Bitter Pill

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Speaker 6 A doctor's wife dies after a minor fender bender. So why do her brothers believe this was no accident?

Speaker 7 And I pulled my brother out and I told him, you are not going to believe what I just heard.

Speaker 6 The startling news came from their sister's friend.

Speaker 7 And she just kept insisting, promise me you'll get a full autopsy.

Speaker 6 The brothers kept it a secret.

Speaker 9 We wouldn't tell our parents. We wouldn't tell my sister Deanna.
We wouldn't tell anybody.

Speaker 6 It was information about a family member they loved. Would they point the guilty finger?

Speaker 10 There was no way we were going to accuse him.

Speaker 6 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Dennis Murphy.

Speaker 15 So ironic that Rosie Issa was just idling away a few hours that afternoon when she had only a few precious minutes remaining.

Speaker 16 But we never know, do we?

Speaker 17 It was February 2005.

Speaker 12 She was dashing to the movies to meet her sister Deanna at a matinee.

Speaker 21 At the last minute, I mean, I was already in the movie theater. She had called and she said, all right, I'm on my way.
She said, I'm leaving now.

Speaker 23 No one knew it then, but Rosie's nothing special trip to the movies that day from her nice home in suburban Cleveland would set in motion an international manhunt.

Speaker 22 Something that became an excruciating five-year ordeal that would expose mistresses, secret bedrooms, and new identities.

Speaker 27 And would involve the FBI, the Middle East, and murder.

Speaker 30 And all the intrigue, and the lifetime of sorrow for so many, began on the streets of a perfectly pleasant mom's, dad's, kids, and dogs kind of neighborhood, Gates Mills, Ohio.

Speaker 32 Rosie, a nurse, and her handsome doctor husband, Yassid, or Yaz, as he was known to one and all, met while working at the same hospital.

Speaker 34 At 36, he was proud that he, a man of humble roots, was able to provide his family with so much. The big house, the backyard pool, money for whatever they needed.

Speaker 32 Yaz was the kind of son-in-law Rosie's parents, Rocco and Gigi DiPuccio, could regard as heaven-sent.

Speaker 35 She'd send him for two jars of baby food. He'd come home with 36.
I mean, everything he did had to be big and lots.

Speaker 36 Was it in a show-off kind of way, or was he

Speaker 35 generous? No, he was just,

Speaker 35 you know, I used to say to to him i think god is so good to you and everything you do because you're so giving to people

Speaker 33 now rosie her family would say could not have cared less about the house the cars the status she was down to earth and content with what she'd always had not the least of it her close italian-american family where Sunday dinner at her parents was don't miss.

Speaker 16 And of course, the sun and moon of her life, two-year-old daughter Lena and four-year-old son Armin.

Speaker 36 Was she happy to be a mother?

Speaker 35 Oh my god, are you kidding? She would just pinch their cheek and say, I can't believe I got these beautiful kids. I just love them.
Her eyes lit up when she looked at her babies.

Speaker 44 They were her life.

Speaker 23 In fact, Rosie and Yaz, married for almost six years, were hoping for another child.

Speaker 42 She was taking prenatal vitamins.

Speaker 26 But she would never get to have another baby.

Speaker 15 Because Rosie's 10-minute drive to the movies in her black Volvo SUV was going poorly.

Speaker 42 Her waiting sister had no idea what had gone wrong.

Speaker 21 I wondered, where is she? How come she's not calling? I held my phone the whole time, just waiting for it to ring.

Speaker 27 As it turned out, for a few minutes anyway, Rosie was on her cell with her friend of many years, a woman named Eva.

Speaker 19 She drove on Interstate 271 for just one exit to Wilson Mills Road.

Speaker 19 That's when Rosie's SUV started veering erratically.

Speaker 34 Another driver noticed it.

Speaker 48 I saw a black car cross over center and go back into the lane and hit a car and the car just kept going. And I'm thinking to myself, what is going on here? What is this woman doing?

Speaker 27 The Volvo eventually stopped.

Speaker 16 That's when Tara Tamsky, a medical technician, pulled over and ran to see if she could help the woman in the car.

Speaker 30 She found a person in desperate shape.

Speaker 48 When I got into the car, the woman was limp, and next thing you know, she started vomiting.

Speaker 17 Meanwhile, patrol officer David Schishiano of the Highland Heights Police Department had happened by.

Speaker 11 His dashboard camera recorded the accident.

Speaker 36 The female driver was sitting back and she's just gasping for air.

Speaker 22 Rosie was rushed to the hospital.

Speaker 19 When word reached her family, they too raced to the emergency room, worried about her condition.

Speaker 52 I just prayed, you know, please, you know, let her live. If she's, no matter how bad she's, you know, broken up, we'll take care of her, you know.
Just please let her live, God.

Speaker 47 In the ER, the doctors working frantically on Rosie almost an hour now, allowed her husband Yaz, an emergency room doctor himself, to observe.

Speaker 44 Rosie's brother would be the one to deliver the bad news to his parents.

Speaker 35 He looked at me, he was crying, and I just

Speaker 35 went down.

Speaker 27 It was sadly over for Rosie Issa at the age of 38.

Speaker 24 The family was brought to a private room for a viewing.

Speaker 35 When I saw her, Anthony, she looked like she was sleeping. I mean, there was not a mark on her.

Speaker 14 And as the stunned family began to prepare for unspeakably sad arrangements, Just hours after she'd passed away, that friend named Eva, who'd been on the phone with Rosie right before her car crash, got a hold of Dominic, Rosie's brother.

Speaker 33 She repeated what were very probably Rosie's last words.

Speaker 15 It was literally unbelievable what Eva was suggesting.

Speaker 7 First thing I did was I went in the house and I pulled my brother out and I told him, you are not going to believe what I just heard, repeated the story to him.

Speaker 7 We looked at each other like, now what the hell do we do?

Speaker 20 What Eva said would nearly rip Dominic and his brother Rocky apart.

Speaker 17 How could they keep such a monstrous thing?

Speaker 39 secret.

Speaker 9 We wouldn't tell our parents. We wouldn't tell my sister Deanna.
We wouldn't tell anybody.

Speaker 6 Coming up, they wouldn't tell anybody what Eva had said and what she begged them to do.

Speaker 7 And she just kept insisting, promise me you'll get a full autopsy.

Speaker 6 When dateline continues.

Speaker 8 The DiPuccio family turned to their church for strength in dealing with the loss of their Rosie.

Speaker 46 At just 38, snatched away far too soon in a slow-motion car accident no one could comprehend.

Speaker 39 Their beloved daughter and sister, mother of two and wife of Yaz.

Speaker 15 Yaz Yazid had been born in Detroit, a first-generation Palestinian American, son of a Ford auto worker.

Speaker 15 After medical school, he'd become an emergency room doctor, but one with an entrepreneurial itch.

Speaker 19 He and his brother had become wealthy as partners in a satellite dish installation company.

Speaker 15 And back in 1999, when they married, Rosie's parents felt it was a dream come true for their daughter.

Speaker 46 In the years they were married, Rosie's mom and dad saw only a solid relationship.

Speaker 35 What she got married was like a fairy tale. We'd loved him and we cared about him because there was nothing we could say we disliked.

Speaker 15 But now, after Rosie's death, there was trouble brewing in the DiPuccio family, and it brought brought Rosie's two siblings, Dominic and his younger brother, Rocky, nearly to blows.

Speaker 18 It all started after a conversation just hours after Rosie's death that Dominic had with his sister's friend, Eva.

Speaker 7 I said, Rosie died. Rosie died.
She's hysterical. She proceeded to tell me that Rosie was talking to her on her way to the movie, and she said Yaz had given her a calcium pill.

Speaker 7 before she left the house and she started to feel queasy. Rosie told her I'm going to call Yaz to see if maybe this calcium pill is making me sick.

Speaker 36 I'm hearing about some kind of a pill. He gave it to her.
She is being made sick by it as Eva's talking to her the phone.

Speaker 57 Right.

Speaker 36 And within an hour, she's dead.

Speaker 51 Right.

Speaker 44 After the Eva conversation, Dominic called a family council of just the two brothers and their wives.

Speaker 30 They needed someplace private.

Speaker 50 So they got into one car and drove to their church's parking lot.

Speaker 14 Eva's story seemed incomprehensible.

Speaker 50 Could there have been something wrong with a calcium capsule Yaz had given Rosie?

Speaker 7 We talked about it, and we called Eva again, and she just kept insisting, promise me you'll get a full autopsy. Promise me you'll get a toxicology report.
Promise me, promise me, promise me.

Speaker 30 Dominic's wife, Julie, was dumbfounded.

Speaker 10 How do you have this information come to you about somebody's family?

Speaker 10 And there was no way we were going to accuse him.

Speaker 7 Let alone a guy that we knew, that was in our family, that we loved.

Speaker 10 We trusted.

Speaker 30 The brothers found themselves in opposite camps as far as strategy.

Speaker 11 Dominic, the lawyer, wanting to go slow, first let the coroner do his report, then see where they stood.

Speaker 39 Rocky and his wife, Rachel, were eager to take Eva's story to the cops.

Speaker 30 Everyone, though, hoped that Yaz was blameless.

Speaker 58 I remember thinking, feeling suspicious after that phone call, feeling like...

Speaker 58 We need to do something with this information.

Speaker 29 In the dark of the parking lot, they made a compromise.

Speaker 54 Rocky would call the coroner the next day and ask for a thorough and full examination of Rosie's body.

Speaker 31 There wouldn't be any mention of Eva's suspicions.

Speaker 9 The coroner's going to find out how she died. I mean, this was a matter of two days, three days, four days.
The coroner would come back and say, this is what happened.

Speaker 16 And that's what everyone wanted.

Speaker 15 They were desperate to know what had happened to Rosie.

Speaker 42 The two-car accident she'd been involved in had been a minor fender bender.

Speaker 30 And there appeared to be no serious trauma to Rosie's body.

Speaker 29 The next day, the coroner performed an autopsy.

Speaker 22 Unwelcome news reached the DePuccios quickly.

Speaker 12 Cause of death, unknown.

Speaker 41 More tests would be needed.

Speaker 22 The weight would only add more stress to an already stressful situation between Rosie's two brothers.

Speaker 42 Their parents felt the tension.

Speaker 35 They were going at each other, and I couldn't understand this.

Speaker 60 You could see it.

Speaker 35 I could see it. They were arguing and arguing, and I'm telling Marocco, you know, I got to talk to Dominic and Rocky.
I don't know what's going on with them.

Speaker 61 But how long could the brothers keep their secret from the rest of the family?

Speaker 6 Coming up, especially when someone else was also growing suspicious.

Speaker 62 As soon as I got off the phone, I think he killed her.

Speaker 6 When dateline continues.

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Speaker 11 Rosie Issa died in a low-impact car accident, and almost two weeks later, her family was still awaiting the coroner's final report on the exact cause of her death.

Speaker 32 That's when Christine DeSillo, on her own, decided to get involved.

Speaker 2 And it's that involvement that would later prove invaluable to the police.

Speaker 62 I didn't want to be the nosy neighbor in Bewitch, the Gladys Kravitz of the neighborhood coming up with these wild, convoluted ideas.

Speaker 34 Christine is a nurse who'd once worked with both Rosie and her doctor husband Yaz at a hospital.

Speaker 32 She hadn't seen much of either of them in the previous five years, but by coincidence, Christine lived right next door to Rosie's friend Eva.

Speaker 34 And Eva told her about that last phone call with Rosie, about Yaz giving her a calcium capsule.

Speaker 62 It was odd to me that just prior to leaving for a movie in the middle of the afternoon in a hurry, that that was so necessary that he'd give her the pill.

Speaker 62 As soon as I got off the phone with Eva, I looked to my husband and said, I think he killed her. Gut instinct.
Immediately.

Speaker 15 So going simply on her gut instinct that something wasn't right and unknown to Rosie's brothers, Christine called the authorities.

Speaker 36 But if you were wrong, Christine.

Speaker 62 Well, where could they take it if I was wrong? There was no harm, no foul, and they could politely tell me that I was wrong and thank you for my help, and I would go away.

Speaker 56 Christine's urgent request to check Yaz out made it to the desk of Gary McKee, then a detective with the Highland Heights, Ohio Police Department. He was already investigating Rosie's car accident.

Speaker 66 I had never met Christine DiCello, and I didn't know if she had an axe to grind with him. Whatever reason she didn't care for him, it may not have been a valid reason.

Speaker 66 So I wasn't approaching him as a suspect or even thinking that, you know, this guy's a murderer.

Speaker 43 Still, the detective had some facts that didn't add up.

Speaker 15 A 38-year-old woman in good health, suddenly dead in a fender bender.

Speaker 29 What's more, the coroner couldn't give him a cause of death.

Speaker 41 At minimum, he had to find out more about those calcium capsules Christine DiCello had told him about.

Speaker 39 The detective called Rosie's husband and he agreed to come down to the police station.

Speaker 15 That interview was recorded on an audio tape.

Speaker 23 The detective questioned the doctor about the calcium capsules.

Speaker 67 Two weeks before I was over at my mom's house, and I thought about this as well,

Speaker 67 my mom had this older lady over when we were talking about osteoposites and whatnot, and I told Rosie was there that we should probably,

Speaker 67 you you know, she's over 35, she's probably starting taking calcium supplements. So she's not in the care of any specialists or anything.
She didn't have any health problems.

Speaker 67 Was she experiencing any unusual stress or recently?

Speaker 67 No, life was good. Did you have any stressors in your marriage?

Speaker 67 Marriage is fine.

Speaker 25 So what's your impression of this doctor, the guy everyone calls Yaz?

Speaker 66 Well, he's clearly a smart individual,

Speaker 66 very low-key.

Speaker 67 Are there calcium pills and the prescription vitamins still at home?

Speaker 67 Would you mind if I followed you back to your home and collected those?

Speaker 67 No, that'd be great.

Speaker 9 Not at all.

Speaker 19 Remember, Rosie and Yaz were trying to have another child, and she was prescribed prenatal vitamins.

Speaker 68 Detective McKee wanted all the pills Rosie was taking gathered up for testing, including the calcium capsules that Yaz said he bought for his wife.

Speaker 31 The interview over, the detective followed Yaz home.

Speaker 66 We entered the home. There was a female seated at the kitchen counter on a stool.
She was Margarita Montanez.

Speaker 12 Margarita was the daytime nanny.

Speaker 17 Yaz had hired her to care for his kids after Rosie died.

Speaker 42 He also hired another woman to be the nighttime nanny.

Speaker 24 At the time, the detective thought nothing of Margarita the nanny, though that would eventually change.

Speaker 13 For now, he was there only to get the pills from Yaz.

Speaker 66 Before he retrieved the pills, he asked me, have you found a cause of death for my wife? And I said, no, we haven't. So then he reached up in the cabinet, retrieved the pills.

Speaker 66 But before he handed them to me, he said, why do you want these? And my response was, you know, I just want to cover all the bases.

Speaker 11 The next day, Yaz asked Rosie's sister to watch his kids overnight.

Speaker 41 Then, in the middle of that night, she got an urgent call from him.

Speaker 21 At four in the morning, he left me a voicemail saying that his friend's brother was in a bad car accident and they didn't think he was going to make it, so he was going to go to North Carolina.

Speaker 33 The friend's brother was apparently in bad shape.

Speaker 30 Yaz asked the DiPuccio family to watch his children through the weekend.

Speaker 42 But on Monday, when the doctor was to return, came a bombshell none of the DiPuccios could ever have imagined.

Speaker 33 Rosie's brother got a call from his wife.

Speaker 7 Julie called and said, nobody can find Yaz. And I said, what do you mean? She said, nobody can find him.
I found his friend. I found his number.
I called him.

Speaker 51 I said, how's your brother?

Speaker 7 And he said, what are you talking about? And I said, well, Yaz told us he was down with you because your brother had been in really bad carics. And he said, I haven't seen Yaz.

Speaker 7 Yaz has been here all weekend.

Speaker 15 Dominic went to Rosie and Yaz's house and discovered something on the kitchen counter.

Speaker 7 It was an envelope that had obviously recently been opened. The postage stamp was just a couple days before, and it was an envelope that a passport would come in.
I said, he's gone. He's gone.

Speaker 26 But could this father really have left behind his two children?

Speaker 46 Children who just lost their mother three weeks before?

Speaker 37 The Tapuccios did have questions: what killed Rosie, and why did Yaz disappear?

Speaker 6 Coming up, the autopsy comes in, along with a stunning revelation about those calcium pills. When Dateline continues,

Speaker 11 Dr. Yazid Issa was gone.

Speaker 29 Three weeks after his wife Rosie had died a puzzling death, eat up and abandoned their two young children.

Speaker 31 His job as an ER doctor just flat and vanished.

Speaker 41 Rosie's brother Dominic filed a missing person report with the police, then headed down to Yaz's house and started his own investigation.

Speaker 7 My entire family spent the week at that house and we were playing detectives, trying to figure out what happened.

Speaker 7 What is the puzzle piece telling you rosie died on a thursday less than 24 hours later he sends a blast email to all his friends that says just wanted to let you know that rosie died yesterday in a minor car accident she will be missed

Speaker 41 that's it that was the email his wife the mother of his two children that was his blast email through credit card transactions dominic eventually learned that yaz had bought a plane ticket Final destination, Cyprus, the island in the Mediterranean.

Speaker 23 Dominic knew it was time to tell the entire family everything he and his brother Rocky had been keeping back.

Speaker 14 About the conversation their sister had with Eva just before she died.

Speaker 30 Her story about Rosie feeling sick after taking a calcium capsule given to her by Yaz.

Speaker 36 Are you the family saying out loud in one voice, Yaz killed Rosie?

Speaker 7 Some of us are.

Speaker 26 It took me a while.

Speaker 7 Really took me a while.

Speaker 16 Suddenly, Dominic and his wife's family had grown, caring not only for their own four children, but now Rosie's two children as well.

Speaker 10 They have not a mother, not a father. We don't even know where to tell them where he went, what happened to him, where did he go?

Speaker 10 How do you answer that question?

Speaker 13 Then came even more devastating news.

Speaker 19 About four weeks after Rosie's death, test results were in for the calcium pills that police took from Yaz's home.

Speaker 52 We had suspicions and everything, but that, of course,

Speaker 9 nailed it.

Speaker 57 And what were they filled with?

Speaker 52 Potassium cyanide.

Speaker 42 cyanide a lethal poison nine pills were in the bottle that yaz had turned over to police it's from that same bottle that he gave rosie a capsule and sure enough there was enough cyanide in each pill to kill a person within minutes rosie's death was a homicide but how could the man the depuccios love so much the son-in-law they thought had a near-perfect marriage with their rosie ever have killed her?

Speaker 41 Nonetheless, Dr.

Speaker 22 Yazid Issa was now a murder suspect and international fugitive.

Speaker 33 The local police called in the FBI.

Speaker 70 Initially, he fled from Cleveland to Cyprus, and then eventually we also obtained information through various sources that he had traveled to Beirut, Lebanon.

Speaker 32 Phil Torsny was a seasoned FBI manhunter. The agent immediately knew he had a major problem.

Speaker 34 Yaz was virtually untouchable in Lebanon because that country doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S.

Speaker 44 So Rosie's husband was living freely in Beirut.

Speaker 36 The FBI knew it, and there was nothing they could do about it.

Speaker 36 Even if we have eyes on the ground, you get an agent say, I just saw him leave his apartment good night at the bistro. He read the paper and he went home.
You can't move in and serve papers on him.

Speaker 57 Right.

Speaker 15 Back in the U.S., Rosie's family desperately tried to get Yaz to turn himself in.

Speaker 41 They held news conferences.

Speaker 55 What we're doing today is making a plea to Yazid. Mifi is watching to come back to Cleveland in answer to the charges before him.

Speaker 33 By then, the doctor had officially been charged with aggravated murder in the death of his wife.

Speaker 26 But it appeared he had no intention of coming back.

Speaker 33 Officials would later learn that Yaz took on a new identity.

Speaker 27 Maurice Khalifi.

Speaker 16 He was a single, good-looking guy, always up for a party.

Speaker 16 Months went by, then a year.

Speaker 36 Did you ever get the feeling he was thumbing his nose at you and all the other people looking for him?

Speaker 71 Yeah, I I think so.

Speaker 36 And what you have to do is lure him off the security of his home base where he's safe in Beirut?

Speaker 70 We hope at some point he leaves the country.

Speaker 54 In October 2006, a year and a half after Rosie's death, her mom and dad got a phone call from their local police chief.

Speaker 52 And he said, are you sitting down? He says, I have big news for you. He said, we got him.

Speaker 23 Yaz had finally slipped up.

Speaker 27 He'd left the security of Lebanon.

Speaker 56 The FBI was aware aware he was going to be in a flight into Cyprus's Larnaca airport.

Speaker 30 How they knew, they won't say.

Speaker 38 But Cypriot police were waiting for the doctor when he got off the plane.

Speaker 24 And in Cyprus, unlike Lebanon, a person can be extradited to the U.S.

Speaker 27 But Yaz would fight every inch of the way to avoid facing aggravated murder charges in Ohio.

Speaker 25 It wasn't until January of 2009 that Yazid Issa was finally brought back to the United States. 50, go ahead.

Speaker 22 And Detective McKee, the Highland Heights, Ohio officer who first started investigating Rosie's death four years before, was waiting for him.

Speaker 66 We put him in the backseat of a car, and I didn't say a word to him.

Speaker 36 You didn't say, remember me?

Speaker 66 I think he did. I don't think I had to say that.

Speaker 6 Coming up, the one question no one had yet answered. Why would the doctor want his wife dead?

Speaker 36 Are you asserting that there's a little love nest, a little pad?

Speaker 69 Oh, yeah, there was a, I thought it was a playhouse that went on over Love Shack, and that was it.

Speaker 6 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 12 For nearly five years, the DiPuccio family had been waiting for this day.

Speaker 26 Dr. Yazid Issa would finally face a jury for allegedly poisoning his wife Rosie with cyanide.
Steve Debber and Anna Feraglia would prosecute the aggravated murder case for Ohio.

Speaker 36 What's the mission? How are you going to go about it?

Speaker 72 The mission is to define his character and let the jury get another glimpse of who he is as opposed to how he appears there in the courtroom.

Speaker 42 As the trial started, the prosecution's challenge was to convince the jury that Yazid Issa was a Jekyll and Hyde.

Speaker 19 One face showing the emergency room doctor who saved lives and seemed the ideal husband.

Speaker 43 The other, an evil poisoner who planned the murder of his wife, the mother of his two children.

Speaker 14 Rosie's sister-in-law may have seen one of those masks slip right after Rosie had died.

Speaker 44 She testified as to how cold and disrespectful Yaz had seemed in the way he treated his wife's body lying on the hospital bed.

Speaker 74 Yaz walked over to Rosie

Speaker 10 and

Speaker 47 very abruptly lifted her up and pulled the sheet down.

Speaker 10 And she was naked underneath and he exposed her breast.

Speaker 10 And he tried to get the necklace off and he just kind of got it off and he just treated her very disrespectfully.

Speaker 74 I remember thinking, why is he doing that?

Speaker 49 Why is he treating her like that?

Speaker 74 That's his wife.

Speaker 49 State calls Eva McGregor.

Speaker 61 If the prosecution had an indispensable star witness, it would be Eva McGregor, the friend who had been on the phone with Rosie just moments before her car accident and death.

Speaker 36 Only Eva could point to Yaz as the source of that cyanide-lace calcium capsule Rosie had taken.

Speaker 75 She had had taken a calcium pill right before she left her house. She didn't really want to take it.

Speaker 75 And she said as she was in it, you know, rushing out the door, he said, here, take it, take your calcium. Now I don't know if that's what's making me sick.

Speaker 32 The jury would get a lesson in poisoning.

Speaker 32 The court was told that cyanide isn't something you can just buy over the counter, but that lethal stuff, according to the testimony of a poison expert, is available only a mouse click away online.

Speaker 76 There was a study done where they actually looked at eBay. There was two times when it came up that you could buy on eBay cyanide.

Speaker 30 And it turned out to be a snap to shake out the calcium in the capsule and replace it with cyanide.

Speaker 76 You can literally just take a pen

Speaker 76 cap and you can scoop it with that and pour it right in.

Speaker 14 That may have been the killer's methodology.

Speaker 26 But in the big picture, the most damning fact against Yaz was his decision to flee.

Speaker 18 Would an innocent father have left his two children behind just weeks after their mother had died?

Speaker 26 For the story, the courtroom was taken to the Middle East to account for Yaz's missing months in Lebanon.

Speaker 65 Good morning, sir.

Speaker 26 Jamal Khalifi, a kind of godfather, Mr.

Speaker 17 Fix-It character,

Speaker 27 testified about how he helped Yaz live on the land with virtually a new life and identity.

Speaker 77 I get a phone call from my brother that there is somebody coming over

Speaker 77 to take care of him.

Speaker 31 The brother of Jamal the Fixer Fixer had known Yaz's family back in the United States.

Speaker 39 Jamal testified he put Yaz up in a Beirut apartment, got him a new passport and a new name, Maurice Khalifi.

Speaker 57 We have

Speaker 77 offered their support to Labano.

Speaker 41 As he got to know the American doctor better, a stunning story about Rosie spilled out.

Speaker 77 He told me the whole story that his wife was leaving the home, going, I think, to a movie. He told me

Speaker 77 he grounded Sinai, refilled the pills. He gave her two pills.
Down the street, she had a car accident and she died.

Speaker 18 A severe blow for the accused.

Speaker 42 A secondhand account of a confession from Yaz.

Speaker 16 And another witness was about to deliver an even more dramatic roundhouse punch.

Speaker 76 Good afternoon, Mr. Issa.

Speaker 45 Ferros Issa, none other than the defendant's own brother and business partner, took the stand as a prosecution witness.

Speaker 71 I asked him if he was responsible for her death, and he said yes.

Speaker 72 When you found out that information, what did you say to your brother?

Speaker 51 I told him he was a

Speaker 79 why did you say that?

Speaker 12 Because he

Speaker 49 took Rosie's life and I loved her.

Speaker 71 He just ruined his whole family.

Speaker 42 It was crippling testimony.

Speaker 26 The brother, once an inseparable blood friend, had given Yaz an evidentiary kill shot.

Speaker 28 Nonetheless, there were still core problems in the prosecution's overall case.

Speaker 14 It was entirely circumstantial circumstantial and seemed to beg for a motive.

Speaker 26 Why would the doctor do it?

Speaker 41 Prosecutors answered by arguing that Yaz, the family man, wasn't really when you took a closer look.

Speaker 30 It turned out he had scads of women on the side.

Speaker 12 He was a doctor with a first-degree cheating heart.

Speaker 72 Every Wednesday night he would spend with his girlfriend, with his mistress at her apartment.

Speaker 57 Girlfriends, mistresses, sex partners, lots of them.

Speaker 15 Jurors were even shown photos of a hidden-away bedroom in the building where he and his brother had their business.

Speaker 69 He loved Chick, that was it.

Speaker 72 Yeah, that was a place that he would use the apartment over there from time to time to bring his lady friends.

Speaker 43 Good afternoon.

Speaker 15 And one of those lovers had been Margarita, the daytime nanny.

Speaker 24 She was the woman the detective saw sitting in Yaz's kitchen when he first went to collect the calcium caps.

Speaker 16 Margarita, it turned out, had had a long-term sexual affair with Yaz, an affair Rosie evidently knew nothing about.

Speaker 80 In 2001,

Speaker 80 we began our sexual relationship.

Speaker 72 Why did you become involved in a relationship with the defendant while you were married?

Speaker 80 Me and my husband were having problems and I thought I was gonna get a divorce.

Speaker 72 So did this begin an affair with the defendant?

Speaker 80 On occasion.

Speaker 62 It wasn't a love affair or anything.

Speaker 17 Margarita described it as a friends with benefits type of relationship with Yaz, purely sex.

Speaker 24 But the prosecution asserted Yaz had a deeper, more complicated relationship with another woman, Michelle Madeline.

Speaker 30 Now she was the so-called nighttime nanny for his children.

Speaker 24 Michelle was also someone prosecutors say who fell in love with a doctor and he with her.

Speaker 72 Stace Exhibit 125.

Speaker 32 To make the point, jurors were shown a camisol, an intimate Valentine's Day gift from Yaz to Michelle just two weeks before Rosie's death.

Speaker 27 A representative of the company that shipped the Nightie read the card that was enclosed.

Speaker 21 Next Valentine's Day will be all ours. I love you with all of my being.

Speaker 80 Yes.

Speaker 74 He's indicating to this paramour

Speaker 74 that next year is going to be all ours. It's kind of a foreshadowing of she won't be around next year.

Speaker 15 The mistress, the nighttime nanny, was called to the stand.

Speaker 65 I had a romantic relationship with him.

Speaker 26 Michelle testified that she was a nurse who'd met Yaz on the job.

Speaker 65 He was telling me that he was so unhappy in his marriage and I was the love of his life and

Speaker 65 I was his dream come true and

Speaker 65 he was going to leave her so that our relationships could continue.

Speaker 72 She's pushing back saying no, I can't be with a married man and he can't take no for an answer and that's his motivation. That's what puts him on this path.

Speaker 53 A path the prosecution argued that led directly to murder.

Speaker 14 The one time Mister shared with the court Yaz's supposed true feelings for his wife, Rosie.

Speaker 65 He wasn't in love with her, according to what he told me. Okay.
And that he was in love with me. He would say she was a good person, but she was cold.
He would call her Amana.

Speaker 72 Amana, what does that mean?

Speaker 65 The refrigerator brand.

Speaker 15 Rosie's family, taking in the testimony, were devastated by the mistress's recollections.

Speaker 9 The way he humiliated her, and on top of everything that he had done to her,

Speaker 9 to belittle her, or to make fun or to mock her with his mistress is, you know,

Speaker 51 sick.

Speaker 76 Your Honor, at this time, the state of Ohio would rest its case.

Speaker 46 The defense was about to rise and offer a completely different theory of the crime.

Speaker 39 In fact, the jury had already met the true killer in court, and it wasn't Yazisa.

Speaker 6 Coming up,

Speaker 2 questions about those cyanide-filled pills.

Speaker 36 If he has successfully killed his wife with them, why hold on to this stuff?

Speaker 71 Precisely.

Speaker 6 When dateline continues.

Speaker 51 What a good marriage

Speaker 55 Rosie had with Yaz.

Speaker 51 Our mandate is to do the best job that we can and to bring home that W.

Speaker 51 Bring home that not guilty.

Speaker 41 The defense for Yaz Issa came down to this.

Speaker 31 Sure, he had lots of women on the side, and he got away with it. So why did he need to kill his wife?

Speaker 12 His two defense lawyers, Mark Marine and Steve Bradley, told the jury straight out the defendant was never going to be a husband of the year.

Speaker 60 Yazid Issa regularly, always

Speaker 60 maintained numerous sexual relationships with other women.

Speaker 14 But they insisted a cheater doesn't necessarily make a murderer, especially a doctor who was planning a bigger family.

Speaker 59 Yazid Issa did not commit this crime.

Speaker 59 He did not intentionally poison the mother of his two young children, the woman with whom he was actively trying to conceive a third child and add to their family something they both wanted.

Speaker 30 If he were the heartless philanderer portrayed by the prosecution, then how come Rosie's family liked him so much?

Speaker 25 Did she have a good life?

Speaker 64 Yes.

Speaker 60 It appeared that they had a pretty sound marriage.

Speaker 51 Yes.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 36 The marriage to their friends and to her family is a loving, good, viable marriage.

Speaker 51 By all accounts, they had a great marriage.

Speaker 15 The prosecution theorized that he killed Rosie to be with his mistress named Michelle.

Speaker 26 The defense's response was that Michelle was just another take-a-number girlfriend.

Speaker 51 Michelle meant nothing.

Speaker 19 Add it up, argued the defense, and you had a respected doctor with no money worries, nice family, and as many girlfriends on the side as he could juggle.

Speaker 16 Bottom line, he had no reason to kill Rosie.

Speaker 59 There was no reason

Speaker 60 for him to have separated his children from their mother and their father.

Speaker 60 To do something as dramatic and extreme as

Speaker 60 poisoning your wife requires some strong motive, and it wasn't present here.

Speaker 38 And then there was the way he behaved early on.

Speaker 50 Would a guilty man have turned over to the police that bottle of calcium capsules if he knew full well the lab would find cyanide in nine of them?

Speaker 36 Maybe the biggest puzzler.

Speaker 60 Right.

Speaker 36 If he has contaminated these caplets, and he has successfully killed his wife with them,

Speaker 36 why in the name of all things we know from television shows would you hold on to this stuff?

Speaker 71 Precisely.

Speaker 18 The defense went after the police for sloppy handling of evidence.

Speaker 17 The detective who had poured the capsules into his bare hand after collecting them.

Speaker 79 Are you telling us that you made a mistake? In hindsight? Yes.

Speaker 49 Yes.

Speaker 8 The forensic expert who didn't check for prints.

Speaker 25 The pill bottle itself would have been conducive to leaving Ridge detailed, correct?

Speaker 49 Yes.

Speaker 12 To be clear then, nobody ever made that request.

Speaker 59 No, sir.

Speaker 51 There was a catastrophe in terms of forensics here.

Speaker 42 And even though the court had learned how easy it was to obtain cyanide, there was no evidence presented that Yaz had actually done that.

Speaker 25 Still, the stark fact at the epicenter of the case against Yaz Issa was his his decision to flee the country.

Speaker 16 How could that be anything other than the action of a guilty man?

Speaker 24 The defense spun it this way.

Speaker 19 Yaz early on had talked to a lawyer who advised him he might be facing the death penalty if charged with a murder.

Speaker 51 Yaz

Speaker 51 was led to believe that he could be charged with capital murder, and he just freaked out.

Speaker 15 Then, of course, his lawyers had to defuse those explosive allegations from the Lebanese fixer and his own brother that he'd admitted to poisoning Rosie.

Speaker 71 I asked him if he was responsible for her death, and he said yes.

Speaker 17 Both witnesses had lied on the stand, according to the defense, because each had cut a deal with the prosecution for leniency on charges they were facing.

Speaker 51 It was the proverbial get out of jail card.

Speaker 76 We were free to step down.

Speaker 15 The brother, for instance, was looking at almost 12 years in prison for helping Yaz on the lamb.

Speaker 2 He took a deal.

Speaker 51 He's got five kids, all under the age of 12 years.

Speaker 51 He employs 100 people. He's got a lovely wife, a beautiful home, and his world is about to collapse on him.

Speaker 36 So, is Faraz well advised in terms of his own survival strategy to sing for a supper?

Speaker 51 That's what we believe.

Speaker 38 Jamal the Fixer had been a fugitive wanted by the United States.

Speaker 25 Were you indicted in a 29-count indictment? How was it?

Speaker 63 Just listen to my question.

Speaker 81 Listen, sir, listen to my question.

Speaker 60 The more he talked, the better off we felt we were.

Speaker 36 Bad guy who's trying to cut a deal. Precisely.

Speaker 12 So if Yaz Issa didn't do it, who did?

Speaker 16 The jury had already met her, argued the defense. It offered up Margarita, the daytime nanny, as the true killer.

Speaker 59 She is one of the women that Yazid maintained a long-term, ongoing sexual relationship.

Speaker 20 Margarita had a motive for wanting Rosie out of the picture, argued the defense.

Speaker 19 She and Yaz had kept their sexual relationship going even after both had married.

Speaker 15 And don't believe this portrait of her as a casual friends with benefits lover claimed the defense.

Speaker 6 Margarita very much

Speaker 59 wanted to marry Yazid.

Speaker 11 And they claim Margarita was so obsessed with Yaz that she scheduled her own wedding for the same day as Yaz's marriage to Rosie.

Speaker 61 Are you telling us that it is an absolute coincidence that you selected the same wedding date as Yazid?

Speaker 62 Is that what you're telling us?

Speaker 48 Absolutely.

Speaker 41 Margarita worked for Yaz's brother and had access to Yaz's house.

Speaker 29 The theory, did she sneak over there once, place the cyanide in the capsules so she'd have Yaz for herself?

Speaker 60 The police themselves did very, very little to eliminate her as a suspect.

Speaker 23 Despite that assertion, the authorities had investigated Margarita and dismissed her as a suspect.

Speaker 29 She emphatically denied having anything to do with Rosie's death.

Speaker 24 But by introducing the girlfriend theory, had the defense raised enough reasonable doubt,

Speaker 78 the defense would respectfully rest.

Speaker 27 After a seven-week trial and over 60 witnesses, the case was concluded.

Speaker 11 Now it was up to the jurors.

Speaker 37 They deliberated for three days and announced they had reached a verdict.

Speaker 35 I couldn't stop shaking. I got exactly the same way I did the day Rosie died.

Speaker 18 The lawyers, the families on both sides, were summoned to the courtroom for the reading of the verdict by Judge Dina Calabriz.

Speaker 65 We, the jury, in this case, being duly impaneled and sworn, do find the defendant, Yazid Issa, guilty of aggravated murder in violation of 20.

Speaker 13 Guilty.

Speaker 16 It was almost over.

Speaker 26 At sentencing a few days later, Rosie's family confronted the man they'd once loved as a son and brother.

Speaker 72 We lost there, Rosie, for no reason.

Speaker 6 The only thing I'm hoping that

Speaker 66 from now on,

Speaker 72 maybe there'll be less fights that my wife cries herself to sleep.

Speaker 78 And I challenge him to find the courage today to admit what he did,

Speaker 26 provide the apology to my mother, my father,

Speaker 78 my sister, my wife, my brother.

Speaker 28 Rachel deserved.

Speaker 78 Are you mad enough?

Speaker 5 Are you?

Speaker 78 It's your last chance to save your soul.

Speaker 7 Right here, right now.

Speaker 70 Yaz kept his silence.

Speaker 65 I sentence you to life in prison.

Speaker 40 The judge had sentenced the doctor to the maximum.

Speaker 17 All along, the detectives, the prosecutors had wondered about the ifs.

Speaker 15 If Rosie hadn't called Eva on the way to the movies, if Rosie had lost control of her SUV on the freeway and not a local street.

Speaker 72 Had it been a high-speed impact on the highway, the coroner and the pathologist probably wouldn't have looked any further than for some blunt force trauma from the automobile accident.

Speaker 72 In a way, it could have been a perfect crime.

Speaker 33 But Yaz hadn't plotted the perfect crime, as the jury saw it.

Speaker 30 He killed, he ran, he was caught by tenacious lawmen.

Speaker 17 Yassid Issa will be eligible for parole after serving 20 years.

Speaker 6 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
Thanks for joining us.

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