investigation indicated

that this was very personal because

the beating up of the father

and Danny was very hateful.

When I saw the injuries,

the first thing I thought about was a hammer.

But any tool that has

a small striking surface could do it.

The mother, Dolores,

did have two areas in the neck

that showed evidence

of compression or a blow,

and I thought compression was most likely.

I felt that

the cause of death was strangulation.

We can still tell a lot of things from a burned body.

Now, it does obscure identifying features--

the face, the hair--

but anything internal, we'll still find them.

As dawn broke,

news of the murders spread

through the Charles' affluent neighborhood.

And while friends and neighbors

wrestled with feelings of shock and horror,

they also wondered

who could have brutalized the Charles like this.

It's always something that is a scary thought

when you think of the violence that's going on.

Nice people. Very best.

Were they friendly with their neighbors? -Yeah.

Neighbors were also questioning

if a monster was able to slip onto terraza place

and unleash a nightmare on a family

as friendly and mild-mannered as the Charles,

who could be next?

Unbelievable.

I really think this world is out of control.

I-I... it-it's a shock.

I couldn't believe

that something like that could actually happen

in a neighborhood like this.

I couldn't believe Dolores was killed.

What a nice, kind human being.

How could anyone kill her?

You can't really fathom

that this happened to someone you knew.

It wasn't until, I think, I saw pictures on the news

that I really realized, "my god, that's Dolores.

My Dolores."

At first, I thought it was a total random act,

that somebody came into the neighborhood

and somehow picked that house randomly.

I had no idea.

This is a case

about a family that had the American dream.

It ended in a nightmare.

Investigators now had a lead

on how the Charles were killed,

but they still had no idea why or even where

they met their dreadful end

when a new detail emerged.

A police officer from fullerton

advised US that there had been a call

sunday night at about 9:30 one house away

from the Charles house.

When the police arrived,

the car was gone.

And, so,

that was kind of the end of that call.

As we go out

into the investigation and we find out that Danny

was a potential opera singer,

we felt his voice would probably carry

and that possibly it was Danny.

Detectives made the devastating realization

that the neighbor had probably heard Danny screaming

from inside the trunk of his own car

in front of the Charles house

after their sunday family dinner.

Maybe somebody could have saved him

if someone had been able

to open that trunk.

It's where my mind goes first,

is the horror of that.

We now wanted to go

search the house again because we were thinking

that this was now the crime scene,

due to the car being right ther outside the Charles house.

We obtained a search warrant, and we returned to the house

with our criminalist,

Heidi Robbins.

And she brought the light,

and blood showed up all over the place.

She tore the bed apart,

and on the mattress, there was a lot of blood.

So,

it definitely was a crime scene.

An investigation

had ramped up overnight in orange county

as detectives honed in on the Charles home

as the crime scene in their brutal homicide.

Police hoped the Charles' surviving son, Eddie,

could shine some light on a confusing chain of events.

Our intent

at that time was, "we got to clear Eddie of this thing

before we go any farther after anybody else."

Eddie was staying

at his girlfriend Tiffany Bowen's house

on camino del sol.

So, we went up there,

and it was about 6:15 in the morning.

And we saw Eddie coming out

the front door of that house,

so we approached him at the front door.

Eddie was living

with a girlfriend, but Tiffany

was currently going to college

in Maryland, so she was not at the house.

We had told him who we were,

and we asked him when it was he last saw

his parents and his brother, and he told US

about sunday night, he was there.

Last saw 'em then.

We wound up telling him

that the car was found and that there were three bodies in it.

That they were all deceased.

That we believed them to be his brother, Danny,

his mother and dad.

And he went down

to his knees and said, "I told them not to go

down to usc at night."

He began sobbing.

Overcome, racked with grief.

We asked him why

all three of them would be in the same car,

and he said, "well, Danny was having

"clutch problems with his car, so he probably returned home

to get his mother and dad to go with him to usc."

And we asked him,

"why would he take a car with clutch problems

"instead of taking

his mother's car, who was better operating?"

And he said,

"I don't know.

They never listen to me, anyway."

And I asked him where he spent sunday night.

He said he slept at the bowens' house,

at his girlfriend's, where he was currently living.

And he said he was also there Monday night.

And we talked to Mrs. Bowen, who was there,

and because Mrs. Bowen, Tiffany's mother,

had said he was there all Monday night

when the fire was

and the bodies were over at the school,

he had an alibi.

Detectives left Eddie to grapple with his loss

and continued to knock on doors

when a vigilant neighbor

offered another startling account.

A detective rapped on my front door,

and he said, "can I talk to you about what happened?"

And that's when I said,

"on the morning of Monday, November 7, 1994,

"I got up, and it was about quarter to 6:00.

"As I got my paper, I just looked around,

"and Eddie was in his driveway.

"I noticed that he was out there with a rag,

"wiping something off the pavement

behind the truck."

He did not see the Honda civic there,

but the truck that Eddie drives

was there.

He was watching him wipe up stuff off the driveway

at 6:00 in the morning.

He was wearing his karate gloves,

and it was just suspicious to the neighbor.

Then I saw him looking over at our house.

I don't think he could see me in the window,

but he looked for the longest time,

and then he continued to wipe up something.

When Eddie realizes that he was seen,

he ducks into the house.

Dr. Kuhn watched from there

and saw him reemerge, but...

The behavior was very, very suspicious.

Suddenly,

Eddie was looking a lot less innocent,

and an elusive detail from his interview

came rushing back to sergeant royer.

He never did ask

how they were killed,

what the circumstances were, where or nothing.

The torched car had reeked of a cover-up,

and now the neighbor's story

suggested Eddie may have been concealing his tracks.

So what did he have to hide?

Detective royer's trying to get a beat on Eddie.

A background check by the detective

turns up enough trouble in his youth

to raise some red flags.

He was suspect

earlier in his life

in arson-- the neighbor's house--

burglaries

where checks were taken and he tried to cash a check

and vandalism.

He was never arrested.

Never charged with any of these things,

but he was a suspect in 'em.

Our home was robbed

on two different occasions.

I'm not certain anything was traced back to Eddie,

but on the other hand,

we had a suspicion that Eddie was in our house

because he knew that we were gone.

Although Eddie had a checkered past,

why would he have massacred his family?

The next-door neighbor saw

what the Charles hadn't wanted others to see.

I felt that there was a troublesome nature to Eddie.

And I'm not sure what I can base that on,

other than the fact that I observed

his interaction with his brother and with his father,

and he seemed separated on some degree from the family.

I saw the family's struggles

probably a couple of times a year.

In my backyard, I could hear them,

which is quite a ways away.

And typically, it was associated with Eddie doing something wrong

and his father screaming at him

there was a different way

that the parents treated both of 'em.

People think, "not in orange county,"

where it's nice, happy,

but it happens anywhere and everywhere.

Dolores was the last person on earth

I would have ever thought this could happen to.

But the truth of the matter is,

there's no such thing as a perfect family.

Unfortunately, I never heard he speak of her son Eddie.

I never knew she had another son.

For years, she never mentioned Eddie.

Detective royer puts together

a portrait of life among the Charles family

and finds out that the relationship between the sons

is not an easy one.

It's not a pleasant one.

It's a dark tale.

It's not one that's new,

but it is ugly.

Law enforcement was looking at Eddie Charles

for the killings of his brother,

mother, and father

and found a family divided.

The question was, how had it all begun,

and was there a motive for murder?

Detective royer puts together

a portrait of life among the Charles family.

Eddie and Danny have a long history of not getting along.

In the Charles household,

the path always led to academia and college,

the path to success.

Mother, father,

and the youngest son followed that path.

From what the grandfather said,

they were disappointed that Eddie did not go to college.

They were disappointed that he wanted to be a mechanic.

And that alone set him at odds

with the expectation and the worldview of his parents.

The family spotlight never went off of Danny.

Danny's talent, his personality made him center stage

in his own family

in a big way.

You get the feeling that every single time

that he got another accolade,

his brother took it as another slight.

Eddie is not looking for a free ticket.

He has a job, and he has skills himself.

He just wants some of the attention

that his little brother is getting.

He just

didn't get the recognition I think he wanted

from his parents.

And it's not unusual for a sibling

in a family to resent the other siblings,

either for good reason or bad reasons.

Bernie, the grandfather, he loved Eddie.

He really did. Because he and Eddie used to do all kind

of things together, and they were

a grandfather-grandson duo.

But Eddie didn't have much love for Danny.

Or his father.

We went down to the gas station where Eddie was working.

Eddie was not there,

but we went and talked to the gas station owner.

And he said that Eddie had been there on Monday

but that he was very tired

and at one point had actually fallen asleep while at work.

And we asked him if it was possible

that Eddie was involved.

And he said he did not believe

that Eddie could do anything like that.

Later, we talked to a coworker, a Mr. Poor.

The detective is putting together a timeline,

and the information that he gets from Brian poor

is a big part of that timeline.

Sunday night,

November 6, I was working.

I was by myself.

About 9:30-ish,

Eddie had come into the gas station

driving a small little gray sedan.

I had asked him when he came in

"whose car is that?" 'Cause that wasn't

his normal car that he drove at the time.

He just said, "it was my girlfriend's mom's car"

and he was testing the brakes

or testing the clutch or something.

He had parked

in the back corner, the darkest back corner, of the gas station

that we worked at.

He came in, he made a phone call.

I just thought it was weird.

Normally speaking, if...

Y-You were gonna come in and call and leave,

you're gonna pull right up front,

walk right in the door that we all walk in,

and do your thing and leave.

So I had asked him at the end of the day, I said,

"hey, is everything all right?"

He seemed very mellow for anything else that was going on.

And Mr. Poor said that Eddie seemed calm.

He didn't notice any blood,

but he wasn't really looking for any of that.

Eddie was getting mixed reviews

his alibi had seemed solid,

between the sunday dinner

and the discovery of his murdered family on Monday.

But suspicious sightings were eroding his credibility.

Sergeant royer looped back to clarify Eddie's alibi

with his girlfriend's family.

Had Eddie stayed with them

on the nights in question, as he alleged?

Monday night, Eddie went to the bowens' house

about 7:00.

And Mrs. Bowen was inside the house.

He said he was real tired

and he was going to bed.

Well, somehow,

he got out of his bedroom

without her knowing.

About 8:00,

he's on the front yard

and he talks to Ty Bowen,

who was on the roof of the house,

putting up Christmas tree lights.

And he asked Ty,

"give me a ride down to the gas station."

Ty thought that was very unusual,

because Tiffany's truck that he'd always drive

was right there in the parking lot.

But Ty got down,

drove him down to the gas station, and dropped him off.

Little bit after 10:00,

the phone rings at the Bowen residence.

Ty answered the phone and it's Eddie.

He says, "I'm at the ball field on rosecrans.

"I was watching a softball game.

Would you come and pick me up?"

Ty picked him up at the ball field and brought him home

Eddie, however he was getting out or in,

got back into the bedroom,

came out of the bedroom little bit after 10:00,

and went and sat with Mrs. Bowe and watched TV

while the car is burning.

When investigators put together the stories from Jeanne Bowen

and her son Ty,

it seemed that Eddie was likely hiding

his whereabouts from Jeanne to use her as an alibi.

Why did Eddie return to the shop?

Was he hiding something in that Honda

while he worked his whole shift on Monday?

A horrid scenario was materializing.

Maybe the-the most sociopathic aspect

of this entire twisted case is someone driving around

with the naked bodies piled up in the rear seat.

To park it and have it go unnoticed

while he goes about his day,

how did this scenario work?

It's-it's just really twisted.

Why didn't they kill grandpa also?

Mr. Charles told me that he returned back

to the house at approximately 11:00

or 11:30, and when he came back,

Eddie had found that his grandfather

had blood all over him.

It was incredibly disturbing.

As detectives honed in on wayward o.C. Son Eddie Charles

for the triple murder of his brother and parents,

one element was still missing.

Eddie's problems with his family

had gone years without violence

so why would he have suddenly snapped on this fated evening?

I interviewed Tiffany, his current girlfriend,

learned what her real background was,

and it just starts to put the case together

as to why it may have happened.

She had been on baywatch.

Eddie had paid

for a breast enhancement for her.

She'd told me that the breast implants

were, like, $5,000.

She said several thousand dollars

for the aesthetician school.

He spent a lot of money on her.

He maxed out his credit card that his parents had given him,

something like $50,000.

And he just wanted more money.

He just did not want

to take a chance on losing Tiffany.

Tiffany got a good eye on that trust fund

that's waiting for him.

She was a beautiful girl,

and I think he wanted her to be impressed with his wealth.

It's shocking,

but then orange county always has been identified with money.

The financial pressure that people put themselves under

to create the image they think they should have of themselves,

people get desperate and do desperate things.

It's tragic.

It really is very, very sad.

To me, his motive was,

"I'll kill everybody. I'll get the house.

I'll get the insurance."

To me, it wasn't anything else.

It was money.

Investigators had dissected Eddie's deceitful alibi

and uncovered a likely motive.

However, they still needed evidence of probable cause

to make an arrest for the fiery deed.

Police are contacted by

Eddie's martial arts instructor,

his sensei.

He said that Eddie had called him and said, "sensei,

I think I've done something terrible."

"I killed my family."

"I want to come and talk to you."

Well, his teacher didn't want to talk to him right then.

So he hung up

and he called US.

He called his karate instructor and confessed.

In a very

human way that you'd kind of understand,

my god, if I'd ever done something like this,

this is probably what I would say.

The call to the sensei is everything the police need.

This house of cards has collapsed.

Any chance that this guy's not a suspect is out the window

three hours after the call to the sensei,

Eddie Charles III is in handcuffs.

We advised him of his rights

and told him that we knew that he had done it.

He denied it.

He said, "I couldn't do that. That's family."

Once in custody, what does Eddie say?

Eddie says, "the sensei

is fabricating this."

The lockup was

a world away from his buxom blonde in cushy orange county,

and Eddie quickly snapped to spill a shocking revelation.

I worked for the orange county sheriff's department

back in 1994, in the orange county jail system.

Mr. Charles called me over and said

he wanted to talk to me about things and

articulate, you know,

what really happened according to Eddie.

It's a bit of a bombshell.

Mr. Charles told me that

he returned back to the house at approximately 11:00 or 11:30,

and when he came back, Eddie had found

that his grandfather had blood all over him.

He washed his grandfather off,

changed his clothes, and put his grandfather to bed,

and then he proceeded to clean up the evidence in the house.

You know, he took the car

to the school parking lot

and set it on fire to get rid of the evidence.

His so-called interest

was to protect the grandfather.

Eddie said he hated to admit, you know, that

it was his grandfather that actually did it.

Detective royer

calls Bernie severino on the phone,

and the grandfather isn't completely astonished by this,

because it's not the first he's heard of it.

After Eddie was arrested, Eddie had

told severino,

"I'm a young man.

"You're an old man.

Say you did these murders, and I-I will have my life to live."

Severino got mad and hung up.

And grandpa was just furious.

Already, he's brokenhearted from his whole family is gone.

And the-the person who did this wants him to take the blame.

As Eddie proclaimed his innocence from jail,

investigators uncovered even more evidence.

Next thing that happened--

a homeless lady from fullerton

brought a 16-inch Crescent wrench

into fullerton police department and gave it to them.

This woman has been essentially dumpster-diving,

picking through trash to salvage things, and she find

a 16-inch Crescent wrench with blood on it, with hair on it.

She remembered seeing in the paper

a mechanic had been arrested for murdering his family.

We took that wrench down to our criminalist.

And there was a piece of skull bone

found in the father's brain,

and the anthropologist from L.A. county

couldn't figure out what that indentation

was in the end of it, and when we presented him

with the wrench, he said, "this wrench caused that damage."

And the blood and the hair matched that

of Danny, so that was the murder weapon.

And what else does the wrench have

that makes it unique?

It's been engraved

with a ying and Yang symbol.

Eddie's ex-girlfriend told US that

she had helped Eddie

put the same yin-Yang on all his tools.

It's the opposite of an anonymous weapon.

It is a calling card.

Sitting in jail,

Eddie felt the walls of justice closing in on him.

In December the following month

I got a call from an inmate in the orange county jail.

That inmate told me Eddie had written

a large letter about the murders,

and that he had given that letter to a inmate

by the name of cezar pincock,

and cezar was going to attempt to get a hit man

to go back into the house, kill or beat up grandpa,

get caught in the house,

and then confess to killing everybody,

thus freeing Eddie.

Because Eddie was

in jail, he figured

that if somebody would kill grandpa,

then they would think it was not Eddie

that did it. It was just one more

family member that got murdered

so Eddie meets with a hit man

who came to visit him in the jailhouse

and presents himself as having aids, and that

he's gonna die anyway, and that

he's going to take this problem

off Eddie's hands.

His master plan is,

"I will give you $150,000 out of my trust fund"

to kill his grandfather.

He's a desperate man, and his desperation

is only making things worse.

In December of 1994,

Eddie Charles was arrested

for the murder of his brother and parents.

Desperate for someone else to take the fall,

Eddie met with a terminally-ill hit man

who agreed to kill Eddie's grandfather

and take the rap for all four murders.

His intent was to make it look

like it wasn't him, it was somebody else,

there was enemies out there

that were killing the whole family.

But he's trying to get somebody else to kill his grandfather,

the only surviving person.

He doesn't know, though,

that the doomed hit man is actually

an undercover operative.

It's a sting operation.

And subsequently,

they didn't rearrest him--

he was already in jail-- but they confiscated

a large letter about the murders

that Eddie had written to get a hit man.

Eddie did basically confess to that guy

that this is what had went on.

It was through Eddie's

jailhouse letters that the excruciating details

of the Charles family murders finally came to light.

Eddie's letter described

basically what happened.

He never said in the letter

that he did it,

but he said exactly what happened.

What investigators had put together

is that about 8:00 P.M., Danny leaves.

Said he's gonna head back to usc.

Outside, he's approached by his brother.

Eddie stabbed his brother in the back twice,

in the spine, and then stuffed him into a trunk

of a Honda civic.

Danny's banging on the trunk door, and

he's calling out for help.

His elder brother opens the trunk...

But not to help.

More blows rained down. He hits him

in the cheek with the wrench, he hits him in the skull,

he hits him in the neck.

To hit him in the head

with a wrench, there's a lot

of hate involved in it, 'cause Danny had to be

looking at him at the time.

And he kills his brother. He dies right there

in the trunk.

And those cries for help that his brother heard

are the same ones that his neighbor heard.

We surmised

that he came in the back way,

taking a ball-peen hammer

from the garage, and went in

and beat his dad to death in the bed.

And after his father was dead, we believe he went into

the living room, where his mother was still waiting

for Danny to call, and there, strangled her.

And then he changes the sheets on the bed

where the father had been killed,

wraps the body up, and begins to clean up

the crime scene in this family home where,

just a few hours earlier, they had all had dinner,

all while his grandfather's sleeping there in the home.

I think, since

grandpa had helped him on so many things,

Eddie Charles just couldn't murder his grandfather.

I believe, when he had all three of them in the car

and left the terraza place house,

he drove the car down behind a gas station in a big

parking lot.

And it would stay there with the naked bodies piled up

in the rear seat of the Honda civic.

And it went unnoticed

for a full day while he went to work

at the gas station in fullerton.

In the letter, he said,

Monday night,

he got back in the car,

but the bodies smelled at that time,

so he stopped at the El camino high school parking lot.

And there, he gives his parents

a viking funeral. He sets the car

on fire and torches it

with his brother in a fetal position in the trunk.

It's a pretty grisly chore.

It's fratricide, it's patricide. It's crazy.

All you can do is picture

what she must have been going through

at the time this happened.

What kind of tragedy was she hiding all these years?

Dolores had to have been brokenhearted

time and time and time again by Eddie.

This doesn't happen in a vacuum.

This built up

over years.

A year after he was arrested,

Eddie Charles went on trial for the murders

of Danny, Edward and Dolores Charles.

His picture-perfect family had been torn apart,

and their hidden secrets laid bare

in the wake of his heinous acts.

He, of course, was saying, "you know, I didn't do it."

We're at the position like,

"look, there's all this evidence.

Obviously, you did."

He didn't look very good at his psych eval.

He would come out sociopathic.

So it was very hard to have a genuine conversation with him

Eddie Charles was one of the coldest suspects

we'd ever dealt with.

Tiffany-- she did come

to some of the trial stuff, but

she knew that he was never coming out.

You guys, just please leave me alone.

Please? Please?

When Eddie finally goes to court,

he's represented by a public defender. Why?

He didn't have access to the trust fund.

The family has turned the key on it.

It's locked up.

The money that motivated him has been denied to him.

And there's some poetic justice there.

They had all the facts. You got

the blood evidence, you got the neighbor

watching him wipe down the driveway,

where the blood's found in the house.

There was so much other evidence.

This was

kind of a slam-dunk case for them.

Eddie was found guilty of one count

of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder.

All three counts should have been first-degree murder.

But a lot of people had sympathy on this kid.

Bernie was angry with Eddie,

but he got on the stand and testified

on Eddie's behalf because he felt

it would just further devastate

a family that's already been devastated

to give Eddie the death penalty

and so, he begged for his life.

In 1998,

a fourth jury gave Eddie charle the death penalty,

but a moratorium on executions in California leaves him

on death row to this day.

In families with no money, there's still

sibling rivalry and complicated family relationships.

This was over money.

This was over money. This was a money grab.

Just breaks your heart all over again.

It's awful.

This is a case about a family

that had the American dream--

money and talent and opportunity.

All these things were laid out in front of these people.

They were all spread out on the table.

But one of the members of the family-- he flipped that table.

It's a case that's uniquely orange county

and uniquely tragic.

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