The Package (Ildiko Krajnyak)

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Well, I mean, I described to you some of the chemicals that, you know, I have had in the past: you know, strontium nitrate and potassium nitrate and some other things.

So, as far as making some type of explosive device, did you make one?

No.

Ever?

Never.

Never made an explosive device.

No.

I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.

I'm Anasega Nicolazi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction.

And this is Anatomy of Murder.

When it comes to homicides, an investigator can learn a lot about a killer's intentions by the type of weapon chosen to commit the crime.

A gun, for instance, demonstrates a clear intent to kill.

Poison, premeditation, and bare hands, well, that's often a sign of unadulterated rage.

But the more unorthodox methods of murder, they can test detectives and prosecutors alike as they try to decipher motives and analyze evidence that they may not have had a lot of experience with.

And in those situations, local law enforcement might just call on experts that have the experience and the resources to solve even the most perplexing and disturbing crimes.

And I'm talking about the feds.

My name is Anna Martinez-Salak, and I'm a former federal prosecutor.

I began my career in Washington, D.C.

at Maine Justice with the National Security Division.

and then transferred out to the U.S.

Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, where I prosecuted and investigated national security matters from counterterrorism and espionage to export enforcement and cyber matters.

Ever since joining the Justice Department out of law school, Anna Martinez spent her career investigating terrorist attacks and prosecuting criminals involved in acts of mass destruction and murder.

But in 2018, she led an FBI task force investigating a very different type of case.

The story of this extraordinary crime began in the most ordinary of places, a modest day spa in Orange County, California, run by a 48-year-old cosmetologist named Ildiko Kroniak.

Ildiko Kroniak was an esthetician and small business owner.

She operated a day spa in Aliso Viejo, California, which is a small town in Orange County.

And she had immigrated from Hungary in the 1990s to the U.S.

She had come here by herself with very little, and she was an incredibly diligent worker and entrepreneur.

Ildiko's was a classic immigrant success story.

Holding a full-time job selling beauty supplies during the day, Ildiko put herself through cosmetology school at night.

She eventually saved enough money that she was able to open her own day spa, which had been her dream for many years.

Ildeko was described by her friends as elegant, charming, and incredibly social and deeply dedicated to her business and clients.

When we spoke with her friends and family, people described her as one of those magnetic personalities that could bring you in.

She was always happy to see you.

She told hilarious stories.

She cared about her clients and her friends.

She was

just a really effervescent personality.

On May 15th, 2018, at approximately one o'clock in the afternoon, Ildeco had just finished treating a mother and her daughter to facials in preparation for the daughter's wedding day.

It was the kind of business Ildeco loved, allowing her to be a trusted part of someone's big life event.

As the woman thanked her, Ildeco stepped behind the counter to process their payment.

Seconds later, the unthinkable happened.

The room exploded in a a white hot fireball, ripping through the store and blowing a gaping hole in the front of the two-story commercial building.

The massive blast was followed by an eerie silence, and then chaos.

People from surrounding buildings stumbled into the parking lot and couldn't quite believe what they were seeing.

Sirens soon filled the air.

The first officers arrived at the scene within minutes of the explosion.

Then when they arrived, they saw large plumes of white, white, grayish smoke coming out of the building.

They could see that where the day spa had been located, that that whole side of the building was decimated.

The windows were blown out, the walls had been completely blown apart, and essentially the entire side, the quadrant of the building where the explosion occurred was missing and in flames.

First responders looked at the damage and initially thought there must have been a gas main rupture.

They quickly got to work setting up a wide perimeter and evacuating people from the surrounding buildings, including dozens of children from a daycare center just across the street.

Well, I remember arriving to the command post and it was full of law enforcement officers.

And what I was struck by was just the amount of devastation, the fact that this building was completely decimated and the amount of destruction.

As someone who had experience with mass casualty events, Anna Martine looked at the damage and couldn't help but fear the worst.

And I think everyone was shocked that there were surviving victims.

It was incredibly lucky that the two women survived this attack.

Incredibly, the mother and daughter who were inside the spa at the time were still alive.

They had very extensive injuries.

The daughter had second second and third degree burns all over her body.

The mother did lose eyesight as a result of the bombing.

Despite their serious injuries, the victims were able to recount for investigators what had happened in the seconds before the massive explosion.

A mother and daughter had appointments with Ildiko that day at around 11.30 for facials as they were finishing up about an hour and a half later.

The daughter was standing just a couple feet away from Ildiko, who had gone behind her desk.

According to the daughter, there were several packages in cardboard boxes stacked behind the desk.

When the daughter reached into her purse to get her credit card to pay for the services, she could see Ildeko begin to open a package.

And then all of a sudden she heard, she described it as a tinging or a pinging sound and then an incredibly forceful amount of pressure knocked her off her feet.

The room filled with the white hot light as she described it and she never saw Ildico again.

The next few seconds were a terrifying blur of smoke, fire, and flying rubble.

Her mother, who was older, was knocked down under the debris.

The daughter screamed for her mother trying to find her.

She was finally able to pick her mother up out of the debris and they actually had to climb through

the now exposed and blown out windows and doors to get out of the building.

They were burned.

Their eardrums were ruptured and her mother had lost her sight.

It was a miracle they were still alive.

Sadly, Ildico was not so lucky.

The massive explosion was centralized directly in front of her.

And it then completely eviscerated her body.

After hearing the survivor's harrowing account of the blast and reviewing the initial evidence, investigators reached a critical conclusion.

This wasn't the result of a gas leak or faulty wiring.

Every fragment and scorch mark pointed to the one undeniable truth.

It was a bomb.

It was very clear that it was a bombing and it was targeted.

And based on that, FBI deployed to support the Orange County Sheriff's Department, who was the first law enforcement agency on scene.

Any potential mass casualty event like this one is going to attract a huge law enforcement response, often from multiple agencies and jurisdictions.

But the fact that this may have been a bombing also raised another frightening possibility, terrorism.

This was May 2018.

Our office, two years previously, had handled the San Bernardino terrorist attacks.

When the bombing occurred on May 15th, our first thought was that this could potentially be a terrorist act.

So FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force deployed, and so did we.

I think we had AUSA's at the command post within about an hour of the bombing.

Now, the task force also knew that if this was an act of terror, the danger might not be over.

Federal local officers rushed to evacuate and secure the surrounding area just in case of a potential follow-up attack.

The response to the scene was massive.

You had hundreds of law enforcement agents and officers, both from the Orange County Sheriff's Department, from the FBI, from the ATF, from other local police departments, responding to the scene.

After they made sure that all civilians were out of the location, they then went through a very methodical search.

of the building.

First, they did a render safe of the location where the bomb techs went in and did some initial assessment and looked for other devices.

Thankfully, no other explosive devices were found, but their search of the bomb-ravage building did turn up the remains of the sole fatality of the explosion, Ildico Croniac.

Due to the force of the bomb, the deceased victim, her body was horrific.

Her body was ripped apart.

Her midsection and her hands and forearms, the parts of her that were closest to the bomb when it went off, were completely eviscerated and the FBI ERT team spent weeks finding her remains in the trees and the bushes outside of the building.

It was an awful scene.

With the news of Eldico's shocking death, her friends and family were devastated and heartbroken.

And the mystery surrounding the incident was a source of fear throughout the town of Alicio Vajeo.

It was very scary to the whole community, all of Southern California.

As we talked about, we didn't know if this was a political, a terrorist attack, what it was.

So there was a lot of media attention in the beginning.

Over the next two weeks, forensic teams, including the FBI's evidence response team, spent their days combing through the debris field and analyzing components from the blast site.

And the FBI went through literally inch by inch in grids, searching for anything that could have been part of the bomb, any other relevant evidence, making sure that all human remains were collected in a humane way and preserved.

And they spent weeks processing the site.

Amongst the recovered evidence were pieces of what appeared to be a nine-volt battery and wire fragments embedded in the ceiling directly above the detonation point.

Telltale signs that the explosion had likely been triggered by a sophisticated improvised explosive device, or IED, that was likely concealed in a cardboard box and specifically designed to detonate upon opening.

Which meant first that this was no accident.

It was intentional and Ildico's death was ruled a homicide.

But if the bomb was hidden in mail addressed to Ildico, it also meant something else, that she was likely the intended target of the bomb, and investigators were determined to find out why.

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In May of 2018, a bomb ripped through a day spa in Southern California, killing 48-year-old Ild Deco Croniak instantly.

The FBI's JTTF, also known as the Joint Terrorism Task Force, determined that the homemade IED was hidden in a cardboard box, like a UPS-style package, designed to detonate when it opened by its intended target.

In other words, this was a deliberate and targeted case of homicide.

Which left investigators to wonder who had the motive and the expertise to execute such a devastating and merciless act of murder.

And you know, Scott, it's not such a wide range of individuals, right?

Because many people can get access to firearms.

Many people can get a knife or the different type of weapons we normally think about when we're thinking about violent crime.

But either to obtain a

destructive device like a bomb or even maybe know how to build it, I mean, that is a pretty narrow pool of people.

Yeah, there's obviously some level of sophistication here.

But when you start to think about what potential motives that could be, you've got to look at various different things.

And one of them, Manasiga, is really where this occurred.

You know, this occurred at her business.

Is there a financial motive?

Could there be an element of organized crime?

You know, was she in financial trouble and unable to pay a debt back?

These are the types of threads you have to pull on to try to develop some potential modus operandi.

But again, even trying to figure out the why really comes down to the who.

I mean, it's so rare that you get them and hear a targeting attack of a person, a woman.

I mean, one thing, it does come down to also thinking about the who, right?

Because given that this was the murder of a woman, well, statistics show that her killer, no matter how he chose to commit that crime, is most likely, very likely by the numbers, someone she knew.

And so investigators, before they even get to the why or the specific person, they're going to start right there in the place that they normally do, in the home.

One of the first people we were looking at was the husband, which is often where these cases start.

Ildeko had been married for nearly 20 years and was the mother of a teenage son.

But investigators soon learned that that her marriage was not exactly the most traditional.

They did live together, but they had separate lives.

So they had separate bedrooms in the house.

She was dating other men.

They were united together with their son in parenting.

They still had family events and dinners, etc.

But the romantic part of the marriage had ended.

Ildico's husband agreed to speak to police and was forthcoming about the state of their marriage, including the fact that he was aware that his wife was beginning to see other men.

It was an unorthodox arrangement, but one that worked for them and it allowed them to prioritize co-parenting their teenage son.

He also gave investigators his consent to search his digital devices.

You know, sometimes as an investigator, you just know.

Well, it was pretty clear from both his demeanor and his cooperation that Ildeco's husband was not a person of interest in his wife's murder.

However, his mention of Ildiko dating other men, well, that did raise the possibility of other suspects.

We then learned that Ildico was in a on and off, again, relationship with an individual named Stephen Beale.

He was the one who had called into the Orange County hotline that afternoon.

I think it was around 3 p.m., a few hours after the bombing, and said, I'm her business partner, and I heard there was an explosion.

Stephen Beale was a 59-year-old businessman from Long Beach, which is about an hour's drive north of Aliso Vajeo.

And according to Ildico's friends, Stephen and her were much more than just business partners.

Many of her friends and clients knew that she had been in a relationship.

Many of them had met Stephen, and they described a relationship that was very hot and heavy in the beginning.

They were both very into it, in love with each other, calling, texting all the time.

He had supported her in opening the spa.

He had actually helped her sign the lease, and he had provided her some cash.

As a minor investor in Ildico's spa, he wouldn't have much to gain from the destruction of the business or the death of his partner.

But his romantic history with the victim certainly made him someone police wanted to talk to, especially when they learned how their romance had ended.

They had a very intense romantic period, but then in around December, January, six months before the bombing, her friends consistently described that Ildico was trying to get out of the relationship with Stephen and that Stephen wasn't taking no, that she had really cooled towards him, that she is dating other men, that she was trying to disentangle herself from Stephen, trying to put some distance in between them, and that Stephen was still very aggressively pursuing her.

And so, soon after he contacted police, investigators decided to contact him right back.

So then officers went to Stephen Beale's residence, which was about an hour away in Long Beach.

And when they arrived, they saw that there were a bunch of UPS packages being delivered at Stephen's house.

So this is just one day after the bombing.

So you have to imagine the investigators were being extra cautious about anything out of the ordinary.

Even a stack of boxes constituted a potential threat.

At this point, we knew the description that the bomb went off as Ildico was opening a cardboard package.

So the officers were concerned that maybe

there was a bomb in one of the packages that had arrived at Stephen's residence.

You really couldn't be too careful.

I mean, it was possible that Stephen Beale could also have been a target or the responding officers.

They made sure that there were no bombs in the packages.

He He then allowed, he provided consent to enter the home.

So the bomb squad confirmed there were no hidden explosives in any of the boxes.

But once inside the house, Beal was about to provide a bombshell of his own.

He gave consent to search his house.

I will say the search was very concerning when they arrived at the house.

They found 130 pounds of volatile explosives and explosive precursor chemicals, the materials that you use to make combustible materials, black powder, etc., the explosive charge.

They found wires, all of the tools you would need to construct a bomb and a large quantity of bomb-making materials in Stephen's garage, the pool house, and in the attic.

But incredibly, Beale was adamant that he had a perfectly good explanation.

Stephen was a rocketry enthusiast.

He had actually obtained this high-level certification in building model rockets.

But we're not talking about one of those foot-long model rockets you may have shot in the air as a kid.

I mean, I remember buying and building STE's rockets and igniting them was more like lighting a piece of fireworks.

But in this case, this was so much more.

These were not what Stephen was building.

Stephen was building rockets that were the size of houses.

One of his rockets achieved Mach 2 speed.

These were massive contraptions that he needed a team to set off in the desert.

Stephen insisted that chemicals and materials found in his house were common among rocketry enthusiasts and that he didn't possess materials powerful enough to produce an explosion like the one seen on the news.

Once investigators set foot inside the house, it became clear this was far from an ordinary search.

Spread throughout the living room were over 130 pounds of precursor explosives, fully mixed charges, electric matches, and wiring rigged to trigger a blast.

Beale claimed it was all intended for his high-powered model rockets and fireworks, but whether that story held any truth or not, detectives still collected crucial insights, details that matched the profile they had built for Ildico's killer.

He had specialized skill and knowledge in mixing explosive powders and chemical compounds to make a bomb and also the fusing systems required to make those rockets and fireworks go off at the right time.

There was clearly a link between the explosion and the amount of materials in his house, his experience and knowledge in building devices that are essentially the same as a bomb.

Police also found several firearms in his house.

Now, they were all legally registered, but again, something police want to consider when he is being questioned in relation to the murder of his former girlfriend.

He actually, the following day on his own, without any request or prompting from the sheriff's department, showed up at the sheriff's department in Elisa Viejo.

Which to me is such a BRF or big red flag.

Being cooperative is one thing, but inserting yourself in an investigation, to me, always feels a bit suspicious.

Real quick before we start, I just want to,

you're here voluntarily.

You came in, drove in on your own.

What was notable to me and others was that he voluntarily sat for many hours of interviews those first two days of the bombing and yet he provided such little information

when investigators asked him about the volatile chemicals found in his home he calmly dismissed it as coincidence i don't remember what chemicals are around in the house because i haven't i haven't taken them down.

I haven't looked at them.

I haven't thought of them.

I didn't even know where they were.

If there's an oxidizer, I'm sure there was some sort of an oxidizer that was in the bomb that was placed because you have to.

And it clearly is possible that I have that oxidizer.

You know, if it was potassium nitrate, potassium nitrate is a specific chemical

and it's in both places.

That's not a surprise to me.

During the course of the interview, Beale volunteered to help, but was guarded and careful not to offer police anything that might be incriminating.

Although there was this one bizarre part where he starts describing a screenplay that he claimed to be writing about get this a professional assassin.

Just because I'm taking the life of someone doesn't mean that I'm the murderer because if I refuse to do it, this person would hire someone else.

So really, I'm just the tool.

All right, it's going to get done anyway.

It's going to get done anyway.

So it's the person that hires me that is actually the murderer, not me.

Which given the circumstances of his friend's murder seems pretty insensitive at best and possibly a kind of taunt or perhaps a weird flex.

And there's this part where he seems to be admitting to knowing a little too much about the crime scene.

Going back to something you just mentioned, you talked about the size of the package that she would have had to have opened in order to have done that kind of damage.

Why would you assume it was a package that she opened?

Because it's in the news reports.

Did she open a package?

It said it was a package.

Is that the only way that a package could be utilized?

I don't know.

I suppose you could have

a timer in there or a cell phone or something that would, you know, that would trigger it.

It's just package for me means

you open it.

I mean, that's my assumption.

When I get a package in the mail, I open it.

Other than that, I

don't know.

Eventually, Beale also shared some personal details of his and Ildico's past together.

It was very bizarre.

He was very calm throughout.

He was not emotional.

He said that he and Ildico were in a romantic relationship, that they had been dating for about two years before the bombing.

They met in June of 2016.

He described that they had a very intense romantic romantic relationship.

They traveled a lot together.

They shared a lot of the same interests.

He was clearly very smitten and in love with her.

At one point during the interview, he even let it slip that he was angry and resentful about their breakup.

He did admit that the relationship had soured, and he said that

around a few months before the bombing, that he had learned that she was dating other men.

and he confronted her and was very upset and felt that he had been betrayed and hurt.

According to Beale, this confrontation had started on a trip the couple took to Portugal, an attempt by Beale to rekindle their relationship, which ended up doing just the opposite.

He had confronted her as to whether or not she was dating other men, and she had told him that she was and that she had been dating an individual in Northern California.

The defendant admitted to being felt very betrayed and angered by that.

Because the reality is, if she had come to me and said, you know,

I really think that I want to open up our relationship a little bit.

I don't want to be exclusive.

I want to, you know, date other men.

I would have said, okay.

You know, we ultimately had that discussion.

Okay,

that's fine.

We'll do that.

And it was the hiding it that was a

deceit planned deceit.

So by admitting that he felt betrayed, he was basically handing investigators a potential motive, which to me is either incredibly stupid or another example of someone with an ego big enough to make him think that he can go toe-to-toe with the feds and just walk away.

When he was asked as to why there was so much volume of this material in his house, he said he didn't really know why it was still there.

He hadn't been making rockets for a long time.

He had lost interest.

He said after 9-11, he wasn't doing fireworks and rocketry anymore.

His answers really didn't make sense

when you looked at the amount of materials

in the house, particularly in his pool house, which was really his workshop.

And while some of the

jars or the containers of explosives did have some dust on them, it was also very clear that he had been in and out of there and working in that space recently.

Investigators were faced with with the decision.

They hadn't directly connected him to the crime scene, but they believed it was only a matter of time.

So at the end of the third interview, he was arrested on probable cause based on two devices that we found in his residence that appeared to be destructive devices.

They looked like little pipe bombs.

And so he was arrested on possessing an unregistered destructive device, which is a federal violation.

The decision to charge Beal was a calculated risk.

They hoped it would buy them time to gather the evidence they needed to prove that he killed Ildico, and it would also get a potentially dangerous man off of the street.

But show their cards too early, and it just might give their main suspect the opportunity he needed to get away with murder.

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The discovery of bomb-making materials in his home, a suspicious interview, and a backstory about a breakup has convinced federal investigators that Stephen Beale was responsible for the bomb that killed his ex-girlfriend, Ildego Kroniak.

But could they prove it?

We knew that this awful event had occurred.

We believed it was a targeted killing.

There were signs pointing to Beale.

We found what we believe would have supported a federal charge in his house.

We obviously didn't want any harm to the community to happen from another explosion occurring.

So, yes, there was a desire to secure the community.

At the same time, the investigation, it was very early on, and this was a very complicated scene and, you know, mixture of people and motives that we had to work through.

But unfortunately for the task force, those charges against Beale fell apart because it turned out that those devices they thought were pipe bombs, they were duds.

We then learned that they were more likely considered sugar bombs and that the explosive charge was lower than it had tested in the field.

So, we ended up having to dismiss those charges, and the defendant was released.

Prosecutors then embarked on a mission to build an airtight case before ultimately bringing murder charges.

And so, over the following months, investigators searched for any physical or circumstantial links between Beale and the explosive device that killed Ildico.

They did chemical testing at the location of the bomb and determined that the bomb had been made up of of a fuel and a chlorate or perchlorate oxidizer and that was confirmed by both chemical testing and the

unique white smoke that many of the witnesses had observed and at the defendant's residence he had chlorate and perchlorate oxidizers.

So the laboratory testing proved that the explosive mixture used in the bomb was chemically identical to the substances found at Beale's home.

But of course, he already had a plausible, if dubious, explanation, his love for model rockets.

So they went looking for an even more direct connection, specifically locating the, quote, seat or origin of the blast itself.

We were able to narrow down to really inches where we believed the package was when it exploded.

And that allowed us to really hone in on that area.

And what we found was we saw charring below the desk supporting that that was the location where the bomb had gone off.

And then directly above

where the desk had been, we found embedded in the ceiling three cells, battery cells that go into a nine-volt battery.

You may be asking, what can you learn from tiny pieces of a generic battery?

Turns out a lot.

These cells, and they were damaged and charred.

One of the bomb techs was able to determine that on the cells was a tiny little series of numbers and letters.

Eventually, and this took several weeks, we were able to tie those numbers on the battery cells to a shipment 9-volt batteries from China that were sold in the Southern California area in the two months leading up to the bombing.

That was a key piece of evidence.

And since Beale was in Southern California during this time, it was possible that he had bought that particular battery, but they'd still need a way to be sure.

And now this is the type of evidentiary findings that just always kept me interested in this field for all those decades.

Through some incredible boots on the ground cop work, we were able to get CCTV footage of the defendant purchasing a single CVS brand 9-volt battery sold in a one-pack just a few days before the bombing in cash.

I mean, that was a huge find.

We have this very unusual brand battery, this specific type, a 9 volt in a one pack.

And he's buying it on May 8th, seven days before the bombing in cash, which we thought was very suspicious.

And just listening to the other side of the argument in my head for a moment, I could hear the defense attorneys, you know, say people buy batteries all the time.

You know, investigators would need something more.

and it comes from the bits of wire recovered from the ceiling just above the blast.

Correct.

They found what they believed were the wires that made up the fusing system of the bomb.

They found these, again, unique single-strand solid core copper wires sheathed in plastic.

They found those

right above the seat of the blast in the ceiling, and they found the same type of wires in the defendant's residence.

And then there was the delivery system itself, the cardboard box that housed the bomb.

Investigators hoped to find a way to connect Beale to that box.

So first we had the witness statements, which described Ildeco opening a cardboard box and of a very odd size.

Her last image of Ildiko was Ildiko opening this box.

And she described it as a, you know, a standard cardboard shipping box with some shiny tape on top.

But the size really stood out to her.

It was like a shoebox, but narrower and higher.

And when

I think it was the next day that she, when she was still in the hospital, she was shown a box that measured 12 by 6.

She said, that's the size.

That's it.

That's the box.

I'm 100% sure.

So from the witness descriptions, we were looking for a very unique size box.

And to prove Beale purchased a similar box before the murder, it was back to the videotape.

In addition to the battery purchase, we linked the defendant to this very unique box size because we found CCTV footage and receipts showing that he purchased two 12x6x6 boxes on May 7th, the day before he purchased the battery.

And then we were able to get CCTV footage actually showing him purchasing the boxes from Staples just a few days before the bombing.

And so if he indeed did build the bomb using the rocketry chemicals from his house, the battery from CVS, and the cardboard box from Staples, how did he actually then deliver the bomb?

Right before the explosion, Ildico had gone to Hungary to visit her friends and family.

She was gone for about 10 days.

She arrived the night before the bombing.

And what we saw on the CCTV footage was Stevens' vehicle driving into the office park and leaving on at least two occasions while she was gone.

We also had had cell tower evidence placing him in the area of the day spa.

Which means he could have left the package at the business during one of those visits, timing it to coincide with her return from her trip to Hungary.

When we did a search of his vehicle, we found keys to the spa in the center console of his Prius.

And so we knew that he had visited the spa while she was away in Hungary on at least two occasions.

And as for how he knew when she would be out of town, well, Beale had already admitted to police in his prior interview that he had access to her daily schedule.

How'd you know she was back in the U.S.?

I have access to her schedule.

I'm the business manager for her.

Share a calendar or something?

Yes, special programs that she uses.

So with what was becoming a flood of evidence, the FBI and federal prosecutors finally made their move.

A little less than a year after the explosion, Beale was arrested and charged with Ildico's murder.

A grand jury returned an indictment with four charges in relation to the attack, including the malicious destruction of a building resulting in death and the use of a weapon of mass destruction.

Federal prosecutors were prepared to argue that Beal's jealousy and possessiveness had escalated into a lethal plot to kill the woman he claimed to love.

And they believe they finally had the hard evidence to prove it.

In the first trial, the defendant was represented by the Federal Public Defender's Office here in Los Angeles.

And they,

as is their right and their duty, they challenged us on every single piece of evidence.

And until the, really midway through the first trial, we did not know what their defense was going to be.

They had raised several different types of defenses throughout pretrial litigation.

There was a defense that this wasn't even a bomb, it was a gas explosion, or it was related to her oxygen facile machine.

And so we put on a case that could combat any possible defense that they may raise during the case.

But I can tell you from experience that sometimes admitting every possible piece of evidence in an already complex trial can come with risk.

We were on the defensive in the first trial.

We put

over 60 witnesses on the stand.

We had thousands of exhibits.

We were attempting to sort of show the overwhelming evidence that we had, but in doing that, I think we lost

the ability to focus the jury on the pieces of evidence that were most compelling.

We could feel during the trial that we were moving in a bad direction.

I like we knew that we were getting lost in the weeds, and defense counsel was doing a great job of poking any tiny little hole, no matter how irrelevant it it was to the actual bombing, but they were making headway.

So we could feel it going wrong and we could feel how exhausted the jury was as well.

The trial ran for three months over the summer of 2020.

And when both sides rested their cases, it was still anyone's guess which way the jury would go.

Had prosecutors proven that the heartbroken rocket enthusiasts had made the bomb that killed Ildico?

Or had the defense created enough reasonable doubt to blow their case apart?

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In Stephen Beale's trial for the murder of Ildeko Kruniak, the jury deliberated for nearly two weeks, an unbearably long time.

And those two weeks were awful because at any moment you could receive a call.

know you're hanging out with your team in the courthouse waiting you're waiting for a call that either there's a verdict or there's a jury note and the longer and longer it takes the worse it's looking finally anna and her team received the call from the courthouse deputy to report to the court in 10 minutes Everyone scrambles, we get up there, and then we had learned that they were unable to reach a verdict on the counts and a mistrial was declared.

And that was devastating.

Faced with a sea of evidence and the defense counter-arguments, the jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict.

And having had more than one hung jury in my years prosecuting homicides, I can say that it is a super difficult result for any prosecutor.

But here, so much more so.

In this case, you had the survivors who had witnessed and also been part of and maimed by this crime, and also for the family of the victim, Ildico.

The hardest moment of the jury returning and unable to return a verdict and a mistrial being declared was just turning from, you know, you sit at this table in the courtroom and you can't really see the audience, and then turning and seeing her husband, her cousin, all of her family members who were there every single day of the trial and looking at them and realizing that we were going to have to go through it again.

That was the worst moment.

When you look at the situations when these happen, and they don't happen very often, but when they do, do you see it as like sort of a diagnostic moment of how you move forward knowing you're going to retry the case?

It depends.

I mean, there's so many different types of them.

I've had them that were 11 to 1, and one of them because a juror kind of fell in love with my defendant.

You have them because, you know, there's some piece of evidence that they aren't getting or that hopefully it's a then teaching moment when we go back in there and try it again.

So again, it's not one size fits all, but I always look at it, first of all, by the numbers.

It does happen to work work more often than not in a prosecutor's favor when we have the opportunity to retry it.

But then, as you said, it's like a teaching moment, hopefully that we figure out how to take that same evidence and just, whether it's put it together differently for the juror or do something that hopefully brings it over the finish line to prove beyond any reasonable doubt the second time around.

And just like in this case, it didn't mean the journey was over.

It meant that the trial would happen again.

Witnesses would have to return to the stand.

graphic evidence would have to be presented as well, and Ildico's family would have to sit through another painful recounting of her murder.

And for everyone involved, it really would not be easy.

Particularly for the two surviving victims who were physically traumatized by the event, of course, but psychologically traumatized.

And they had had to testify in the first trial.

They were both subject to cross.

Again, the public defenders did exactly what they're supposed to do and zealously representing their clients, but it was brutal and intense.

And the thought that they would have to go back on the stand and once again be subjected to cross-examination when they had just had the unfortunate of witnessing this terrible event was really devastating.

And of course, it is always something that prosecutors are considering and thinking through.

But in the end, while incredibly difficult for all the survivors and Ildico's family in particular, justice must be served and this person must stop being a threat to society.

So for Anna Martine, it was never a question what she would do next.

We would have kept trying this case until either he was acquitted or we got a conviction.

When we started that second trial, we knew that if that did not result in an acquittal or a conviction, that we would go again.

There was no chance of us not pursuing this case.

We didn't dismantle our trial books.

We were like, okay, we're doing it again.

So forging forward, a retrial was scheduled for October of 2023 and prosecution redoubled their efforts to present a meticulous forensic case to a new jury.

Going into one, I thought there's no way a jury cannot convict on this evidence.

So having been through that experience, I was incredibly scared to go through it again and not to get a conviction.

We spent that whole year retooling our case.

We did a lot of soul searching and discussions with our colleagues and reviewing of the transcripts to figure out what went wrong and where we could do, we could do a better job.

And really the main difference was just that we put on a much more narrow case that presented our best evidence and didn't get into the weeds into all of the additional evidence that we found compelling but really wasn't necessary to get into.

In other words, keep it simple, at least somewhat, give the jury enough, but not so much as to potentially overwhelm them with too much information.

Of course, that's unless there is some new compelling evidence, which in this case, there was.

And it came from the form of one of our favorite little pieces of evidence in an investigation is a recorded jailhouse call.

So we did have recordings of him with his family members and associates throughout both trials.

He said some very disparaging things about Ildico.

He talked very poorly about her.

He did not seem to have any remorse or emotion about her death.

He told different stories to different people when they would confront him about some of the evidence that was being reported.

So we thought those jail calls were compelling to show that he was lying and also had very little remorse and some very negative expressions about the victim.

The second trial lasted for four weeks, during which jurors again heard testimony from the survivors, forensic experts, and law enforcement officers who had worked the scene.

Especially effective was the emotional testimony of the daughter who had escaped the blast after watching Ildiko

open the package that killed her.

Focusing on Beale's possession of volatile chemicals, his expertise in explosive making, and his access to both Ildeco's schedule and the spa itself, prosecutors presented a compelling argument of his guilt.

This was a carefully planned, premeditated act of murder.

And the fact that it required so much skill was precisely what made Beale such a dangerous man.

He was incredibly skilled.

I have no doubt that he knew the damage that was potential from this bomb going off.

In the digital media that we went through, we found lots of videos and images of him mixing chemicals and making rockets.

And again, a rocket is a bomb.

It's the same components.

He knew it would not only kill Ildeko, but that it could potentially kill anyone else in that area and destroy the building.

Targeting Ildeco made him a killer who needed to be held accountable.

His indifference to the lives and safety of anyone else who may have been caught in the blast, that made him a threat that needed to be stopped.

I think the jury only deliberated for about four hours.

Everyone scrambles.

Everyone arrives because it was so soon after closings.

A lot of the family was still there.

And the jury returned unanimous verdict on all four counts, guilty on all four counts.

On January 19th, 2024, the judge sentenced Beale to life in federal prison plus 30 years, citing the cold, calculated nature of the attack.

I remember walking back into sort of the war room where we kept all of the boxes, but it was the first time I sort of felt the import of what had happened and the loss of this woman.

And I had become close with some of her family members and friends.

And I remember hugging them at the end and just feeling like, whoa,

I couldn't believe that it had ended and we had gotten there.

And for the first time, I was really able to think about this woman who was no longer with us and how still in mourning all of her family and friends were having lost her.

The sentencing marked the end of a grueling five-year investigation that required the collaboration of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, Orange County authorities, and multiple federal partners.

But even after achieving a successful result, Anna Martine can't help but consider the toll a trial like this takes on everyone involved.

I've seen these horrible crime scenes and bodies blown apart and talked to family members of people who've been killed.

And that is always awful and that never goes away.

and those images you see at night.

I think what

was so difficult about this case was the amount of time and energy that the prosecutors and the agents lived and breathed this case and the commitment to not letting it go.

From the moment detectives arrived on scene, they faced a baffling puzzle.

Everything pointed to a premeditated terrorist plot.

Yet, as they methodically pieced together fragments of shredded documents, intercepted phone calls, and fibers matching Ildico's clothing, a different picture emerged.

What began as a potential mass casualty attack slowly unraveled into a singular act of violence.

In the end, Stephen Beale's weapon of choice wasn't meant for the public at large, but for one person.

And investigators realized they weren't stopping at terrorists, they were unraveling a calculated murder.

Even though the first jury hung, Anna Martine and her team demonstrated remarkable resolve, rebuilding the case piece by piece until a second jury saw clearly what the first had missed.

In true justice, the path to verdict is rarely a straight line.

It's dug out, refined, and ultimately reaffirmed.

Anna's sentiment is something felt by most homicide prosecutors, detectives, all the people that work in fields of such violence, loss, and pain.

But as tough as that can be, the cause is necessary, just, and also rewarding.

Getting justice for the victims and survivors of violent crime, like Anna and her colleagues did for Ildeco and the women so severely injured by the bomb.

It's that end goal that gave her the drive to keep going for all those hours, months, and years.

It's something I've often felt myself.

But in the end, there was justice, at least in the courtroom, for the mother and daughter and also for Ildico Kroniak, a mother, a businesswoman, and a friend to so many who had dedicated her life to making the world just a little more beautiful, one person at a time.

Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.

Anatomy of Murder is an audio chuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media.

Ashley Flowers is executive producer.

This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond, researched by Kate Cooper, edited by Allie Sirwa and Phil Jean-Grande.

I think Chuck would approve.

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Stay ahead of the hottest trends and discover new favorites from top brands like Reformation, Veronica Beard, Favorite Daughter, Free People, Mango, Madewell, and more.

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So get ready to shop in stores on Nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app today.