Strange Truth

Alan Rarig was found dead in a parking lot in Oklahoma.

He'd been shot twice, once to the head.

You'd think his wife would be devastated.

Not exactly.

She was either the black widow or bad luck.

This is the unbelievable story of a femme fatale

with a trail of bodies in her wake.

From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Fatal Beauty.

Available now on The Binge. Search for Fatal Beauty wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today.
I think it was on a Thursday. My wife answered the phone.
Hey, we've got an emergency, Ramona's missing. Just searching for my sister's car.
Bad things were going through my mind. I start heading towards the RTA lot.
Then out of the corner of my eye, there looks like a Camry. It was my sister's car.
Your adrenaline's going. You don't really know what you're doing.
I dialed 911. You have to use this car? No.
What if my sister's in the trunk of this car? I ran back to the truck and I got a pipe wrench. Can can't break it.
We have Wendell. I reached into the trunk latch, just pulled up on that.
Wendell! Okay, Greg, Wendell! She's in the truck! Greg, you're right, Wendell! She's cool. Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg.

It's been, what, two and a half years?

I miss her a lot.

Still miss her.

The more we got to know Ramona Croteen's background,

it made us more determined to find out who did this.

Detective Timothy Robinson,

case investigator for the Ramona Crotein death.

Jeffrey Crotein is kind of like your typical suburban male.

We firmly believe that he killed his wife.

This was the home of Ramona Crotein and Jeffrey Crotein.

And this is the house where we believe Ramona Croteen was killed. My sister was home.
She says she never heard anything, never saw anything. We have a trail of Ramona's blood from the master bedroom, down the stairs, through the laundry room, and into the garage.
Being in the house, I never heard anything.

Everything that Croteen felt that there was blood on, he got either rid of it or changed it, painted it,

threw it out.

There's no way I don't think he did it.

This is the third trial that we've had.

All rise for the jury.

Prior to trials, we got pretty close.

This time, we'll get a good verdict.

He's the man who killed Ramona Crote.

Strange truth.

People always say they want their day in court. But 57-year-old Jeff Crotein is way beyond that.
My life since my wife's death has stopped. It's like I'm in a twilight zone.
Crotein, indicted for murdering his 53-year-old wife Ramona, has had too many days in court. He just wants it to end.
I didn't murder my wife. I'm innocent.
Two Cleveland juries have deliberated long and hard on Croteen's guilt or innocence. I was on jury number one.
I voted guilty. Jury number two, my final vote was not guilty.
But all either could agree on was that they couldn't agree. My final vote was guilty.
Not guilty. Both juries were hung.
Good afternoon. Please be safe with us.
So now, at the start of Croteen's third murder trial. I first collapsed to the ground.
Mona's family and friends are praying that this time, finally, justice will be done. You have a calculated killer here before you.
Everything he's done shows guilt. He's a cold individual, but I didn't think that he could do this.

Mona Croteen was murdered on March 21, 2003.

She and husband Jeff had lived here in this suburban Cleveland house for years,

raising their three kids.

Perhaps there's no such thing as a likely murder victim, but by all accounts, Mona Crotin was about the least likely you could possibly imagine. Ramona, she was always smiling, always helping people out.
Growing up, she was a tough act to follow. She was so good.
Mona's brothers, Greg and Roger Wolchewski, say that even as kids, the Wolchewskis were a tight-knit clan. She was the best big sister anyone could ever have.
It's hard on the family that she's not here. Patty Wolchewski adds that Mona was the perfect sister-in-law.
Whenever you needed something, Mona knew either how to do it, how to get it, or who to ask. We used to call this family the Waltons.
But there was one big problem with this happy picture, namely Jeff. How did he fit into the Waltons? Like a square peg in the round hole.
I thought that Jeff was a little different, but I liked him. Sharon Wolcheski is Greg's wife.
He was a good provider. He educated three kids.
But by 2003, their kids all had left home. Mr.
and Mrs. Jeffrey Protein.
Oldest son Jeff Jr. was married, middle son Jason, a Marine, was in the Mideast, and daughter Jennifer was away at college.
The Croteen house was empty and Mona and Jeff were alone, though hardly together. It was as if they had just developed different lives.
And different interests. Jeff worked long hours at his insurance agency.
And when not there, was often out on the water. He liked boating and she hated boating.
Mona, by contrast, loved people and reveled in her part-time job,

managing a concession stand at Cleveland's busy convention hall, the IX Center. She didn't really have to work.
She did that for extra money. She liked, you know, doing her own thing.
Friends Alice Smock and Bev Daly. Do you think she was happy? I thought she was happy.
On the night of March 20 20 2003 mona left her job here at the ix center and headed off to a nearby hotel for a big party the end of the convention season bash an event she looked forward to every year if nobody was dancing we got up we we started dancing. It was like, Mona, let's get them up there.
While Mona was out dancing, daughter Jennifer, at home on spring break, tried to stay up until her mother got home. But by 2 a.m., she was sound asleep on the couch.
I told her to get up, go to bed, and I went back to sleep. At about that same time, Mona was leaving the party with Bev Daly.
She said, I'm tired. I'm just going to go home.
I have a lot to do tomorrow. And that was the last time I talked to her, Sar.
The next morning, a Friday, Jennifer woke to find her father in the kitchen getting ready for work. I came down the stairs like, hey, where's mom? Being surprised.
And your dad's reaction to this that morning was what? He was irritated. But both father and daughter say they knew the annual convention party could get a little wild.
I was like, okay, well, you know what, she crashed with her friends instead of driving home. So at what point then does this begin to get alarming? Her friend who does her nails called.
Jennifer answered the phone and she says, my mom didn't come home last night. Manicurist Denise Taroski.
And I said, I have such a feeling there's something wrong. My mom just never misses a nail appointment.
And that was like my red flag. What's your dad doing at this point? He had left for work already.
So your mom doesn't come home all night, doesn't call, and your dad just gets up and goes to work? Pretty much, yeah. But you had gone to work that morning.
Oh, yes. Because truly you saw no reason to be concerned.
No, not at all. Not at all.
Did you try to call the hotel or call any of her friends before you went to work? No. But Mona's family was frantic.
I was calling everybody. They called the police, who said they had to wait 24 hours before filing a missing persons report.
Where do you really go to look? Who has any idea? 10 30 p.m. Greg had been out looking for Mona for hours when, incredibly, he discovered his sister's car.
911, what's your emergency? My heart is pounding out of my chest. Please send somebody out here to check out this car.
The dispatcher said no. 24 hours still hadn't passed.
It was at that point that Greg took matters into his own hands and made his terrible discovery. His sister, beaten and shot to death.

It's been two years and I still can see it.

Police descended on the parking lot.

There was blood all over the back seat and $900 from Mona's concession stand was missing.

We just felt that was a straight up robbery when it started. At first, police suspected a botched robbery.
Until, that is, they began to get some strange reports about what was going on at the Croteen house. The painting of the bedroom, the getting rid of the carpeting.
Why would somebody burn a headboard in your fireplace? It doesn't make common sense. Alan Rarig was found dead in a parking lot in Oklahoma.
He'd been shot twice. Once to the head.
You'd think his wife would be devastated. Not exactly.
She was either the black widow or bad luck. This is the unbelievable story of a femme fatale with a trail of bodies in her wake.
From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Fatal Beauty, available now on The

Binge. Search for Fatal Beauty wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today.

Weird. He's different.

He's his own little character.

From the moment Ramona Crotin was murdered,

friends and family all told police the same thing.

I always thought he was an odd duck.

He's a flatline. Jeff Crotin is, well, different.
Being different, I hope that never becomes a crime. A crime? Perhaps not.
But his behavior certainly raised questions. Why weren't you out looking for your wife? Your family was out searching for her.
While the Wolchewskys were out looking for Mona, Jeff was keeping a routine appointment with his accountant. What could I do? I knew people were out looking for her.
How could you be so cold to conduct business as usual when your wife is missing? And police say odd things began happening the very night Mona's body was found. As far as you know, she didn't go to work Friday.
When they first tried to interview Jeff. As the night wore on, his health seemed to deteriorate.
It just got numb right here. His face was flushed.
He looked ill. His sister-in-law, Patty, who's a nurse, began rubbing his back.
I was really concerned that he was having a heart attack. Oh, man, I'm so stiff.
Jeff spent the night in the hospital. Turned out he hadn't had a heart attack after all.
But over the next few days, the police didn't bother him with more questions. At that point we did believe there was a robbery.
We did not believe that Ramona Crotee arrived home. After all, daughter Jennifer had been with her father in the house.
If there was a gunshot so loud I'd heard something but I heard absolutely nothing that night. And Jennifer says she even was in her parents bedroom the next morning I was doing sit-ups on their floor and I was sitting on their bed nothing out of the ordinary nothing out of the ordinary didn't feel anything out of the ordinary didn't see anything out of the ordinary Jennifer provided her father with a rock-solid alibi.
But still, people began to wonder.

It just didn't jive with me.

Mona's close friend, Denise Taroski.

I actually said these words.

Is it possible?

Jeff did it.

And it wasn't long before the Wolchewskis were asking the same questions.

On the weekend after we buried Mona, he wanted everything of hers out of the house. All of her clothing boxed up, curling irons, makeup, nail polish, and that didn't settle well with me at all.
That really bothered me. Soon, even the detectives were focusing on Croteen.
We started hearing the tidbits. We heard about the headboard, and I was like, wow, that's weird.
What they heard was a jaw-dropping story

that Croteen had taken a saw to the couple's wooden headboard

and then burned it piece by piece in the downstairs fireplace.

You were in the house when he did this?

Yeah, I smelled it.

He's burning something.

And then I was like, it must be the headboard

because I heard something chopping up there.

But why would anyone do that? There was nobody in this world that was going to make love anywhere near that headboard. You're telling me that's why you burned the headboard in the fireplace? That's it.
Basically, he refused to cooperate with the police. He never even asked us about his wife.
The police were eager to talk to Jeff, but now, with a lawyer in tow, he no longer was talking to them. Never called us to see how the investigation's going.
Didn't you want to know what was going on? I knew. My children would tell me in their communication with the police.
The investigation dragged on until one day when police drove by Jeff's house and saw, of all things, carpet installers arriving. Starting to alter things here.
He's changing carpet. We had heard he painted the bedrooms.
We're going to check it out. We're curious now, too.
They questioned the workmen. We learned that when they went into that bedroom, there was a six-foot section, four-foot by six-foot, cut out and missing, carpet and padding.
That's a big chunk of carpet. But as usual, Jeff can explain.
I spilled a full bottle of Carvasier. He says that during a bout of heavy drinking after Mona's death, he knocked over a bottle of cognac and a candle, ruining the carpet.
The smell of the Carvasier was just overpowering to me and I just cut it up and threw it away. Jeff wasn't domestic.
He didn't care about carpeting. He wouldn't have cared if there was wax or cognac spilled on the rug.
I just

just didn't none of it was that settling well. That piece of carpet never was found

but the cops did recover the rest and hustled it off to the crime lab.

There was confirmatory test.

There were some spots found on the carpet for human blood.

Further testing revealed that the blood, in fact, was Mona's,

which convinced police that, indeed,

she had come home the night she was murdered.

They scrambled to get a search warrant.

But in the meantime, Jeff Croteen hired a professional cleaning company to go through the house a company with a snappy little slogan over 35 years of working to make fire and water damage like it never even happened why did you have this place cleaned by professional cleaners who normally come in after fires and floods none of these things had happened in your house. They were people that I was very familiar with.
I called them and I had requested that they do a spring cleaning. So this was just a spring cleaning? Yeah.
But it didn't look like spring cleaning to Sharon Wolczewski. It almost appeared to be if you looked at a timeline of the events it was like a systematic dismantling of a crime scene.
Two months after the murder, police finally got their warrant, and a forensic team descended on the house. Investigators found more droplets of what they believed to be Ramona's blood in the bedroom, utility room, and on a step in the garage.
A step that appeared to have as many as 45 bloodstains. The police believe that Jeff struck Mona in the bedroom, rendering her unconscious, and then carried her down the stairs to the garage, where he placed her in the back seat of her car and shot her in the head.
Your contention, just to make sure we understand this in any case, is that not only did you not kill your wife, but she never came home. She never came home, and I did not kill my wife.
The police didn't buy it, especially after a search of his office turned up four guns, one of them potentially the murder weapon.

In February of 2004, Jeff Crotin was arrested and charged with Mona's murder.

We couldn't believe it. I didn't even know he had guns.

Of course, they had no idea he had a girlfriend either.

IS, the Girlfriend.

I had never had an affair. I had never broke a law, you know.
But then 39-year-old Mary Engel went to work at Jeff Crotin's insurance agency, and the rumors began. A lot of people were saying that we were having an affair anyway.
So I thought, you know, I've had it. People say it anyway, you know, maybe I'll go ahead and see what happens.
And you did? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I did.
This is already set up, Mary. I like the big orange ones so they could see me.
Their affair started long before Jeff's wife's murder. You were in love with her? Yes, I fell in love with her.
And I'm still in love with her. Did you consider a divorce? Never.
Mary Engle is completely convinced of Croteen's innocence. I don't think physically he was capable of it.
Jeff can't do anything fast. He's a slow-mo kind of guy.
There is just no way, Mary says, that Jeff could kill his wife, hide her body, return home without a car, and clean up a bloody crime scene in just eight hours. It wasn't possible.
It just wasn't possible. And you never ask him? I never ask him, did you do this to your wife? No.
Police thought, perhaps she didn't need to ask, that Mary may have driven Jeff home from the parking lot after he dumped Mona's body. How can they say that? I mean, that's not me.
How can they tell people this when it's not true? I was really upset about that. Mary Engle had an alibi and never was charged, but the affair gave prosecutors a possible motive.
Husband cheats on wife is, in fact, one of the oldest motives in the book. If I had a $5 million life insurance policy or a $4.5 million life insurance policy on her, Jeff could go across the street and get a divorce.
Didn't have to kill his wife to do that. Oh, what are these? Richard Drucker is Croteen's defense lawyer.
So basically we have an odd guy who is having an affair, and you're saying, so what? I'm saying, so what? I'm saying they've charged him because he's an odd guy having an affair, but that doesn't make him a murderer. But prosecutors moved ahead with a case that two juries so far have shown is no slam dunk, partly because it's so highly circumstantial.
Lead prosecutor Steve Dever. I don't think that we have direct evidence and people or juries have this expectation that you have to have direct evidence to make a case.
But this is the CSI effect, right? I mean, juries today really do expect footprints, hair, blood. It's all going to lay out, and the guy from the lab is going to come in and explain how this implicates the suspect.
There is a CSI effect. Juries do have that expectation that science will provide the answer to every question.
In fact, jurors from the first two trials were highly critical of the prosecution's case. I felt that the evidence that was presented to me was not all the evidence that could have been collected and was the most scientific.
And with that in mind, I could not find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The state is stuck with the evidence it has.
Okay, please be safe. But this time, a new prosecutor will highlight the science, and he thinks this case is winnable.
I'm confident that this jury is going to be able to reach an answer, and I wouldn't be trying the case unless I thought that Mr. Croteen killed his wife.
30 years of marriage, he made no effort to find his wife. He tells the jury Jeff's behavior after Mona's death is not just odd, it's incriminating.
The defendant starts to chop up the headboard and he burns it in the fireplace. Peculiar.
Implying that Croteen burned the headboard to get rid of evidence. Police did find blood drops elsewhere in the house.
Endeavor calls DNA expert Carrie Martin to testify. Briefly tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury how much work is involved in doing this, what you do? A lot.
A lot more than you see on CSI. But her results are clear.
Three of the carpet stains match Mona's DNA. The small little tiny speck of blood the size of on the head of a needle of a pin is going to be what is going to make Jeffrey Crotein guilty in this case.
In what Dever insists is a blood trail, Mona's DNA also turns up in stains on the bedroom door jamb. What forensic scientists said came from a spontaneous hit where blood shot out.
And on a downstairs wall of the room leading to the garage. The DNA profile obtained from item 65 matches the DNA profile of Ramona Crotein.
So what, says the defense attorney. Ramona lived in the house for 25 plus years.
She might have bled, like all of us, bleeding our own house. So the prosecution's contention that the blood evidence is scientific support for its case you reject out of hand.
Yeah I think it's absurd. Especially since as Martin testifies those impressive 45 stains found on the garage step do not conclusively match Mona's DNA.

And what about the gun police recovered from Croteen's office?

Do we have a murder weapon here?

Assistant District Attorney Anna Feralia.

We have a gun. A gun.
Not necessarily the gun. It's a pretty close call for what was left of that murder bullet.

Functions just fine. I checked the trigger pull.

But the state's own witness,

the expert who conducted ballistic tests on the gun,

admits...

I could not be positive

that the two bullets were fired from the same gun.

Without direct proof,

prosecutors returned to Croteen's behavior,

noting that even before Mona was buried, he was on the internet looking at pornography. And they even suggest he faked the apparent heart attack that sent him to the hospital the night her body was found.
The nurse who treated him takes the stand. There was one time when I went to go into his room and he was actually doing some push-ups on the floor.
I did not enter his room. I stood outside his room and then left the room.
No push-ups. Why in the world would this woman say that? An opportunity to become involved.
But she's lying. Yes.
But neither push-ups nor porn prove Croteen killed his wife, says his attorney, who's about to tell the jury who he says really did. Some people follow the rules, but where's the fun in that? I'm Soraya and this is Rule Breakers, the podcast where we celebrate the rebels, the misfits, and the ones who make their own way.

Every week, I sit down with the biggest rule breakers

in sports, entertainment, and beyond

to talk about the wildest moments, toughest lessons,

and why breaking the rules might just be the key to success.

Follow and listen to Rule Breakers with Soraya,

an Odyssey podcast available now for free

on the Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Jeff Croteen is an innocent man, says his attorney, Richard Drucker.
Jeff Croteen did not commit this crime and if the Brook Park Police Department had done their job today there might be another person sitting at that defense table. We think that Ramona left the party and was apprehended by either one or a group of people, robbed, beaten, and shot.
The defense scenario is that Mona never made it home that night, that in fact she was killed during a robbery and carjacking in the hotel parking lot. And the defense attorney has two witnesses who will support that theory, two witnesses who never before have told their stories to a jury.
I thought someone was possibly struggling with a suitcase trying to put it in the backseat. Mel Twining, a friend of Mona's, says he saw something strange in the parking lot after she'd left the party.
At some point you thought somebody might be doing something to a person, am I correct? After I found out that Mona was missing, that it's a possibility that that could have been going on. Call the next one.
The other new witness is Paula Smith, also at the party, also a friend, and she says she heard a gunshot. I heard a bang.
So this noise that you heard, you thought it was a gunshot, is that correct? That's what I called it. Was there really a gunshot.
I heard a bang. So this noise that you heard you thought it was a gunshot.
Is that correct? That's what I called it. Was there really a gunshot? Paula Smith had had more than a few drinks that night.
How many did you have? It had been anywhere six to seven. Were you intoxicated? By the end of the evening I probably was a little intoxicated.
Then a third friend, Sue Ziegler, takes the stand with an amazing new piece of information, saying someone left an eerie message on her cell phone voicemail just hours after the party ended. It was very faint.
I do know it was a woman's voice and it was it said help me just the two words that's it. If that voice is Mona's then she was alive long after the prosecution insists Jeff Croteen killed her.
But Ziegler never has testified about this message before and she didn't save it.

Let's have a seat and continue to. Although she did play it once for Mel Twining.
Did there come

a time that you listened to cell phone messages on Sue Ziegler's telephone? Yes. Would you tell us about that.

Excuse me. That was somebody crying for help.
Do you recall what you heard on the voicemail message? It was help, help, help me. And how did you react to listening to this voicemail? I was shocked.
You were shocked? Shocked. Okay.
Shocked, too, is Detective Tim Robinson. This is unbelievable.
Where did this come from? Who says neither Ziegler nor Twining ever mentioned the call to police. Well, Mel Twining then should have said something because he never said nothing.
Sue Ziegler never said nothing. We at Brook Park never heard of that call.
Was that Ramona Crotein? No, I believe Ramona Crotein was already dead at that time. After hearing testimony about the call, Crotein says he only wishes he had heard that message.
I don't know if it was Mona's voice or not. I'll never be able to tell.
I wish I had been there to hear it. And if it was Mona's voice, I wish I would have been able to do something to help her.
Prosecutors insist Croteen did hear Mona's last words just before he knocked her unconscious in their bedroom. But if that's so, why did Jennifer Croteen not hear something? She was sleeping just a dozen feet away.
Through the course of the night, did you wake awake at any time? No. Did you get up to use the bathroom? No.
Were you startled in any way? No. At any time through the course of that sleep, did you hear anything? No.
Devor has an explanation as to why Jennifer may not have heard anything. We've done sound testing, fired about 38 shots into a test tank inside of that car and measured what type of sound reading you would get in Jennifer's bedroom and you would not hear it.
But Mona's co-worker Alice Smock is convinced Mona did go home because she was found in tennis shoes, not what she'd had on at the party party she had worn black strappy shoes and I commented that I liked her shoes and she said she had bought them and that that's what she'd been wearing to go dancing why are the shoes so significant shoes are significant because shoes telegraph that Ramona made her way home that night Mona Croteen Devers suggests took her shoes off when she arrived home that night. And after Jeff killed her, he mistakenly put the wrong pair of shoes back on.
But Jennifer is adamant. Her mother was never there.
And despite your best efforts, you weren't able to find your mom, were you? No. You're all done.
Thank you. So is Jennifer right, wrong or lying? In the past jurors haven't found her very believable.
The daughter had a very bad case of selective memory. Their judgment was so harsh that at trial two neither side even called her as a witness but this this time, all three Croteen children testify.

All right, come on up.

Jeff Jr., 31, says all these questions

about his mother's death have split the family.

I've lost my mom, and then I have my mom's side

of the family turn against us,

and the police are against us, and we're all,

we're alone. Jeff's youngest son, Jason, a former Marine, tells about getting news of his mother's death while in Iraq.
Could you explain to the jury how you were feeling and what you were going through at that time? You're sleeping in a hole that you dug that night. It's about four inches deep of water, and it's so cold that you can't sleep.
In a suddenly hushed courtroom, the jury, for the first time, sees emotion in Jeff Crotein, a Vietnam vet. I knew from my own personal experiences what he was going through.
It just brought it all back and I felt sorry for him. To show that the children believe their father absolutely, Drucker puts Jason on the spot.
If for one minute you thought your father brutalized your mother in that house what would you do? He wouldn't be here right now. I'd have to use ungodly restraint to keep myself away from taking matters in my own hands if I found out that wasn't the way it was.
Jason is the trial's final witness. Crotein decided not to testify.
Okay, please be seated. Alright, thank you.
Mr. Dever on behalf of the state of Ohio.
In his closing arguments, prosecutor Steve Dever highlights Crotein's alleged cover-up of the crime. Jeff Crotein's got a problem, and he's got a problem with you folks, ladies and gentlemen.
gentlemen how do you resolve how do you disregard all of that evidence as to the crime scene evidence of cleanup evidence of removal of carpet how do you get around ladies and gentlemen this crime scene and that is the dilemma that Jeff Croteen has in this particular case and in her impassassioned closing statements, Assistant District Attorney Anna Feralia hammers home Crotein's strange behavior. Does he do anything, anything at all, to look for his wife? He does nothing, ladies and gentlemen.
While he's hooked up to monitors, he's on the floor doing push-ups. So how does Mr.
Croteen prepare for the funeral? He's on a porn site, ladies and gentlemen. He is guilty of concealing and destroying all the evidence.
Hold this man responsible for not only the bludgeoning death of ramona crotein

but for the victims that are left behind thank you ladies and gentlemen She's always in the back of my head.

She's always with me.

Jeff Crotin says he's never stopped praying for his wife Mona.

Ladies and gentlemen, this case is now in your hands for a verdict.

As the jury began deliberating, he also may have been praying for himself.

I just don't know, but it's in God's hands.

Praying that the third time's the charm.

That after two hung juries, this one finally comes to a verdict.

A not guilty verdict.

What is it most that you want them to understand about you? That I didn't murder my wife. The days tick by, Jeff stays positive.
I'm 99% optimistic. Then, midway through day five, word of a verdict.

All right, we're back in session here.

If this defendant is anxious, it sure doesn't show. Case number 447-950, State of Ohio v.
Jeffrey Crotein.

Docket already stated, count one, murder.

We, the jury in this case, being duly impaneled and sworn, do find the defendant, Jeffrey Crotein, not guilty of murder of Ramona Crotein.

It's signed by all 12 members of the jury.

Acquitted of murdering his wife, Jeff Crotein is a free man.

Local reporters who have lived with this story through three trials...

This is a mini OJ trial. ...are clearly astonished at the verdict.
What do you think of the people who think you got away with murder? Nobody got away with murder. Annoying reporters and pesky photographers aside, They're tabloids.
I don't want to talk to them. Jeff Crotin's ordeal finally is over.
Oh, Jeff, I'm so happy. And back at his lawyer's office, there's a celebration.
Justice was not served with that verdict. Prosecutor Steve Dever.
I apologize to the family. We gave it our best effort, but the jury had some reasonable doubt.
We're still an entire family in shock over the verdict. Mona's brother Greg was the only family member who got to the courthouse in time for the verdict.
Find a defendant Jeffrey protein not guilty of murder. A very strange sensation when I heard the verdict.
I kind of lost all peripheral vision. It was not a good feeling.
I thought there was enough there at first to go with guilty.

Juror Michael Lisi says he went into the deliberations convinced of Jeff's guilt.

But then he began having doubts.

Lisi says the jury gave a lot of weight to the testimony of Jennifer Crotein.

There's no question in your mind that your mother did not come home that night.

That's correct.

Did Ramona make it home?

We don't even know if she made it home.

Thank you. There's no question in your mind that your mother did not come home that night.
That's correct. Did Ramona make it home? We don't even know if she made it home.
So what exactly do you think happened? I think he did it. I think he did it.
And he's not the only one. After the verdict, 10 of the 12 jurors who had just found Jeff Crotin not guilty told the judge that in their heart of hearts, they thought he probably did kill his wife.
But with no direct evidence, they just couldn't vote to convict. Despite the verdict, do you feel like you're still under some sort of cloud of suspicion? There will always be people out there that will never be fully convinced until the murderer of my wife Ramona is caught.
He has to live with what the truth is. I firmly believe that Jeffrey Croteen killed his wife.
These days, Jeff, no longer an insurance agent, lives in what once was his office. Watch your feet.
What do you most want to do with the rest of your life?

Go sailing.

They're together quite often.

And Mary Engle is still a big part of his life.

And I'm still in love with her.

But that relationship has shattered his relationship with his own children,

who only rarely speak to their father.

We still have a chance to get out of here. in love with her.
But that relationship has shattered his relationship with his own children, who only rarely speak to their father. We stood behind him because we thought he was being falsely accused, but now it's just, you know, he cheated on our mother.
It's over. And as long as Mona's relatives insist Jeff is guilty, the Croteen kids want nothing to do with them.
Can you see a day when you might reconcile with them? I don't care if it takes 20 years. I'll still wait for him.
I will still wait for the kids. I feel terrible.
Carry a lot of sorrow in me but I could not imagine what the kids are going through. And of course the worst injustice of all.
She was so looking forward to Jennifer turning 21, and she couldn't wait to have a grandchild. She was so ripped off in life.
But Greg consoles himself by remembering all the things that were so special about his sister Mona. Smiling.
Just a big smile on her face, dancing. That's how I will remember her.
Yeah. Great older sister.

Officially, the murder of Mona Croteen remains an open case.

Jeffrey Croteen died in 2014.

Alan Rarig was found dead in a parking lot in Oklahoma.

He'd been shot twice. Once to the head.
You'd think his wife would be devastated. Not exactly.
She was either the black widow or bad luck. This is the unbelievable story of a femme fatale with a trail of bodies in her wake.
From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Fatal Beauty, available now on The Binge.