Secrets of the Sliding Door

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Tonight on Dateline.

Speaker 4 I turn on the news and it says high school teacher murdered. I was just distraught.

Speaker 5 Just distraught.

Speaker 6 You see them bringing her body out.

Speaker 2 Oh my God, I'm sorry.

Speaker 7 She was laying on the floor. Multiple stab wounds, lots of blood.

Speaker 8 Mattresses were turned upside down, drawers were taken out and turned upside down.

Speaker 7 If it was a burglary, that person took an awfully long time looking for something.

Speaker 2 There was a strange number on her cell phone.

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 9 Who was it?

Speaker 7 Her tag name was Miss Pumpkin.

Speaker 10 We told her we needed to talk to her in regards to an investigation.

Speaker 2 Man, I would like to have been a fly on the wall in that conversation.

Speaker 8 Inside that bag was the laptop.

Speaker 8 There are thousands and thousands of searches to sift through, and my god, Keith, I did it for days.

Speaker 10 There's a pattern of lies that I'm uncovering.

Speaker 11 We were in shock.

Speaker 12 This really can't all be happening.

Speaker 7 Now we were in bizarre land.

Speaker 13 A teacher murdered in a case that was a study in secrets. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dadline.

Speaker 2 Here is Keith Morrison with Secrets of the Sliding Door.

Speaker 2 Manhattan.

Speaker 2 Perhaps the most recognizable cityscape in all the world.

Speaker 2 And yes, this is a New York story.

Speaker 2 But not this New York.

Speaker 2 This one.

Speaker 14 We're kind of what we would call the forgotten borough.

Speaker 2 Staten Island, so close to the great moneyed monuments of the city, but

Speaker 2 really a world away.

Speaker 7 It doesn't have the hustle-bustle like the rest of the city does.

Speaker 2 The difference is night and day.

Speaker 2 These quiet streets seem a haven from the big city and the crime that comes with it.

Speaker 2 But sometimes the very thing you're trying to escape is already there.

Speaker 2 Staten Island is home for many of the city's police and firefighters and teachers, like the remarkable Simonette Mapes Croupi.

Speaker 2 As Simonette's mother Teresa wanted the whole world to know,

Speaker 12 she was just an amazing, amazing soul.

Speaker 12 I always consider her my gift from God.

Speaker 2 She was, said just about everybody, a giver, devoted to her students, to her family, to her pets, and she was a dreamer who believed in angels and fairy tales

Speaker 2 until a hot July day in 2012.

Speaker 16 I just came home. My wife is dead.
Oh my god, I think my house was robbed.

Speaker 2 The man on the 911 call was Jonathan Croupy, Simonette's husband. He'd been running errands and then came home to a nightmare

Speaker 2 and utter chaos.

Speaker 16 I know you're scared, but

Speaker 16 why do you say she's dead? Like, is she... There's blood all over her.
Oh, my God. You're trying to pull her blood.

Speaker 2 The next-door neighbor, Bob Garberino, heard the commotion. I came out, I came about here.

Speaker 2 And I saw Kruppy standing over there on the phone. And he was just going up and down, going,

Speaker 2 they killed her. They killed her.
She's dead. She's dead.
He was in like a little bit of hysterics.

Speaker 2 Joe Metzopoulos was the first detective to arrive to what was indeed a horror.

Speaker 17 Inside the house, there was a female body laying face down in a pool of blood. There was no shell casings or bullet holes.
I think the assumption was that she might have been stabbed.

Speaker 10 I got a phone call from Detective Metzopoulos telling me that we had a homicide.

Speaker 2 Detective Michael Burdick got over there pretty quickly to witness his turn to take the lead.

Speaker 10 The amount of stab wounds was excessive. I think you got somebody who's very angry and intent on making sure that she is in fact dead.

Speaker 2 It fell to Jonathan to break the news to Simonette's mother, Teresa. She rushed to her daughter's house.

Speaker 12 By the time I got there, the place was full of cops and full of helicopters.

Speaker 5 Police are still still closely guarding the scene of a brutal stabbing death on Staten Island.

Speaker 12 It was just horrible.

Speaker 5 Neighbors say her family showed up, destroyed and confused.

Speaker 12 I wasn't thinking straight.

Speaker 12 I just wanted to see my daughter. I didn't care where she was, how she looked.
I just wanted to touch him one more time.

Speaker 2 Did you get to?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 Simonette's father, John, a stoic career military man, also raced over, of course.

Speaker 2 He found his wife in front of their daughter's house, inconsolable.

Speaker 3 I grabbed her and she said, they killed our baby, they killed our baby, and just

Speaker 2 she collapsed. Because, of course, they couldn't see her, couldn't go inside.
Not while the detectives scoured the place for evidence for any kind of clue in all the mess.

Speaker 10 There was disarray. Drawers were taken out of the kitchen.
Drawers were taken out of dressers.

Speaker 2 Like a burglar who didn't know what the heck he was looking for or didn't know where to find it or something.

Speaker 10 I would agree with that.

Speaker 2 And there was a door open, right?

Speaker 10 Yeah, slide-in door. It was ajar by about two to three inches.
I took notice of that.

Speaker 10 Multiple things were sent for DNA.

Speaker 10 Knives that were discovered inside of the dishwasher. We swabbed the back handle of the door.

Speaker 2 While the crime scene was being processed, Detective Metsopoulos drove a distraught Jonathan to the station.

Speaker 17 The first thing that I did was I offered my condolences to Jonathan. He seemed like he was just more numb.

Speaker 2 Numb.

Speaker 2 Easy to understand why.

Speaker 2 In the days after she was killed, Simonette's family would be overwhelmed with so many emotions, grief, of course, but also rage.

Speaker 2 Her mother went to the media with a message for the killer, whoever it was.

Speaker 8 I will find you.

Speaker 12 I will get you.

Speaker 14 You will pay. It's not going to bring my daughter back, but she'll know that her mother will not leave any stone unturned.

Speaker 2 Turn over enough stones, and

Speaker 2 well, you never know what you will uncover.

Speaker 12 It got worse and worse and worse.

Speaker 7 It's kind of like Jacqueline Hyde. Eventually, Hyde's gonna dominate.

Speaker 8 He was an animal. He was disgusting.
Disturbing to say the least.

Speaker 7 So now we were in Bizarro Land.

Speaker 2 School was out for the summer. So Simonette Mapes Kruppy's students got the news, like the rest of the city, impersonal and devastating.

Speaker 5 Police say a 29-year-old woman was found dead.

Speaker 4 I turn on the news and it says like high school teacher murdered. Drop to the floor and just start crying, blowing my eyes out.

Speaker 2 Simonette was Carmen Sita Majid's teacher and was supportive, understanding, kind.

Speaker 4 It was like, who would kill her? Like, who has a problem with her?

Speaker 2 Certainly not her students. They adored her.
This is von Stephen Duvallier.

Speaker 6 You see them bringing her body out,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 6 you can tell about

Speaker 6 the body bag,

Speaker 6 the shape of her body,

Speaker 2 you know.

Speaker 2 Oh my god, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 The crime scene here on a busy road in Staten Island was, no better word for it, ransacked.

Speaker 2 This is the NYPD's Mike Cosenza.

Speaker 8 We're conducting canvases to determine if there are any similarities as far as burglaries in the area.

Speaker 2 Detectives considered the burglary angle, but the level of violence suggested passion, rage.

Speaker 2 It just didn't make sense.

Speaker 2 Thing was, everybody seemed to love Simonette, or Sissy, as her family and close friends called her.

Speaker 8 As part of our investigation, we have to dig deep into her life, you know, see if she had any secrets. And, you know what, Keith? She was an angel.

Speaker 12 Everybody thinks their children are special, but I always said that God sent Simonette to me because I needed Simonette.

Speaker 2 Simonette was so respected, she could have worked anywhere, but she chose a school in a high crime section of Brooklyn.

Speaker 2 There she taught social studies and raised money to help her students, from buying them prom dresses to treating them at restaurants where they'd never been, couldn't afford to be.

Speaker 3 She explained to him, says,

Speaker 2 go to school, get your degree, and this can be yours.

Speaker 4 We called her mommy Maps. She would always bring up Disney.
And for me, I'm obsessed with Disney.

Speaker 4 I remember we would just be in class bored, and she would love to just break out singing The Little Mermaid, I'm Part of Your World.

Speaker 2 Vaughn told us her kindness and encouragement changed his life.

Speaker 2 He was bullied in school, ready to quit, until Mommy Mapes stepped in.

Speaker 6 She's like, Vaughn, please, just please don't. You're special.
You have to get your education, Vaughn. You don't want to become left behind.

Speaker 2 Simonette's devotion to others and her deep faith once once led her to consider becoming a nun.

Speaker 2 And then she met him,

Speaker 2 the love of her life, Jonathan Croupy.

Speaker 12 Simonette went on a date with him. She came home that night and she said, Mom, oh my God, he's so nice.
You know, I really like this one.

Speaker 2 This is Simonette's little brother, John. As a match, how did this look?

Speaker 15 It looked great. And every time they were together, they always had a good time.
As long as my sister was happy, I was a happy brother.

Speaker 12 I used to tell people I couldn't buy a bed of salmon.

Speaker 12 That's how good he was.

Speaker 2 Wonderful woman. Great marriage.
Still, of course, they had to look at everything, including the husband. Standard procedure.

Speaker 8 But, you know, you got to treat him with some compassion, to say the least. You hung up, Mama.

Speaker 2 Detectives learned Simonette helped Jonathan get a job teaching English at the same school where she worked. And he was good, too.

Speaker 10 Both teachers were known to be charismatic, able to relate to the students on

Speaker 10 a deeper level than most. Sometimes, Mr.
Son,

Speaker 10 you get it!

Speaker 4 He was funny. He would do cartoon voices.
I remember one year he dressed up as Wolverine.

Speaker 4 He was just like a little big kid. Like, you can just...

Speaker 4 His class was a joy.

Speaker 2 But did he have an alibi?

Speaker 2 Yes, he did.

Speaker 2 Jonathan told the police he last saw Simonette when he left their condo at 7.30 in the morning. Assistant DA Wanda Di Oliveira was there as Jonathan recounted his day.
A busy one.

Speaker 7 He said, it's our wedding anniversary this weekend. I'm going to get cheap tickets for a Broadway play for my wife and I to attend.

Speaker 10 He then went to his school to pick up books for a summer school because they had both opted to teach summer school in order to earn some extra income.

Speaker 10 Upon leaving the school, he had went to get his car inspected.

Speaker 2 Jonathan also dropped by a sneaker store and then one final stop before heading home.

Speaker 7 He tells his wife via at least two texts, I'm going to stop at Home Depot and get paint for that painting project that you wanted to do in the bathroom.

Speaker 7 So he pulls into the Home Depot but decides not to go in because he hadn't heard back from her and comes home.

Speaker 2 Detectives checked out his story and found video of Jonathan at the school and at the sneaker store, as well as a time-stamped receipt from his car inspection.

Speaker 8 The times that he gave us were consistent with the times he was at the locations that he had visited that day.

Speaker 2 In other words, they looked like a good alibi. It did.

Speaker 2 Jonathan and Simonette were not wealthy, but if this was a burglary, well, there was something that might have attracted the intruder. Jonathan had a side hustle, selling pricey sneakers.

Speaker 2 He stored them in the condo.

Speaker 7 On the top floor, there were very, very expensive designer, I mean three, four, $500 sneakers, dozens of those. So there were sneakers upon sneakers.

Speaker 12 The first thing we thought was, oh no, he was selling sneakers and some guy came in to rob the sneakers while Simonette was at home.

Speaker 2 A burglary turned violent.

Speaker 2 Or did someone set out to kill Simonette because of something she witnessed? Something she wasn't supposed to see.

Speaker 2 Just one week earlier, as Simonette and her husband walked from school to their car in one of Brooklyn's most dangerous neighborhoods.

Speaker 15 There was a shooting when they ducked down behind the car. Once they heard the gunshots go off, it was scary.

Speaker 6 It was dangerous.

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Speaker 2 Five days after her murder, a funeral mass was held for Simonette at Our Lady of Pity Roman Catholic Church on Staten Island.

Speaker 2 An overflow crowd turned out to show their respects.

Speaker 3 The amount of love that was shown by the school and the students and our family and friends, obviously, it took me aback.

Speaker 2 Some of the parents

Speaker 3 came to Teresa and I said, You don't know what impact your daughter had

Speaker 2 on

Speaker 3 my daughter's life. I never knew.

Speaker 2 Never.

Speaker 2 On her way to the funeral, student Carmen Sita Majid messaged Simonette's husband and fellow teacher, Jonathan.

Speaker 4 And the message that I had got back was like, your fairy godmother got her wings.

Speaker 4 And it just broke me.

Speaker 6 I remember going up to the casket

Speaker 6 and looking at her. And you can tell that her body went through something traumatic.
That even hurt me even more. I love this woman.
She didn't deserve that.

Speaker 2 Police were there, a sharp eye out the whole time.

Speaker 10 Maybe you might get information from a student that is not looking to come forward initially, but might find an opportunity to approach you and see if there's information that could be had.

Speaker 2 What information?

Speaker 2 Maybe about the scary things that have been happening around Siminette School in that high-crime neighborhood.

Speaker 4 Our school was right across from Cypress Projects, so there was, you know, gangs, fights, shootings.

Speaker 6 When you stepped out of that building, it was scary. It was dangerous.

Speaker 2 Were you afraid for her working at such a tough school?

Speaker 12 Oh, yes. I used to beg her all the time, please Simonette, quit.

Speaker 12 Please come to Staten Island to work and

Speaker 8 but she wouldn't do it the school where siminet worked is uh

Speaker 8 it could be considered a high crime area and it wouldn't be unusual to hear gunshots in the distance

Speaker 8 yeah gangs and so on around there yeah there are gangs everywhere unfortunately

Speaker 2 just a week before the murder siminette witnessed something frightening as she and Jonathan were walking to their car.

Speaker 15 There was a shooting nearby and they ducked down behind the car Once they heard the gunshots go off, I was concerned because I know the reality of where she works.

Speaker 15 I was always afraid for her working in that area. Always.

Speaker 2 Police didn't think Jonathan and Simonette were targets, but she posted about the incident on Facebook.

Speaker 2 She didn't say anything describing the shooter, but if it was a gang member and they learned she was there, they sure wouldn't want her talking about it.

Speaker 2 I assume they wouldn't have looked into it, right?

Speaker 2 Absolutely, yes.

Speaker 7 They went to check out, you know, well, maybe this was in retaliation for, you know, being present for the drive-by shooting.

Speaker 8 Maybe what she saw was enough to get her killed.

Speaker 2 But then, at the funeral, Simonet's brother John looked around and was amazed.

Speaker 15 My sister taught several Bloods and Crips. These two organizations do not like each other.
I do remember a high-ranking member of the Bloods gang

Speaker 15 telling my mother that for today they made a truce to say goodbye to my sister.

Speaker 3 They respected her that much.

Speaker 2 That is something.

Speaker 15 There was roughly

Speaker 15 50 of them.

Speaker 2 That's amazing, really.

Speaker 2 They never did find out who was shooting whom near the school.

Speaker 7 She hadn't identified anybody. Neither one of them did.
So there would be nobody out there that would even know that they were connected to that drive-by.

Speaker 6 These gang members, they're too busy killing each other. They're not worried about any outsiders.
They're not hurting any outsiders.

Speaker 2 So was the shooting a motive for murdering Simonat?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 But a promising lead emerged when the DNA lab came back with a result from the sample taken from the condo's sliding door.

Speaker 7 They swapped it, it comes back, a mixture of DNA.

Speaker 2 Some of it would be Jonathan's, right?

Speaker 7 There was Jonathan's DNA and a unknown female.

Speaker 7 In other words, it was not Simonat's DNA.

Speaker 8 It was shocking because the DNA didn't didn't belong to his wife. So, you know, you say to yourself, well, if it's not Simonette's DNA, then whose DNA is it?

Speaker 2 And when investigators searched Simonette's phone, they discovered another unknown female.

Speaker 7 The contact came up as woman

Speaker 7 in her cell phone.

Speaker 2 Woman?

Speaker 2 Well, that's intriguing.

Speaker 2 An unknown female's DNA on the door. A phone contact marked only woman.
What could it possibly mean?

Speaker 17 Who was it?

Speaker 7 So her tag name was Miss Pumpkin.

Speaker 2 For a mother in mourning who'd pledged to find her daughter's killer, each passing day without an arrest, was torture.

Speaker 8 It was very, very hard

Speaker 18 having to put up with

Speaker 2 what was going on.

Speaker 18 I mean, it's not like we've ever been through anything like this before. We didn't know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, of course not. And months dragged on, right? Months.

Speaker 12 Yes, months.

Speaker 2 The detectives had conducted a lot of interviews during that time, trying to find out everything they could about Simonette and her relationships.

Speaker 2 They also explored electronic devices, both hers and those closest to her.

Speaker 7 The detectives started looking at all the information. Who are they calling? Who are they looking up? Who are they emailing? Who are they texting?

Speaker 2 Secrets are harder to maintain these days.

Speaker 7 No such thing anymore.

Speaker 2 No such thing indeed. The search of Simonet's phone is what led to that odd contact listed only as woman.

Speaker 10 So part of...

Speaker 10 Our normal investigation would be to Google the numbers if they're an unknown number and see see if there's any information that we can uncover.

Speaker 2 That led to a classified ad on Backpage.com in the Adult Services section. The number on Simonette's phone was for an escort.

Speaker 17 Who was it?

Speaker 7 So her tag name was Miss Pumpkin.

Speaker 2 A phone number for an escort named Ms. Pumpkin on Simonette's phone?

Speaker 2 Which seemed to make no sense at all.

Speaker 2 Of course, they had to talk to Miss Pumpkin.

Speaker 2 But how? Without scaring her off.

Speaker 2 Their solution?

Speaker 2 You won't find in any police manual.

Speaker 10 I was

Speaker 10 tasked with calling her up and ordering her up as a John in order to get her to show up at a local motel on Staten Island.

Speaker 2 Say that again?

Speaker 10 Detective Cassenza and I had

Speaker 10 made a plan that we would call up Miss Pumpkin and I would order her up as a John in order for her to produce herself at the local motel and think that she was, you know, about to turn a trick.

Speaker 2 Detectives Burdick and Casenza headed to the motel. Ms.
Pumpkin was there, expecting to meet a new client.

Speaker 10 We identified ourselves, told her that we needed to talk to her in regards to an investigation.

Speaker 2 Man, I would like to have been a fly on the wall in that conversation. How'd she take it?

Speaker 10 She knew what she was there for, which had to do with prostitution, and

Speaker 2 she

Speaker 10 didn't want any trouble to come her way.

Speaker 2 No. The alternative would not be very pleasant for her.

Speaker 10 No, sir.

Speaker 2 That is when they told her they were investigating the murder of Simonette Mapes Croupie.

Speaker 2 Never heard of her, said Miss Pumpkin. And then they asked about Simonette's husband.
Jonathan. Did she know him?

Speaker 2 Again, a hard no.

Speaker 2 But then detectives started describing him.

Speaker 10 She only had one school teacher that she was dating at the time.

Speaker 2 Well, well, well.

Speaker 8 We showed her a picture. She knew Jonathan Kroupy as Mike.
That was the name that he gave her.

Speaker 2 And suddenly, she knew a whole lot. Jonathan, Mike to Ms.
Pumpkin, was a regular client.

Speaker 10 He was having, in fact, a relationship for multiple years with her.

Speaker 2 Multiple years with her?

Speaker 10 Multiple years.

Speaker 2 Really?

Speaker 2 The man's so in love with his wife, the devoted husband, had been keeping a sex secret from everyone for years.

Speaker 2 After that shocker, the detectives figured it best to invite Ms. Pumpkin to the station.
Get the whole story that way.

Speaker 7 She showed up and provided them with a wealth of information. When asked when she last saw him, she said the date that his wife was found murdered.

Speaker 2 The very day Simonet was killed, he was having sex with another woman. Oh my.

Speaker 2 But there was more.

Speaker 8 So normally, Jonathan would call her weeks in advance to arrange a date. On this day, he called her the day of from a different number, demanded, I need to see you today.

Speaker 2 Very unusual.

Speaker 8 Very unusual. So she agreed, and she met him at the local motel.

Speaker 2 But hadn't hadn't Jonathan provided alibis for the whole day? Alibis that certainly did not include a dalliance with Ms. Pumpkin.
Well, yes, he did. And his story was mostly backed up by video.

Speaker 2 Mostly.

Speaker 2 Investigators were never able to confirm one part of it. The visit to Home Depot.
And now they knew why. Miss Pumpkin was his Home Depot.
You got it.

Speaker 7 Pit stop.

Speaker 2 With With Miss Pumpkin in the picture, that unknown female DNA recovered from the crime scene suddenly became much more interesting. So detectives collected her DNA.

Speaker 7 And when the DNA swab was compared to the mixture of DNA on the sliding glass living room door, it came back to Miss Pumpkin.

Speaker 2 So did you think she could have been involved somehow, that she was just hiding it from you?

Speaker 10 So we knew at that time that they were intimate. It's a telltale sign of a a good detective to make sure that you let the evidence speak to you and tell you the story.

Speaker 2 And oh, what a story they were about to hear.

Speaker 7 So now we were in Bizarro land.

Speaker 2 Wow.

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Speaker 2 Detectives learned that Simonette's sneaker-collecting, comic-book-loving teacher husband was in a secret long-term relationship with an escort named Ms. Pumpkin.

Speaker 2 Clearly, a very bad look for Jonathan. And when Ms.
Pumpkin's DNA was a match to a sample found at the crime scene,

Speaker 2 well, that wasn't a good look for her either.

Speaker 10 It made me think that she could have been involved or not been involved.

Speaker 2 miss pumpkin admitted she had met jonathan at his house before but denied that she was there the day of the murder so to see if she was telling the truth detectives checked her cell phone and sure enough it did not ping near the house that day so what was her dna doing there

Speaker 2 the answer said prosecutor de oliveira was pretty simple jonathan put it there unwittingly are you suggesting that you know he picked up her DNA when they were intimate together during that meeting that day, went home,

Speaker 2 put his hands on that sliding glass door, and got her DNA on the door in addition to his?

Speaker 7 No, I'm not suggesting. I know.
That's what happened.

Speaker 2 Ms. Pumpkin was cleared.
But Jonathan?

Speaker 2 Not at all. Detectives were learning that behind the happy facade, his marriage was in crisis and for reasons other than his secret sex life.
One issue was this.

Speaker 2 Teachers in New York City public schools are required to have a master's degree.

Speaker 2 Jonathan and Simonette decided to earn theirs at the College of Staten Island, and she graduated with flying colors, but then discovered Jonathan had registered but never attended classes.

Speaker 10 This was a big point of contention in the marriage because the gravity of not having your master's degree to paint the picture means you don't have a job.

Speaker 2 With the deadline approaching, the high school principal gave him an ultimatum.

Speaker 12 She was to the point where either you get your master's or you're out of here, you're not coming back.

Speaker 2 Simonette was ready with an ultimatum of her own.

Speaker 7 She had shared with her mom that she was going to confront him.

Speaker 2 As far as Simonette's family knew, that meant confronting him about work and what happened to the money he was spending, supposedly on school. Well, investigators knew now where a lot of it was going.

Speaker 2 To Ms. Pumpkin.
How much money did he spend on this stuff?

Speaker 8 He spent a lot of money. Her fee was $300 for an hour.
Apparently, all her money went to the bills and the food, and his money went to

Speaker 8 his sneakers and his extramarital affairs.

Speaker 2 Might be a good time to search the house again, go deep this time. It was still a declared crime scene, and Jonathan hadn't set foot in the place since just after the murder.

Speaker 2 So had they missed anything? Well, yes, they had. Shoved out of sight in a downstairs closet was a green shoulder bag.

Speaker 2 Here's Jonathan at his school with that very green bag the day of the murder.

Speaker 2 He told detectives when he returned home, Simonette was already dead, lying on the floor right in front of that closet door. Meaning that when he stashed the bag.

Speaker 8 In order to get to that closet, he had to step over his wife's dead body to pull that door open, which is disturbing to say the least.

Speaker 2 It is pretty disturbing.

Speaker 8 And inside that bag was the laptop.

Speaker 2 The laptop, on which more of Jonathan's secret life was revealed in lurid detail.

Speaker 7 Porn sight, escort sight, porn sight, escort sight, porn sight, escort sight. So now we were in Vizaro land.

Speaker 2 Strange, strange existence. Living with an angel and behaving like a devil secretly.
Yep.

Speaker 8 It said it really is.

Speaker 2 From the looks of it, everything came to a head after Simonette discovered Jonathan didn't get his master's degree. She was finally going to do something about it.

Speaker 12 Yes, she was leaving. And she promised me she was going to leave.
She was done. I said, just come home.

Speaker 12 That's all you have to do. Bring the dogs and come home.

Speaker 2 And since Miss Pumpkin's number was in Simonette's phone, detectives figured she knew about Jonathan's secret relationship. So the confrontation she promised must have been about that too.

Speaker 2 And they had reason to think it happened the night before she was found murdered. That's when Teresa had an emotional conversation with her daughter.

Speaker 12 She answered the phone crying. She goes, I don't feel good.
I said, please promise me you're going to go to the doctor tomorrow. She said, I promise you, mom.

Speaker 12 And that was the last words I ever said to my

Speaker 15 daughter.

Speaker 7 She would never be hysterical crying like that because she was ill. That just wasn't her.
Something was going on in that house that night.

Speaker 2 A story of the crime was coming into focus, but it was still just a theory. I don't have a murder weapon.
I don't have an eyewitness.

Speaker 8 I don't have a video. I can just keep stacking and putting the pieces together.

Speaker 2 One of the biggest pieces came from the medical examiner. Siminet's time of death was sometime before 7.30 in the morning.

Speaker 7 If Jonathan left when he claimed to have left, she had to have been murdered during the hours that he was present in the home.

Speaker 2 Before 7.30 a.m.

Speaker 7 Absolutely before 7.30 a.m.

Speaker 2 The prosecutor was convinced that only one person had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to kill Simonette.

Speaker 2 On November 13th, 2012, Jonathan Kruppi was arrested and charged with murder.

Speaker 2 Can you tell me about the arrest and what that was like for you?

Speaker 11 We were in shock.

Speaker 12 Like, how could he have done this to us? Why did he do this to my baby?

Speaker 8 Why?

Speaker 2 Nobody who knew him wanted to believe it, especially the students who loved him.

Speaker 6 It was just unbelievable that this person who showed one side in school was a totally different person to his wife.

Speaker 2 But there was no avoiding the other Jonathan Croupy now.

Speaker 2 His dark secrets were about to be put on public display at his murder trial.

Speaker 7 It's kind of like Jacqueline Hyde. Eventually, Hyde's going to dominate.

Speaker 2 Forget the secrets, said Cruppy's defense.

Speaker 2 Start looking for the real killer.

Speaker 21 Why are you not out trying to find who it is?

Speaker 2 For those convinced they knew him,

Speaker 2 Jonathan Kruppy's arrest for murder was hard to believe.

Speaker 4 I told my friends and they were like, nah, nah, he didn't do that.

Speaker 7 He didn't do that.

Speaker 2 The trial got underway in June 2015. Wanda Di Oliveira took the lead for the prosecution.

Speaker 2 The job of defending Krupi fell to Mario Gallucci, one of Staten Island's most experienced defense attorneys and no stranger to the prosecutor.

Speaker 21 I've probably tried

Speaker 21 at least five or six homicides against Wanda, and it's a war.

Speaker 2 It's war.

Speaker 2 Prosecutor DiOliveira made a preemptive strike on what figured to be a theme for the defense, that Simenette was killed during a botched burglary.

Speaker 2 Not likely, De Oliveira said, since jewelry and credit cards and even Jonathan's high-end sneakers were not stolen.

Speaker 7 If this was a burglar who went to the trouble of literally trashing this house, they left everything of obvious value behind.

Speaker 2 The jury heard about Krupi's sexual obsessions from his computer searches and also from Mrs. Pumpkin, who testified using a pseudonym.

Speaker 6 We brought her in.

Speaker 2 Dramatically, I gather.

Speaker 7 So this is going to sound odd maybe coming out of my mouth, but what a lovely woman. Very pleasant, very well put together, educated.

Speaker 2 The centerpiece of the prosecution's case was to give jurors a look at a deeply troubled marriage and get inside Croupi's head. to offer a motive to the jurors for such an atrocious crime.

Speaker 7 The strategy was to them literally in the lives of Simonette and Jonathan.

Speaker 7 His job, everything was going in the garbage once she exposed for the final time what a fraud he was and that he was patronizing prostitutes. His life as he knew it was going to completely end.

Speaker 2 Prosecutors showed the jury other searches from Kruppy's computer. Look like a manual on how to kill your wife.

Speaker 7 There are searches for how to slit a throat,

Speaker 7 how to break a person's neck, does a fall actually break someone's back, how to clean up a crime scene.

Speaker 2 Defense Attorney Gallucci challenged virtually every piece of the state's case and suggested, no surprise, that the murder was in fact a result of a bungled burglary.

Speaker 2 He gave the jury evidence to back that up.

Speaker 2 DNA of an unknown person found on a jewelry box in the condo.

Speaker 21 To me, there was the person that did it, and why are you not out trying to find who it is? I don't think they ever took this home invasion seriously, ever.

Speaker 2 Prosecutors have taken great care to pick apart the timeline of Kruppy's day to show how it didn't hold up as an alibi, because the ME said the murder happened before 7.30 that morning.

Speaker 2 Not so, said the defense. Did you argue that the timeline of the murder was inaccurate?

Speaker 21 I argued that the timeline of the death was inaccurate. The time of death was inaccurate.

Speaker 2 They put it too early? Is that the idea?

Speaker 21 Too early. They made it so it didn't fit into his alibi.
We had our own expert that put the time of death in line with his alibi.

Speaker 2 Gallucci's expert put the time of death later when Coopy was out running errands. An alibi is supported by time-stamped video and receipts.

Speaker 2 With one exception.

Speaker 21 The only bit of the alibi that's not corroborated is this embarrassing act that this man was with a prostitute. No married man is going to admit that, you know, that he was with a prostitute.

Speaker 21 So he came up with the Home Depot argument. I actually remember trying to pick more men than women on this jury.

Speaker 2 Why did you want to do that?

Speaker 21 Because a man could understand

Speaker 21 that that would be an embarrassing thing to have to disclose, and I'd rather say I was buying a hammer at Home Depot than

Speaker 21 having activities with a prostitute.

Speaker 2 Colucci even had an explanation for those how-to-kill searches on Kruppy's computer. Nothing unusual, he said, for an English teacher.

Speaker 21 He was teaching Shakespeare, and I think he was teaching Macbeth. And he was trying to develop his knowledge of how somebody, you know, would stab somebody, slit somebody's throat.

Speaker 2 Did anybody roll their eyes in the jury box as you went down that road?

Speaker 21 I don't recall that, but I have to answer it. I can't just let it sit out there and dangle.

Speaker 2 Kabuchi told the jury to focus on evidence about the murder and not get distracted by his client's behavior.

Speaker 2 All those issues about Miss Pumpkin, did that not make you think that, huh, here's a guy you have to look at pretty seriously for the murder case.

Speaker 21 So that's troubling, but that doesn't make him a killer. It makes him a bad husband.
It doesn't mean I'm going to kill my wife.

Speaker 2 In the end, Gallucci felt pretty good about his chances with the jury.

Speaker 21 I sat down in that chair and I said, you got this. He's going home.

Speaker 2 I really

Speaker 21 was that confident.

Speaker 2 Prosecutor to Oliveira would have the last word with the jury. She had a very different take on Jonathan Kruppy.

Speaker 7 it's kind of like jekyll and hyde eventually hyde's gonna dominate and that's kind of what i would say happened that day

Speaker 2 the jurors deliberated for less than two hours before returning a verdict jonathan croupy

Speaker 2 guilty

Speaker 12 of second-degree murder the jury met us outside and hugged us and

Speaker 12 and said how sorry they were.

Speaker 2 I heard you had a big hug for the prosecutor, too.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 7 She was falling down to her knees and I had to hold her up and grasp her. It was literally just this sobbing, you know, just

Speaker 7 like really

Speaker 7 grief-stricken. It was not joy.
She was really overcome.

Speaker 2 Kruppy was given a sentence of 25 years to life.

Speaker 2 Case closed.

Speaker 12 Remember that Christmas Eve?

Speaker 2 But for Simonette's family, the grief is still very raw.

Speaker 2 They still think about her every day.

Speaker 2 Their beautiful sissy.

Speaker 2 And they wonder what might have been.

Speaker 2 Sissy always wanted her happily ever after. Her Disney life, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And he took that from her. Took it away.
He did.

Speaker 2 He did.

Speaker 15 So I hope she's having her Cinderella life now in peace.

Speaker 12 There's a reason reason for everything.

Speaker 12 And I still haven't found the reason for this.

Speaker 12 I'll never find the reason for this.

Speaker 2 Maybe there isn't a reason for everything. I don't know.
We don't know.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 21 We don't know.

Speaker 12 But I'm so grateful she was my daughter.

Speaker 18 God gives the mobs this gift of loving them so unconditionally.

Speaker 12 And when when it came to Siminette, that's how I feel.

Speaker 13 That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again Friday at 9:8 Central.
And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News. I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News.

Speaker 13 Good night.

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