Murder in the Family

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I'm Jenna Bush Hager from The Today Show, and I'm excited to share my podcast, Open Book with Jenna. It is back for season two.
Each week, celebrities, experts, friends, and authors will share candid stories with me about their lives and new projects. Guests like Rebecca Yaros, Kristen Hanna, Ego Wodum,

and more. Celebrities, experts, friends, and authors will share candid stories with me about their lives and new projects.

Guests like Rebecca Yaros, Kristen Hanna, Ego Wodum, and more.

Like a good book, you'll leave feeling inspired and entertained.

Join me for my podcast, Open Book with Jenna.

Listen now on Amazon Music. After years of a domineering husband putting her in her place, the Miami woman was starting the first day of the rest of her life with a new hairstyle and a manicure.
She was saying that she had to take care of herself. Maggie Locasio had finally taken the step.
The next day, the divorce would be on its way to being final, a last deposition in court. As she drove her Mercedes back to the nice house in Coral Gables, we don't know if she was thinking about the end of her 28-year marriage or her next chapters.
Her son, Ed Locasio Jr., had been urging her to call their marriage quits for years. She cried a lot about it, but afterward, I think she knew it was for the better.
But once the garage doors closed, Maggie Locasio had only a few minutes of life remaining. Homicide detective John Buchko found a disturbing crime scene when he arrived at 2806 Granada.
There was an alarm that sounded, which indicated that the victim was in the house with the alarm on. It was a very bloody, violent scene.
There were bloody footprints into a kitchen and bloody fingerprints on a wall. Maggie lay dead on the kitchen floor.
She'd been bludgeoned in the head, an awful wound,

then stabbed, kicked, even choked by her killer.

There was indication that the victim resisted, that she fought back.

So it could have been a home intruder at that point?

Yes, it could have been.

However, there seemed to be more to it than that.

An icon of the cruelty of this murder,

a barometer of the rage in that kitchen,

was a black metal police baton found on the floor. It had been used to bash in Maggie's head.
Did the nature of the death tell you anything about who the perpetrator was? Yes, it seemed to have been done in anger. It appeared to be somebody that would have some sort of relationship as opposed to a stranger.
Her son, Eddie Jr., was in medical school running some lab experiments that night, so he didn't get home to Coral Gables until after 10. By then, there were flashing cop cars, gawkers, police lines.
Eddie elbowed his way to the front. Finally, I asked, where the hell is my mother? The son didn't get any answers.
He was taken to the police station, where detectives put him in a room and started asking him questions. The detectives began to piece together the unhappy soap opera of the Locasio family.
Maggie, the 45-year-old victim, had been an accountant with a master's degree, but had mostly been a stay-at-home mom since son Eddie Jr. came along.
Edward Locasio Sr., the husband and father, was an accountant too,

and he'd done well with investments, a family with a net worth estimated at up to $6 million.

But the house was bitterly divided. Mother and son joined against a cold,

abusive husband and father, at least by Eddie Jr.'s accountant.

You call your father Ed?

Yes.

Rather than father or dad or pops? It seems a little bit funny, Eddie, you know? Nothing funny at all about childhood or memories of his father, as he tells it. Ed Jr., bookish, happy to find sanctuary in a library.
The father berating him for not being more than a scrub on the track team he coached with fire-breathing intensity. One of the kids who he actually coached came up to me and told me, you're so lucky to have a father like Ed.
And I was absolutely shocked. The obvious question to the detectives was, what's up with this husband? Described as an abusive character in the final stages of a bitter divorce.
Did he have the motive and the rage to actually beat and stomp his wife to death? Ed Lucasio was abusive to her. He's threatened her before.
So in the ranking of possible suspects, he's moved up ahead of the unknown intruder. He was a strong suspect.
The detectives asked the son who he thought might have done it, and he didn't hesitate. I think my exact words, I can't believe the bastard finally did it.
The bastard finally did it, meaning? Ed. Your father.
Right. But Ed Locasio Sr.
had an airtight alibi. He was at his condo on Miami's South Beach when the murder occurred, and a security camera picture proved it.
And something else. The cops had had extraordinarily good luck in

finding a trove of evidence in a gym bag ditched in a neighbor's shrubs near the murder house. DNA.
And not the husband's. A forensic clue just waiting to be matched up to a killer out there.
Maybe the guy in the white pickup who did an illegal UB out of the scene as officers screamed up. Who murdered Maggie of that very unhappy Locasio household? It was the first minutes of Halloween morning 2001, and police were taking their photos, measuring blood spatter stains, trying to understand who had so viciously murdered the homeowner lying on the kitchen floor.
They knew early on the victim, Maggie Lacasio, and her estranged husband, Edward Lacasio, had been living apart for several months. She'd gotten a restraining order against him.
They called the husband at his Miami Beach condo, telling him only the briefest version of the truth to lure him over to the house. They told him there was trouble at his house.
Yeah, there was a problem there with the alarm. He needed to come there.
When he arrived at the street outside, Edward Lacasio, the husband, seemed to the detectives talking to him quite placid, even incurious about why the home of his wife and son was marked off as a crime scene. Down at the police station, he told detectives he said he and his wife were split and he didn't keep up with her lately, what with the ugly divorce proceedings and the restraining order.
When the cops finally told him his wife had been murdered, they noted that his reaction was blank, nothing. Unbeknownst to the husband, the detectives were interviewing his son, Eddie Jr., in a room down the hall.
They would pass in the hall afterward. An officer was escorting him one way and me another way, and we crossed in a hallway.
I think the look on his face as he saw me was in both anger and surprise. Did he say anything to you? Are you okay? Did you reply? No.
At that moment, you believed that he had killed your mother? Yes. But there'd been hostility between the father and son for years and years.
A son who despised his dad and suspected the worst of him didn't add up to evidence against Edward Locasio Sr. The father, the victim's husband, said he'd been at his beach condo miles away when Maggie was murdered, and the time-coded security tapes of comings and goings at his building showed he was telling the truth.
So Locasio wasn't the likely killer. But cops are trained not to lock onto one suspect early to the exclusion of other possibilities.
And now one of the first officers responding to the burglar alarm that night was thinking back to that white pickup truck he'd seen near the Locasio house. The driver had pulled an illegal U-turn, and if he hadn't been running hot to the scene, the officer would have pulled him over.
The white pickup would be a detail they would pursue. But bigger, more immediate evidence had fallen right into their laps the morning after the murder.
We received a phone call from one of the residents that they had found a small sports bag in the bushes between the houses. The gym bag turned out to be a cop and prosecutor's dream.
Inside, a knife, the killer's bloody clothes, and the victim's stolen credit cards. Lab experts had every reason to hope for some solid DNA evidence.
Hair, fibers, maybe even some fingerprints. Then something a little odd happened.
Two days after

the murder, the police get a call from Edward Lacasio saying that someone's broken into his accounting office. The cops go check out the reported burglary and find nothing stolen, just some papers scattered around the floor.
But that supposed burglary becomes the turning point of the murder investigation because the detectives use that opportunity to talk to some of Lacasio's employees about their boss and his family. The name of one family member in particular came up.
One thing we learned was that he had a brother that lived in North Carolina. And during that next day, we actually found out that his brother had a white pickup truck.
The brother, Michael Lacasio, lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in a heartbeat, police officers there were searching his white pickup. The upholstery had been ripped out, the inside of the cab hosed down.
I believe he had blood all over him, and that would be the motive for tearing the seat cushions out of his car and for washing out the vehicle. Michael Lacasio, it would turn out, was the obverse image to his brother's success.
A mostly unemployed guy, addicted to pills, and who'd been busted once on a fraud charge. The investigators kept Michael Lacasio squarely in their sights as the lab experts processed each bit of evidence from the scene.
The police baton, the bludgeon known formerly as an asp, yielded no fingerprints. But prosecutor Gail Levine said the killer did leave his mark behind.
He thought he was smart enough to have used gloves and he didn't bleed. So he thought he was okay.
Well, then he came back and bingo, as they say, there was DNA on the ass and there was DNA on the inside of some latex gloves that were in the green bag that he had to try to throw away. DNA that matched Michael Lacasio.
Just two weeks after the murder, he was charged with killing his sister-in-law, Maggie Lacasio. Eddie, how do you even take that information in? The detective is telling you, we believe we have your mother's killer, and he is your uncle, Uncle Michael.
At first I was optimistic about it, actually, because I thought, well, there must be some link to Ed. And the son wasn't the only one thinking that way.
The detectives, the prosecutor, all saw the hand of Eddie's father, Ed Sr., behind the heinous murder. I think in most cases, it's the, we got it.
And it's scientific, it's DNA, it's everything we need. But in this case, it was, we got one, now we got to get another.
It sounded straightforward. Who had the motivation, the temper to dispose of Maggie Lacasio? Easy,

the husband, Ed. But that isn't the way the law and evidence work.
And maybe there was something that no one knew about between the accused, Michael Lacasio, and the victim, his sister-in-law. Michael Lacasio was going on trial for murder, and his brother Edward was going to work and dating.

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Cancel anytime through Apple under Profile Settings. Michael Acasio was charged with the bludgeoning and stabbing murder of his sister-in-law, Maggie Lacasio, in her Miami home.
If convicted, he could face the death penalty. Prosecutors were hoping Michael Lacasio would stew in his juices to think about being injected to death.
They were hoping he'd flip and testify against his brother. That's what Lacasio's son certainly wanted.
For a long time, that's why we were holding to hope that Michael Lacasio would say either he himself would confess to committing the murder and saying how Ed was connected to it or how a payoff was to be made. He never did.

So the trial was on.

Michael Lacasio charged as the lone killer,

but the prosecutor made it clear she thought the brothers were in on it together.

Maggie Lacasio and her husband Ed were involved in a contested divorce.

Her husband and his brother, this defendant,

decided to end the marriage not by waiting for the judge's ruling, but by murdering her. And the facts were bad for him.
The white pickup truck leaving the scene was like his white pickup recovered at his home in North Carolina. The one with police found the upholstery ripped out.
And most of all, that gym bag recovered near the crime scene with the murderer's bloody clothes, a weapon, and also Michael Lacasio's DNA on a latex glove.

Lacasio's defense attorney made a familiar argument in criminal trials.

The lab work was flawed. The motivation wasn't proven.

The state's case is based mainly on DNA and circumstantial evidence. The DNA evidence in this case is highly suspect.
But the jury took only six hours to convict Michael Lacasio of first-degree murder. We, the jury, find the defendant, Michael D'Otary Lacasio, guilty of first-degree murder as charged.
The jury recommended a life sentence, which Judge Stanford Blake imposed. It was a brutal, brutal, brutal killing.
No one, no living thing deserves to be killed like that. The death that she suffered that night at your hands.
Someday we may be all meet our maker. Life sentence may be the easy part for you.
But Eddie Jr. in an impassioned speech had argued for the death penalty.
We do not believe that you should show this killer any mercy, just as he showed Maggie no mercy when she begged him for her life. Eddie Lacasio Jr.
was both brilliant and tortured. He graduated from college at 19 and was accepted at the University of Miami Medical School, where he was one of the top students.
But Eddie was also living a role out of an ancient Greek tragedy, the son determined to bring down the father, avenging the death of his quiet, much-put-upon mother Maggie. Eddie Jr.
was getting through his studies at a double-time pace so he could get his medical career up and running and get his mother away from the father he called Ed, never dad. Something that drove me really hard to study for was, you know, eventually to become financial independent.
So you could make the money as soon as possible to get her out of that situation. Right.
His mother's first step had been the restraining order. The second, getting a good divorce lawyer.
In Florida, it's 50-50, and there seemed to be enough community property to share, a net worth estimated at up to $6 million. And they freeze his assets, huh? They freeze his assets because in order to pay the alimony, he starts to take it out of the joint assets.
Judge said, no, you're supposed to take it out of your income. He doesn't want to do that.
He wants it all for himself. Edward Sr.
was an accountant, and so was his wife Maggie. So she knew how to read the books on the family finances, knew the accounts where the money was invested.
And she knew that her husband hadn't disclosed their true net worth to the judge. She was going to tell the judge, in effect, that Edward had been squirreling away some money from the court and from her.
So she could say in her deposition, look, this is what this marriage, this guy is really worth. Exactly.
She had actually been a CPA and she was finding every single account. But hours before that courtroom confrontation, she was murdered by her brother-in-law from North Carolina.
That was the jury's finding. The day after his wife's murder, Edward Lacasio's lawyer did go to court to have his divorce case dismissed, his assets unfrozen, and to declare him sole beneficiary of the estate.
How someone could have such an utter lack of regard for human life that immediately after this woman that he was married to for 28 years, after he murders her, then right away he moves to cash in on the money that he murdered her to obtain. Eddie Jr.
pursued his father into civil court to keep him from getting his hands on the family money. Eddie, the medical student, found himself in courtrooms as much as classrooms.
I had to basically teach myself how to become a lawyer, and I actually would go to probate court, and I had to defend on various occasions against motions from his attorneys to unfreeze his assets, and I actually prevailed on those motions. Eddie Jr.
was winning against his father in civil court, but he was having less luck with the criminal case.

Even four years later, while his uncle was awaiting trial,

the prosecutor cautioned Eddie Jr. about getting his hopes up of ever nailing the person he regarded as the mastermind of the crime.

His father, Ed.

She said we'll probably never arrest him. He'll probably get away with it.

Pushed by Eddie Jr. and his aunt, the prosecutor went hard after some heretofore reluctant witnesses.

The investigators went through the evidence one more time, and in November 2005, they thought they finally had it.

Edward Locascio Sr. was brought before a judge and charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy in the killing of his wife Maggie.
Five and a half years after his mother Maggie Lacasio had been found beaten and stabbed to death in her home,

a year after his uncle had been convicted of the murder,

Eddie Lacasio Jr. was staring across a courtroom at the man he saw as the evil architect of the crime,

his father, Edward Lacasio Sr.

The moment had been long in coming.

Guilty of first-degree murder. The conviction of the brother, Michael, had been a prosecutorial snap.
He'd left his DNA on tools of the murder. It wouldn't be that easy with the brother, the husband, the father, Edward Locasio Sr.
You've charged him with first degree murder, but you don't have a great case against him. Every single prosecutor says, what's the defense case going to be and where are my weaknesses.
And I was aware that I had a circumstantial case. One, because he was...

Gayle Levine and her co-prosecutor were telling the jury that the buttoned up middle-aged accountant before them was tired of his wife, didn't want her to get half in the pending divorce. So he got his ne'er-do-well brother to do the dirty work.
A pact was formed, a blood pact between brothers, a silent pact, with this defendant advising and inciting his brother Michael to murder Maggie. The jury was introduced to the stomach-churning crime scene photos, the police baton used to bash in Maggie Lacasio's skull.
Murder news that the defendant, the victim's husband of 28 years, seemed to take in stride when detectives told him. Did he ever say to you, what's going on at Miami? No.
The officer wearing a badge that says Miami-Dade homicide says, you know, your wife is dead. And he has no reaction.
That's an important moment. Extremely important.
And very, very telling to the detective that was sitting across from him. How Locasio reacted or failed to react and what he said about his wife would become building blocks in the circumstantial case against him.
One of the key prosecution witnesses would be a former employee in his accounting office, Gudule Gonzalez. He was talking on the phone with his brother, Michael.
He hung up the phone and he said to me, man, my brother's crazy. And I said, why? He goes, because he told me that if I ever wanted to have the bitch killed, he could have it done and no one would ever find out.
Is that the kind of quote you can build a case around? Well, we thought that that statement that he used to this young woman was a powerful statement. Again, his conscience speaking to us.
But if Edward Lacasio had, in effect, hired his brother to kill his wife, where was the contract, the agreement about money perhaps to be paid at some future time? Unfortunately for the prosecution, there was no evidence like that. But it did have records of phone calls, brother-to-brother calls in the months leading up to the murder.
Unusual for the two of them. Between Michael and Ed, there had been no contact except for birthdays.
Now there's a barrage of phone calls. A lot of calls.
39 in six weeks. But again, it's circumstantial.
You don't know what they said. I know what they said.
They were planning a murder. After Lacasio's brother was arrested for the murder, Edward Sr.
learned that his secretary, Gudule Gonzalez, had been talking to the cops about all those overheard phone calls between the brothers. Her boss, she testified, went nuts on her.
He went like this, like, because of you, my brother is going to be in prison and he could die. Did he attempt to grab you by your throat? Almost.
What did you do? I went and I called Detective Estopignan. Detective Julio Estopinian had taken the secretary's original statement.
When you got the cell phone call from Ms. Gonzalez, could you describe her demeanor to you on the phone or her attitude? She was very angry, scared.
Then came a long awaited momented moment. Edward John Bukowski.
If this had been Greek tragedy, or Shakespeare, the confrontation between father and son might have taken place with swords on a battlefield wet with blood. But in District Court Miami, Eddie Jr., who'd been fighting for his father's indictment for years, took the witness box.
The man he called Ed, the accused, sat at his table. In 1999.
The prosecutor led the son through testimony focusing on his recollection of years of his father's physical and mental abuse of his mother. There was the time his father threatened to strike her with a heavy piece of sculpture.
It was too heavy for him to throw at her, but he was able to pick it up and he was going to throw it at her.

And five months before Maggie Lacasio's murder, the son told the jury about the blunt, simple threat his father had made, almost a promise.

He told her, I will kill you, I will end you, and I will destroy you.

And after that, he proceeded to, as he would usually do, bump into her with his chest and told her, I could kill you with one blow. And the prosecution put an exclamation point on its depiction of Edward Locasio Sr.
as a menacing bully by calling his former mistress. Eleanor Salazar, a masseuse, had been outside Locasio's South Beach condo the night of the murder.
She testified that she spotted Locasio's brother Michael, the now convicted killer, trying to get into the apartment a little after 11.30 that night. In court, the girlfriend testified with the help of a translator.
And what did he tell you? That I couldn't tell that to the police. What did he say? That if I called the police, something worse than what happened to his wife would happen to me.
And the same condo security camera that gave Edward Lacasio his alibi, he was home when the murder occurred miles away, turned out to be a double-edged sword. Because that security cam verified the mistress's story about the brother showing up.
Michael Lacasio time-coded at 1141 p.m. He's seen ringing the buzzer repeatedly.
What was he doing there two hours after murdering Maggie Lacasio? The security tape shows him walking away, his shirt soaked. Had he just hosed down the interior of his bloody pickup as the prosecution suggested.
Clearly, Michael would have never come back to the apartment to report or to get help if Ed wasn't aware. So really, the pieces of the puzzle were big pieces that fit together.
All along, the prosecution's theory of motive was this. Edward Lacasio had decided that his wife Maggie had to be killed the night that she was.
Otherwise, the following morning, she was going to tell the divorce judge where he'd stashed away millions of dollars in secret accounts, money that he would lose in the impending settlement. The brother argued the prosecution was dispatched to fix the problem.
The prosecutor, with help from the medical examiner, brought the murder of Maggie Lacasio vividly into the courtroom. As the medical examiner testified as to what the wounds told him about the violent attack, he stuck pieces of color tape to a mannequin, each color representing the different ways he believed Michael Lacasio tried to kill his sister-in-law.
She was initially hit on the head with a baton that wasn't bent initially and then ultimately bent and was rendered useless. Eight blows to the head with a metal police baton.
Then, savagely slashed with a steak knife, a finger all but severed wounds were evidence that she fought back but the me said michael lacasio began choking her pushing her into the wall until she gives up stamping on her stomach or chest and then walking her way they there leaving her to die. The bloody footprints leaving the murder scene were clearly Michael Acasio's.
Had the prosecution convinced the jury that it was his brother Edward who had caused them to be there, and was therefore guilty of murder too? When you want to lie under oath, you'll lie under oath. The defense was about to argue its case, saying in part, star witnesses shouldn't sleep with lead detectives.

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Ed and Maggie

Locati Ed and Maggie Locasio just wanted to get divorced. Nothing more, nothing less.
Little did they know that brother Mike had other ideas. Edward Locasio's defense attorney, Bob Amsell, argued that the prosecution got it right in the trial of Michael Locasio, the brother.
Conspiracy to commit crimes to dreamer. It was Michael who indisputably murdered his brother's wife.
The criminally bent, drug-addicted brother claimed the defense with a warped idea about how to help his brother out of a failed marriage. No conspiracy at all.

And Edward Lacasio was not his brother's keeper.

So your theory of the crime is that in some crazed manner,

he's doing his brother a nice thing.

Right.

By killing the wife.

That bloody scene was not a contract-type murder.

When Mike killed her, he did it with such passion and such rage

that it defies imagination that he was doing that to help his brother. The defense had to paint jurors a different portrait altogether of Edward Lacasio Sr., that he wasn't the abusive bully of a husband and a father, that there were family snapshots of happy times when even Eddie Jr.
had a smile. And he wanted jurors to think about the son's possible motivation for going after his father, money.
With his father behind bars, Eddie Jr. would get everything, millions.
You're clearly seeking all of your father's money, aren't you, in the civil side of the case? Technically, I mean, it passes as if... Answer yes or no.
No. Well, technically, yes.
I'm sorry, yes. The answer's yes.
And what about the prosecution's depiction of a suspiciously indifferent Edward Lacasio when authorities informed him his wife had been murdered? Another Lacasio brother testified that Edward Lacasio was, in fact, devastated by his wife's death. He was very upset, very sad.
I didn't think he could keep things together. In a circumstantial case, maybe the most damaging testimony was a story told by Lacasio's secretary.
She said after a phone conversation with his brother Michael, he blurted out, my brother's crazy. He told me that if I ever wanted to have the bitch killed, he could do it and no one would ever find out.

Now, the key words here are the bitch, crude shorthand in Locasio's office for his wife.

The defense told the court that that damning quote had a dubious history.

The secretary, in a follow-up sworn deposition, watered down her initial recollection of Edward Locasio's outburst.

He hadn't used the words the bitch, he said. Rather, he'd said someone.
The brother was crazy enough to kill someone. Quite a different thought.
Now in trial, the secretary reverted to the original version, the one with the bitch. You're the one who told this jury that you actually did lie.
I'm telling the jury today, if I lied about the bitch word, it was because I didn't want to get myself more involved in this case and I wanted to get out of it. Plain and simple.
Your choice is that when you want to lie under oath, for whatever reason it is, you'll lie under oath. You can continue accusing me from lying.
I'm trying to ask you a question. And I'm answering your question.
Well, I don't think you are. Well, maybe you're not happy with it.
And there was something else about the secretary and her story. She had become intimately involved with the lead detective on the case, Julio Estopignon, an affair that turned out to be a cringing embarrassment and ethical taboo for the prosecution.
She's literally sleeping with the lead detective in this case for a year, a year and a half. To this day, the defense berated the detective for living with his star witness in a pending first degree murder trial.
You see nothing wrong with that. Explain that it is wrong.
So if it's wrong, why didn't you stop it? Was the affair with the cop why the secretary had changed her mind and gone back to telling the more damaging story about hearing Lacasio say the brother could kill the bitch for him. Isn't this why your testimony changes over time? It's because of your relationship with him.
It has nothing to do with my relationship. You wanted to make him look good and make his case for him.
No. There was a call made to...
The prosecution's best evidence of a brotherly plot was thin. What the prosecution characterized as a barrage of phone calls, 39 in six weeks, between the usually distant pair.
The strongest part of my case was that any juror would necessarily have to guess what was said between Ed and his brother. The defense argued that Maggie Lacasio's murder had never been about money.
Edward Lacasio may not have been happy to split his millions with his wife, but he was loaded, and killing his wife just to hang on to more of his wealth simply didn't make sense. What did add up, the defense told the jury, was the picture on that condo security camera of a wild-eyed brother fresh from a bloody murder.
I think that's about someone who is sick, who has lost his mind, who is panicking. How in the world could that be part of this conspiracy? The last place you'd go to is back to your brother.
The last place. So what was it? Edward Locasio Sr., a plotting murderous husband?

Or the unwitting victim of an unguided missile of a crazy brother?

Edward Locasio wouldn't take the stand to explain last chance to summarize its case for the jury. The prosecution.
He had a plan. And that plan was for her to die.
He was the one that needed this done, not Michael Locasio.

The defense. The very idea that Ed Locasio, a man who is no doubtedly smart, would use someone like Michael Locasio, a man whose life is spinning out of control, is absurd.
All eyes for the jury,

please. Edward Locasio Sr.
was on trial for his life. His fate was in the hands of the jury.
The central question for jurors to resolve was the relationship between the two brothers. Had Michael Lacasio acted alone when he killed his sister-in-law? Or was it a conspiracy between the two? A question that led them to wonder why prosecutors had been so long in bringing Edward Lacasio Sr.
to trial. They had a pretty difficult case.
It's all circumstantial. There's no evidence, no physical evidence, no DNA.
Maybe then the defense's theory of the crime is accurate, that the brother was a crazy off by his own and the other brother wasn't involved. That's what made it difficult.
The prosecution had asked the jurors to understand the accused's motive and state of mind through stories told by witnesses like the secretary, Goudelay Gonzalez. She testified that after a phone call between the brothers, she heard her boss, Ed, blurt out that his crazy brother would kill his wife for him if he wanted.
One juror thought that outburst actually spoke to Edward Lacasio's innocence. I felt that anyone who's premeditated a crime of this type isn't going to blurt something like that out to somebody in their office.
It didn't make any sense. And jurors wondered why the secretary had changed her original story about that phone call and had lied under oath in a later deposition, as she admitted, she said for fear of getting dragged into a murder investigation.
Robert, did it bother you that she amended her story a little bit? Very much so. Very much so.
It implied that the detective somehow influenced her giving testimony.

And all the jurors thought the son, Eddie Jr.'s depiction of his father as a domestic brute, was both poignant and credible.

Your son called you Ed?

That struck me very strange that this is the way that family grew up.

The string of phone calls between the brothers, where previously there had been few, were points for the prosecution. I would have liked a little more information on what was being said in the phone calls, but for me it was the key evidence.
As for that security cam picture of Michael Acasio at his brother's condo door the night of the murder, these jurors didn't buy the defense's spin that it showed how out of control the wacky Lone Wolf brother was. I thought it had more to do with what went wrong after the murder than really coming back to report anything to his brother.
It was one of the more incriminating pieces, I think. For two days, the jurors had gone back and forth trying to get into Edward Lacasio's head.
But they didn't have irrefutable evidence that showed them what was going on there. On the third day, they reviewed again.
Motive. At the end of the day, Michael didn't have a motive.
They sent out a note. They had a verdict.
The state of Florida versus Edward Stanton Lacasio defendant. Waiting to hear the verdict, Edward Lacasio Sr.
looked grim.

Across the courtroom, Eddie Lacasio gripped his grandmother's hand and closed his eyes.

Verdict. We the jury find the defendant, Edward Stanton Lacasio, as to count one first-degree murder.

Guilty of first-degree murder as charged. So say we all.

Guilty. Eddie Jr.
took in the words he'd been waiting almost six years to hear. His father shook his head.
He now faced a possible death sentence. It has to be a densely complicated emotion.
It's your mother, it is your father, and yet you want this verdict. What we wanted to have come out was the truth, because for so many years, my mother and I had suffered in silence.
Your father found guilty of murdering your mother. Did you also believe that he should be put to death? We certainly didn't oppose the state's desire to seek it.
To me, it was like flipping a coin. Either way, he was going to, you know, he's going to die in prison.
Thank you, Judge. The jury was out only a few hours in the penalty phase.
The jury recommends to the court that it impose a sentence of life imprisonment upon Edward Stanton Lacasio without possibility of parole. Nothing will ever bring back your mom or your sister or your daughter.
But I hope you have some comfort in feeling that our system of justice will. Edward Lacasio would not be put to death.
He was taken from the courtroom and never looked once at the son who called him Ed. Lacasio never told his story to the jury during trial.
But six months into his life sentence behind bars in a high security lockup, he talked to Dateline. Mr.
Lacasio, you were convicted of, in fact, putting your brother up to kill your wife. Did you do that? Did you have your wife killed? Absolutely not.
Even to the point of her death, I always thought we were probably going to get back together. At trial, you'll remember, Lacasio's defense was that his brother was a lone wolf killer who took it upon himself to fix Lacasio's messy divorce.
When we spoke to him out of the verdict, Lacasio had a different theory.

Do you accept that your brother Michael did it, that he killed Maggie? No. I could never see my

brother doing that. And I can't even, it's so surreal.
Edward Lacasio told us he believed it

was a member of his family who killed his wife, not his brother Michael. But, get ready for this,

Thank you. it's so surreal.
Edward Lacasio told us he believed it was a member of his family who killed his wife, not his brother Michael, but get ready for this, his son, Eddie Jr. Are you implying that Edward Jr.
might have been responsible for the death of your wife? Yes. That he might have killed her? Yes.
And his motivation would have been what? Money. And to keep me out of the house.
He'd kill his mother that he dearly loved. He was a mama's boy.
Yes. And he would get rid of her and get you put into the state prison system so he could have the money.
That's the. Yes, sir.
He lied throughout this thing. And it's taken me a long time to say this.
There was a love hate relationship between Eddie and his mother. Absolutely.
The way Eddie tells it, it was a love-love relationship. And you were the odd person out in that household.
It's just the opposite. She and I were hooked at the hip.
You know, people who watch you tell this story, believing that you're guilty as charged, that you conspired with your brother to have your wife killed, and now hear you laying off the crime against your own son they'd say how poisonous is this guy that's their opinion talking about Eddie of course in the bad blood Eddie your son tells the prosecutor you should get the debt penalty it's incredible and that's pretty vicious for your own son to say something like that, right? That's a sad, that's a sorry, sad son. Police and prosecutors say Eddie Jr.
was thoroughly investigated and cleared after the murder. Knowing what his father was saying about him, Eddie Jr.
described him as a desperate man saying desperate things. I think I know the answer to this.
Will you ever see your father in prison?

No.

We didn't want to have anything to do with him before the divorce,

and I certainly don't now that he's murdered my mother.

In 2008, a jury awarded Eddie Locascio Jr.

$125 million in damages and a wrongful death suit against his father and his uncle Michael. Both men are in Florida prisons for life without the possibility of parole.
Both guilty of murdering a woman who only wanted a fresh start. New chapters to a life that would never be written.
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