A Story of Poison

Transcript

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Speaker 7 Um, a little spicy, but also tangy and sweet.

Speaker 9 Maybe it's time to turn up the heat.

Speaker 3 Or turn it down.

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Speaker 2 Spicy.

Speaker 4 But not too spicy.

Speaker 10 She was a person out of a 40s film noir movie. She was a stunner physically.

Speaker 6 And she had a strange hold over men.

Speaker 10 She was able to say, jump, and the men would say, how high.

Speaker 6 One of those men was her husband.

Speaker 11 He said, she's just fun and vivacious, and we have a good time.

Speaker 6 But the good times ended. He disappeared.
Then so did she, leaving behind a very close friend.

Speaker 12 They bought matching underwear together.

Speaker 6 A mystery.

Speaker 13 How deep a world did you dig?

Speaker 13 Not deep enough, not.

Speaker 6 And a murder.

Speaker 10 It was a love triangle, and one of them had to go.

Speaker 6 Here's Keith Morrison with a story of poison.

Speaker 6 It was September 11th, 2001. Just about everybody knows where they were that awful day.

Speaker 6 Like the glamorous trio that was traveling north through California's Yosemite National Park.

Speaker 6 Even as the rest of the world's attention was focused on New York City,

Speaker 6 they were intent on their own urgent needs, their desires, their fears, their deadly love triangle.

Speaker 6 So they probably didn't appreciate the passing wonders, the astonishing cliffs, the waterfalls, the giant sequoias,

Speaker 6 any more than the one in the back seat, through fading eyes, saw anything at all.

Speaker 6 His name was Larry McNabney, and he was a tall, handsome man, a well-known and respected attorney from Nevada, a personal injury specialist, made buckets of money, loved the big life, loved being in control.

Speaker 11 There was never a hair out of place. There wasn't dust on his desk, his pen was always in the same spot.

Speaker 6 Larry's daughter, Tavia, was was crazy about him, in awe of his type A personality, his joy of life, his courtroom presence.

Speaker 11 I loved

Speaker 11 to go to the courtroom and watch my dad. It was

Speaker 11 mesmerizing to me. In command of the place.
Completely confident, not an ounce of shyness. He commanded the courtroom.

Speaker 6 I've been a trial lawyer for over 20 years. A good attorney, and perhaps as important, very good at the business of law.
Larry's longtime friend, Fred Acheson.

Speaker 14 He could open 50 files a month in personal injury litigation, which made him a rich man.

Speaker 6 But nobody's perfect, of course. And for all of Larry's unquestioned talents, the man carried around with him a raft of corresponding demons.

Speaker 11 I know he had a difficult childhood

Speaker 11 and

Speaker 11 that a lot of your personality is shaped when you're a child.

Speaker 6 And as an adult, Larry struggled with alcohol and women. He married and divorced several times.

Speaker 11 It was like a void he was trying to fill and he never could fill it.

Speaker 6 In fact, from time to time Larry had gone on benders and just vanished weeks at a time.

Speaker 6 And everybody would worry and wonder, and sure enough, he'd show up again.

Speaker 14 I had a t-shirt made up once, yellow with black letters saying, Where is Larry McNabney?

Speaker 6 But then, finally, Larry, well into his 40s, seemed to get his act together for real. He set up a new office in Las Vegas.
Everything clicked, possibly for an attractive reason, as Tavia discovered.

Speaker 11 I went by the office one day and he said, I have someone I want you to meet.

Speaker 11 He said,

Speaker 11 This is Elisa.

Speaker 6 Elisa, 17 years younger than Larry, and he was in love.

Speaker 11 And he said she's just fun and vivacious and she's young and it's just we have a good time.

Speaker 6 Davia didn't stand in the way. She wanted her dad to be happy.

Speaker 11 We welcomed the new person in.

Speaker 11 It's my dad, so I didn't want anything that would inhibit me from spending time with him.

Speaker 6 And he really cared for this woman. He did.

Speaker 6 Larry and Elisa thrived, both personally and professionally. They got married.
Elisa became his office manager. They opened up a firm in Sacramento, California, another big success.

Speaker 6 So they hired a young, attractive college student named Sarah Dutra, the outgoing daughter of deeply religious parents. who soon became a friend as well as a sort of personal and office assistant.

Speaker 6 And together, Elisa and Larry enjoyed the high life.

Speaker 14 She was into the same thing that Larry loved, and style. I mean, they went out and bought Viper cars together.

Speaker 6 They also shared Larry's newest passion, quarter horses.

Speaker 14 Larry would show horses and show himself, which fit in with with Larry looking good and feeling good.

Speaker 6 Larry could do more of what he liked, while young Sarah pitched in to help Elisa run the business end of Larry's law practice. Just about perfect.

Speaker 6 Though Larry's friend Fred was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud about it.

Speaker 14 The fact that she took control of his business allowed him to engage in drinking and partying.

Speaker 6 Which is not really what Larry needed.

Speaker 14 No, he didn't need that, because his appetites would run amok.

Speaker 6 So when, after nearly seven years of marriage, Larry suddenly dropped out of sight, close friends weren't extremely alarmed at first. After all, Larry had gone on drunken benders before.

Speaker 6 But this time, as days stretched into weeks, it seemed different, extremely odd.

Speaker 6 Ginger Miller started working at the law firm as a secretary in September 2001, just about the time Larry went missing. Elisa kept the business going in his absence.

Speaker 6 but couldn't seem to settle on what the staff should tell people about Larry.

Speaker 12 I was told to tell his kids and different people in his family different things. So I was told that he was golfing or skiing, someplace they probably couldn't get a hold of him at.

Speaker 6 So it was all obvious, BS.

Speaker 12 Yeah, yeah, because, and then if it was a client, I would have to say that he was working on the deposition, he was with another client, and he had to fly out.

Speaker 6 Larry's kids didn't know what to think.

Speaker 11 And I said to my brother, this doesn't sound right. Why do the stories keep changing?

Speaker 6 October arrived, still no Larry. Thanksgiving.
In December, he was always with family on his birthday. But still no sign of Larry McNabney.

Speaker 11 I didn't get a good feeling. And what I worried about was, had something gone wrong and dad was scared and he took off.

Speaker 6 Had Larry offended the wrong person?

Speaker 6 Tavia had a friend in law enforcement.

Speaker 11 who told her. You have to look at it two ways.
Either if he's in hiding, he's not going to be happy you found him. Because obviously he's hiding for a reason.

Speaker 6 Or

Speaker 11 something's happened to him.

Speaker 6 Meanwhile, back at the office, Ginger was hearing things, worrisome things, until she just couldn't keep it in anymore.

Speaker 12 I went to the sheriff's department. I wasn't sure what to do.
So I just asked for a piece of paper and I slid it under the window.

Speaker 6 Detectives got her note all right and thus figured they should have a chat with Alicia McNabney. But by the time they went looking for her, just like Larry, she was gone.

Speaker 6 Coming up, investigators begin to fill in the missing pieces about the mysterious and now missing Elisa.

Speaker 14 He called me up and said, Fred, I don't know who she is, if her name is what she says it is or anything.

Speaker 6 By the dawn of 2002, while the rest of us were getting used to a post-9-11 new normal, it seemed pretty clear that something very abnormal must have happened to that successful personal injury attorney, Larry McNabney.

Speaker 6 Nobody had seen him in five months. He'd never been on a bender for this long.

Speaker 6 And now his wife, Elisa, was missing, too.

Speaker 6 By this time, Ginger had dropped off her note at the sheriff's office, and detectives were poking around in the abandoned remains of Larry's law practice, talking to employees like Sarah Dutre, the attractive 21-year-old art student from Sacramento State who worked at the McNabby Law Firm as an office secretary.

Speaker 6 She brought her little dog Ralph with her to the sheriff's office.

Speaker 6 Sarah told the detectives that she and Elisa had become close friends, and so she, Sarah, certainly noticed how erratic Elisa became after Larry went missing.

Speaker 13 Things with stories do not seem right. Like, you know,

Speaker 13 Elisa won't come to work all the time there, you know.

Speaker 6 Sarah confirmed what Ginger Miller said, that Elisa kept changing her explanations for Larry's whereabouts.

Speaker 6 And Sarah said she saw Elisa signing Larry's name on checks and day-to-day business transactions.

Speaker 13 I figured she's keeping this business going for him. You know, so he's the real player doing whatever he's doing.

Speaker 6 In early January 2002, said Sarah, Elisa planned a trip to Arizona to attend a horse show,

Speaker 6 and in the absence of Larry, invited Sarah to go along.

Speaker 13 I was going to fly down the next day,

Speaker 13 and she told me we needed to get paid for and all that.

Speaker 6 But when Sarah got to the airport,

Speaker 6 the ticket was not paid for.

Speaker 13 So then you called her cell phone number, and what did did you get? Nothing. It was this number is no longer needed.

Speaker 6 And that was that, said Sarah. She hadn't heard from Elisa since.

Speaker 13 I actually called Ginger and I said, Ginger, you know,

Speaker 13 you know, I'm going to look for a new job. I don't know about you, but Elisa's gone.

Speaker 6 Thomas Testa was the San Joaquin County Prosecutor. He'd handled a number of missing persons' cases, and so when he heard about the case of Larry and Elisa McNabney, he gravitated toward it.

Speaker 10 T was an attorney with a caseload who just disappeared. This isn't someone who's a homeless person who just vanishes and you think maybe they took a greyhound and went to Nevada.

Speaker 6 Jessica began by taking a good hard look at Elisa.

Speaker 10 She was a person out of a 40s film noir movie in that she was a stunner physically. Everyone said that, but more importantly, she had a control over men that just amazed me.

Speaker 10 She was able to say, jump, and the men would say, how high.

Speaker 6 It certainly seemed true for Larry. So said his old friend Fred Acheson.

Speaker 14 She was controlling him to the extent that she was keeping him away from his family and his former friends.

Speaker 6 Did that include the relationship he had with you?

Speaker 14 No question about it.

Speaker 15 You found yourself shut out.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 So did Larry's daughter, Tavia.

Speaker 11 Elisa completely cut me out of the picture and I was devastated.

Speaker 6 But why? Why was Elisa keeping Larry away from his family and friends? What did she have to hide?

Speaker 14 He called me up once on the phone and said, Fred, I don't know who she is.

Speaker 14 And, you know, I thought he meant, well, we don't really ever know who our spouses are deep down.

Speaker 14 And he said, no, I don't even know if this is who she is, if her name is what she says it is or anything.

Speaker 6 By then, said Fred, Larry had discovered ample reason to stop trusting Elisa.

Speaker 14 He couldn't keep his his wallet in his pants.

Speaker 6 He told you that? Yeah.

Speaker 14 She would steal money out of his wallet. He had to hide his wallet in his own house.

Speaker 6 Turned out she was also stealing from the law firm.

Speaker 14 She'd ripped him off.

Speaker 6 How much? Any idea?

Speaker 14 Over $100,000.

Speaker 6 Larry told Fred all about his troubles with Elisa. And yet, he kept her around.
Not like he hadn't divorced women before, but not this one. Tavia didn't get it.

Speaker 11 I mean, he always said she has this hold over me, and I never understood what that meant.

Speaker 6 And Larry's comments to Fred about not knowing his wife?

Speaker 6 Well, his suspicions turned out to be true.

Speaker 6 A little research told detectives that the real woman behind the name Elisa McNabney had a considerable criminal rap sheet, including stolen property, credit card fraud. grand theft.

Speaker 10 She really had a way of ingratiating herself with men and using her female charms, and she was very, very good at it. She was a true and true con artist.

Speaker 6 So was Elisa just conning Larry? Surely, thought Fred, she wouldn't have done away with him, would she?

Speaker 14 It wouldn't make any sense even for a dedicated pole cat to do anything like that because he was the goose that laid the golden egg. It wouldn't make any sense whatsoever.

Speaker 6 It was a farm worker who noticed a flock of vultures or buzzards drifting above grapefields. Saw something sticking out of the ground.

Speaker 6 And soon, the missing person's case turned into something much, much worse and considerably more bizarre.

Speaker 16 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 16 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 16 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 16 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 6 It was February 2002. A remote vineyard up in the northern end of California's Central Valley.

Speaker 6 A farm worker checking the outer reaches of a giant field of grape couldn't help but see the big birds wheeling round and round.

Speaker 6 Something out there.

Speaker 17 Vultures were circling. He spotted the vultures, and and so he went out to see what they were circling.

Speaker 6 Investigator Javier Ramos and Lieutenant Robert Bookwalter worked with the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Department at the time. They were among the first on the scene.

Speaker 6 Must be some dead animal or something.

Speaker 17 Well, I believe he said that. That's what he figured he was going to find.
Just some dead animal out there.

Speaker 6 But it wasn't a dead animal. The leg that was sticking out of the ground was decidedly human.
And soon Larry's daughter Tavia heard the news.

Speaker 11 I got a call from the Sheriff's Department. I felt myself get really hot and nauseous and she said that

Speaker 11 the body they found, the dental records, it was him.

Speaker 11 And I remember I never swear and I yelled out this cuss word.

Speaker 11 And I slammed down the phone and I just started shaking. Was a moment in time that I've never felt such anguish.

Speaker 6 It's still raw even though.

Speaker 11 It is because I thought,

Speaker 11 I don't know, I thought,

Speaker 11 I guess I was hoping he was in hiding.

Speaker 6 Very fortunate that the body was discovered and now we can move on and investigate it as a homicide.

Speaker 6 Homicide? Oh yes. Ample proof now, five months after he vanished, Larry had been murdered and left to rot out in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 15 There weren't any stab wounds or any bullet holes.

Speaker 6 There were no obvious signs of Larry's cause of death. So they looked further and found something very unusual.

Speaker 15 The medical examiner was able to find out that Tokasadeh was poisoning with a horse tranquilizer.

Speaker 6 Horse tranquilizer? Yes. Now that was strange.
But get this.

Speaker 17 He'd been dead for an extended period of time. However, the body had not decomposed consistent with the timeframe that we were looking at.

Speaker 6 Meaning.

Speaker 17 Meaning that it was preserved, kept cold.

Speaker 15 One of the first things that I thought is where would the person that killed Larry, where would they have access to? Like a walk-in refrigerator, large enough to hold a human body.

Speaker 6 Detectives wanted answers, and so did Larry's daughter, Tavia, who sometimes believed she could hear her father in her sleep when i would go to sleep at night i would wake up and i would hear him calling for me to help him and i didn't know what to do and i didn't understand what was going on sometimes people get a sense of uh knowing either what or who was responsible did you i knew elisa had done something

Speaker 6 Larry's much younger wife, Elisa. She vanished a few months after he did, and now that Larry was dead, she was the prime suspect in his murder.

Speaker 6 Sheriff's deputies and the FBI finally tracked her down in March 2002 in Florida.

Speaker 15 She cut her hair short and changed her name.

Speaker 6 Elisa was now going by the name of Shane Iveroni and was working as a paralegal at a Florida law firm.

Speaker 15 Elisa was a very smart person.

Speaker 15 She had, I believe, 140 IQ.

Speaker 6 She could talk anybody into anything. Right.

Speaker 6 But now that she was finally exposed for the con artist she was and was in custody, Elisa decided to tell her story, starting at long last with her legal name.

Speaker 13 My whole name is Lauren.

Speaker 13 L-A-R-E-N.

Speaker 13 L-A-R-E-M. My middle name is Renee, R-E-N-E-E.

Speaker 13 My main name was Sims, S-I-M-S.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 11 And Elisa, where does that come from?

Speaker 13 A change or you just wanted a different name? No, I don't. Where is that?

Speaker 13 You know, I mean, I was a totally different kind of thing.

Speaker 6 Elisa, or Lauren, was from Massachusetts and was a mother of two. She was wanted in Florida for violating probation on a burglary and theft charge and had been on the run for nine years, she said.

Speaker 6 She eventually settled in Las Vegas, where she met Larry and by this time had changed her name to Elisa.

Speaker 6 She told the police that she was at the horse show in Arizona when she found out police wanted to talk to her about Larry.

Speaker 6 And so she took off in her Jaguar, drove from state to state.

Speaker 13 I need just away and went away.

Speaker 6 So, with the preliminaries out of the way, now came the big question: What happened to Larry McNabney?

Speaker 6 Elisa, without hesitation and without even being asked, spilled the beans.

Speaker 13 And did I kill my husband? Yes, I killed my husband.

Speaker 6 There it was. No apology, no evasion.
She simply confessed to killing her husband, Barry McNabney.

Speaker 6 But, and this was a butt with a capital B, that wasn't the whole story. Not even close.

Speaker 6 Coming up, the rest of the story. Did Elisa have help?

Speaker 4 And I freaked it.

Speaker 13 She was not throwing a hole up. Yeah.
And I was freaking out.

Speaker 6 She? Who was she?

Speaker 6 When poison continues.

Speaker 6 There is a purity to confession, a real cleansing of the soul. And now, after months on the lamb, Elisa McNabney, a.k.a.

Speaker 6 Larry Renee Sims, etc., etc., was finally in custody and offloading the secrets of a lifetime. Didn't hold back.
Yes, she killed Larry, her husband of nearly seven years, she said.

Speaker 6 But it wasn't her idea.

Speaker 13 I said, I don't mean you. She said, yeah, I can't.
My said,

Speaker 13 I can't.

Speaker 6 She said?

Speaker 6 Who was this other woman who pushed Elisa to commit murder? Turned out detectives had already talked with her.

Speaker 6 Remember Sarah Dutra, the young secretary, Elisa's friend, who came in with her little dog and had been so helpful to detectives after Larry and Elisa disappeared?

Speaker 6 Now, Elisa was saying that killing Larry was Sarah's idea.

Speaker 6 I never will talk about that after my own.

Speaker 6 Elisa told the story this way. Larry was a heavy drinker and drug user.
He was abusive, she claimed, and she feared for her life.

Speaker 6 One day she said she confided in her young friend Sarah, and Sarah said there was just one thing to do. Kill Larry McNabney.

Speaker 6 And now in a three-hour long interview, Elisa went into detail after gruesome detail of how she and Sarah did it.

Speaker 6 Elisa and Larry were at a horse show in Los Angeles, she said, and Sarah flew down to meet them, or rather to meet Elisa, since Larry didn't like Sarah, said Elisa.

Speaker 13 And what did you guys decide to do with him?

Speaker 11 We said,

Speaker 13 if we kill him,

Speaker 13 no reason to miss him. Were you going to do it like that day, or were you going to do it some other time in the future? Or when were you guys planning on doing it? Right then.
Right then and there.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 6 That was September 9th, 2001. According to Elisa, Larry had already passed out after imbibing a little horse tranquilizer on his own for fun.

Speaker 6 So Sarah decided, according to Elisa, to just give him more.

Speaker 6 And no one would ever find out.

Speaker 6 Oh, my God.

Speaker 11 It seemed like a good idea at the time, you guys.

Speaker 13 Oh, my God. It's so horrible to think of taking somebody's life.

Speaker 6 Well, Larry slept, said Elisa. She and Sarah squirted drops of horse tranquilizer into his mouth.
But Larry didn't die.

Speaker 6 Instead, the next day on September 10th, Larry got up, showed his horse, and then went right back to bed.

Speaker 13 Next morning, he's like lying there and I thought he was dead. And so I wakes her up and then say, I need stead.
And she pushes him and she says, no, he's not good.

Speaker 6 But he was so heavily drugged, he couldn't walk.

Speaker 13 So we went down the street and went into a wheelchair. And I got him dressed and put him in the wheelchair.
and we rolled him out to my truck, our truck, and put him next to the truck and we drove.

Speaker 6 This, by the way, was September 11th, 2001. Everyone else in the known world preoccupied elsewhere.

Speaker 6 Well, Elisa and Sarah drove north through California with Larry slowly dying in the back seat of the truck.

Speaker 13 We stopped in Yosemite somewhere in Yosemite and Sarah got out and started digging a hole. I figured it was alive.
alive, okay?

Speaker 13 And I freaked.

Speaker 13 She was going to throw him in the hole.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And I was freaking out.
I said, we can't put him in there. He's alive.

Speaker 13 We can't do that.

Speaker 6 So, she said, they drove on. They thought Larry would die in the car, but he didn't.

Speaker 6 So when they finally made it back to Larry and Elise's home near Sacramento, Larry was slipping in and out of consciousness, still alive.

Speaker 13 And then then like six o'clock the morning falls on,

Speaker 13 the sun starts coming up,

Speaker 13 and Sarah sleeps late, you know, and so I immediately go out there

Speaker 13 and he was dead.

Speaker 6 That was the morning of September 12th.

Speaker 13 And Sarah said, well, we have to be lying here. So

Speaker 13 we take the sheet

Speaker 13 that he was lying on and we wrapped it around him and then we took that tape and wrapped it around him and he was like in a crouch position and then but in my garage he had this wine refrigerator you know like a regular refrigerator but he ordinarily kept wine in so we took the wine out of it and we took the racks out of it and we put him in it

Speaker 6 we stuffed Larry's body in the refrigerator well they decided what to do with it.

Speaker 13 We talked about Baron in the backyard. We talked about Baron over my trainers.

Speaker 13 We talked about taking it in the desert and burning the body.

Speaker 6 But they couldn't quite decide. And so they kept Barry's body in the refrigerator for three months.
And then they decided to take it to Las Vegas. Find someplace there to bury it.

Speaker 13 How much does he wait? He waited back a lot. I'm having a hard time seeing you two picking up.
No, me too.

Speaker 13 I need to lay the trailer tire down in front of the refrigerator open the refrigerator door laid the trailer tire down

Speaker 13 slide him out put him on the trailer tire and then back the jag up really close to the trailer tire and then it was only like that much difference so then we just pushed you know you like pulled the tire into the trunk exactly and he was like shaved like this you know so then we put him in the trunk

Speaker 13 And he was like this.

Speaker 13 And we closed the trunk and we went to Las Vegas.

Speaker 6 En route to Las Vegas with their two dogs in the back seat, Larry in the trunk, along with two shovels. Once there, Sarah hung out at a hotel with the dogs.

Speaker 6 Elisa went out looking for a burial place for Larry. But when she started digging, she said, the ground was too hard.

Speaker 13 And so I went back to the hotel and I told her I can't do it. You know, all the time he's in the trunk, you know, and the valet's parking us, and it's not good, good, you know.

Speaker 6 So, Elisa said, they drove back to California. And the next morning, at 4 o'clock, she drove out to a vineyard, dug a hole, and buried him.

Speaker 13 How deep a hole did you dig? Not deep enough, obviously.

Speaker 6 That was Elisa's story. And just a few hours after she finished telling it, California detectives hauled in Sarah Dutra, the alleged driver of the whole plot.
And her story?

Speaker 6 Well, it was a little different.

Speaker 6 Coming up, is Sarah Dutra a cold-blooded killer or an innocent who was just trying to survive?

Speaker 6 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 16 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 16 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 16 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 16 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 13 I'm here tonight to encourage you

Speaker 13 to let the chips fall where the chips fall. Do not protect Elisa anymore.
Don't protect yourself either. Just tell the truth.
Does she like incriminating me somehow?

Speaker 6 Sarah Dutra appeared confused. No little dog to keep her company now.

Speaker 6 Her close friend Elisa McNabney had confessed to murdering her husband Larry and claimed that Sarah, just 21 years old at the time, not only helped with the murder, but was actually the driving force behind it.

Speaker 13 What do you think Elise is doing right about now?

Speaker 13 She is lying about what really happened.

Speaker 13 Are you a cold-blooded killer or are you or are you somebody that got caught up in some stuff and made some mistakes?

Speaker 6 They confronted her with Elise's written confession.

Speaker 13 Basically, it says I Lauren Jordan, along with Sarah Dudra, planned to overdose Larry McNapney with horse tranquilizer. No, I'm not denying.
I mean...

Speaker 13 I'm not denying that that conversation couldn't have happened, but I never thought that she would have carried it out and taken me along with her unknowingly.

Speaker 13 She's evil, and she's trying to do this to pull me down with her because she's been jealous of me. I know she has.

Speaker 13 Explain that to me, Ben. Why is she doing this?

Speaker 13 Make me believe it, Sarah. Because she's an evil person.
Anyone who can kill her husband is evil.

Speaker 6 Sarah Dutra broke down and told detectives her side of the story. And in this version, it was Elisa, not Sarah, who was the cold-blooded killer.

Speaker 6 It was Elisa, she said, who dosed Larry with horse tranquilizer. Elisa, who ordered Sarah to bury him in Yosemite, even before he was dead.

Speaker 13 Get out and grab the show and go check that ground. I said, I don't want to go fucking get out.
Okay.

Speaker 13 I want you to know I was so afraid to not do what you wanted me to.

Speaker 6 Elisa, who was eerily calm when Larry finally did expire.

Speaker 6 And he was laying there on the ground and said,

Speaker 6 what is he laying on the ground for? You know, why is he not leg in bed?

Speaker 6 And she said, he's dead. And I thought,

Speaker 6 oh, poor Larry.

Speaker 6 That was the morning of September 12th, after the long and harrowing drive home from the horse show in Los Angeles, said Sarah.

Speaker 6 And through her tears, she told the detectives how Larry's body body ended up in the refrigerator.

Speaker 13 It says he put him in a sheet.

Speaker 13 I'm like, God, I understand.

Speaker 13 Grab a sheet. And then we carry him down the stairs.
And I'm like, what are you doing?

Speaker 13 We have to call the police. This is not right.
She says, we are not calling the police. If you call the police, you'll be so sorry you did.

Speaker 6 And this was the heart of Sarah's version. She went along with the whole awful, crazy thing.
For one reason, she said, she was deathly afraid of Elisa.

Speaker 13 God.

Speaker 13 I didn't want anyone else.

Speaker 6 Was it possible? An innocent young woman in the thrall of a con artist and killer? Sarah Dutra seemed so frightened, so emotional. And yet, thought the detective.

Speaker 15 I felt a little bit over the top.

Speaker 6 She was a little over the top. Yeah.

Speaker 6 You mean she was acting, putting it on?

Speaker 14 I believe so.

Speaker 6 After more than nine hours of questioning, Sarah Dutra was arrested and charged with Larry's murder. It was a classic crime story.
Two killers, mutual finger-pointing.

Speaker 6 And prosecutors knew they could use each woman's testimony against the other. An easy checkmate.
That is, until Elisa took herself off the board.

Speaker 6 On March 30th, 13 days after her arrest, a jailer found her hanging by the neck in her cell. A suicide.

Speaker 10 A million questions

Speaker 10 for Elisa.

Speaker 10 And now that door has been slammed shut.

Speaker 6 And now Sarah. left holding the bag, would face murder charges alone.

Speaker 6 Coming up, the prosecutor had to prove that Sarah was equally responsible for Larry McNabney's death. But with Elisa gone, whose story would the jury believe?

Speaker 10 When you try only one defendant, it's very easy, as it was for Sarah Dutra, to point the finger at the one who's not there.

Speaker 6 It was the winter of 2003, more than a year after Larry McNabney was poisoned with horse tranquilizer. His admitted killer, his wife Elisa McNabney, chose her own destiny.

Speaker 6 And her alleged accomplice, Sarah Dutra, alone faced the possibility of spending the rest of her life behind bars.

Speaker 6 You attended the trial every day?

Speaker 11 Yes, 11 and a half weeks.

Speaker 6 Why, why?

Speaker 11 Our DA had talked to us about the importance of our family being represented, that my dad not being forgotten.

Speaker 6 Tavia believed that her father died at the hands of both Elisa and Sarah.

Speaker 6 But while Sarah admitted to being there when Larry died and in the days and months that followed, she adamantly claimed she never went to the police because she was so afraid of Elisa and of ending up just like Larry.

Speaker 6 A theory that even prosecutor Thomas Testa found, well,

Speaker 6 believable.

Speaker 10 When I first got this case, people in my office will tell you that's exactly what I was saying walking up and down the hall.

Speaker 6 Poor Sarah, she's a person.

Speaker 10 Sarah, she's just an eighter and a better. But as I got deeper into the case, I totally turned around on this.
But I started with that very mindset.

Speaker 6 As Testa reviewed the evidence in preparation for trial, he became convinced that Sarah Dutra was in fact the woman in charge.

Speaker 10 Sarah did not like Larry. She always accused him of being full of himself, talking about himself all the time, self-centered.
She didn't like him, so Larry

Speaker 10 didn't want Sarah around. Sarah did not like Larry.

Speaker 6 You know, this sounds to me like two people who both love Elisa and want the other out of the way.

Speaker 10 That's it. That's exactly it.
It was a love triangle, and one of them had to go.

Speaker 6 Sarah, said Prosecutor Testa, was enjoying a very fancy life with Elisa and Larry was simply in the way.

Speaker 6 If your theory is right, these are two kind of good time girls who have got this great relationship and they're living off the proceeds of Larry.

Speaker 13 Why get rid of him?

Speaker 6 They have no motive.

Speaker 10 Larry was Elisa's golden goose, but Elisa was Sarah's golden goose. And Sarah was about to be cut out of this whole triangle.

Speaker 10 Larry had just told her the day before he was killed, two days before he was killed, you know, that he wanted her gone, he wanted her fired.

Speaker 6 So, said Testa, it was Sarah who had the motive to kill Larry. Sarah's lawyer, of course, saw it differently.

Speaker 10 It seems like a classic instance of,

Speaker 6 you know, evil sort of

Speaker 6 wrapping around a sweet young

Speaker 6 little baby.

Speaker 6 At the trial, Defense Attorney Kevin Klimo portrayed Elisa as a black widow, a sophisticated con artist who wanted her husband dead. And Sarah was her innocent and terrified pawn.

Speaker 6 This is the most horrible thing I ever liked. And I didn't do it, but not because I wanted to.
Not because I want to know that.

Speaker 6 Not because I wanted to.

Speaker 6 Really?

Speaker 6 Now, Prosecutor Testa introduced Ginger Miller. Remember her, the other secretary who worked alongside Sarah and Elisa?

Speaker 6 She said, in the days and weeks after Larry vanished, Elisa and Sarah seemed to feel anything but remorse.

Speaker 12 They're laughing together, they're shopping together, they're eating together, they're sleeping in the same bed together, she's living at her house.

Speaker 6 So they were not really working, were they?

Speaker 12 They were. They would get maybe two hours of work done a day.

Speaker 6 And what'd they do the rest of the time? Just party?

Speaker 12 Shop, hang out, sleep late,

Speaker 12 go flirt with boys.

Speaker 6 All the while spending the firm's money, Larry's money.

Speaker 6 A lot of money.

Speaker 12 Elisa got a red jaguar, Sarah got a red BMW.

Speaker 6 Such close friends, or maybe more than friends.

Speaker 12 They bought matching underwear together.

Speaker 12 No, my first week they're like, look what we bought. They pulled up, they both had wearing matching underwear.

Speaker 12 They were best friends.

Speaker 6 They were blowing through money so fast they fell behind on rent payments for the law office, got evicted.

Speaker 6 So they moved the office into Elisa and Larry's home, which, according to Ginger, now seemed more like Elisa and Sarah's home.

Speaker 12 Yep, in the rooms, they had no clothes of Larry's. The closet was cleaned out, and then the bathroom, hers, and Sarah made the sinks hers and hers instead of his and hers.

Speaker 6 Like they knew he wasn't coming back.

Speaker 12 Well, she said, yeah, they were pretty much moving him out.

Speaker 6 Well, not quite, because all this time, remember, Larry's body was still in the garage, still in the refrigerator.

Speaker 6 And as for the idea that Sarah was an innocent child, Elise's puppet, that was nonsense, said Ginger.

Speaker 12 Everybody knows that she wasn't terrified of her. Sarah had as much say as Elisa had in the whole situation.

Speaker 6 But at her trial, Sarah, the daughter of those devout Christians, sat quietly at the defense table, a wide-eyed innocent.

Speaker 6 Elisa wasn't around to be cross-examined, so her videotaped confession didn't get played for the jury.

Speaker 6 And with no DNA, no prints, no trace evidence, no living eyewitnesses, the case against Sarah was entirely circumstantial. The first-degree murder.

Speaker 10 It's first-degree, yeah.

Speaker 6 But would the jury see it the way he did?

Speaker 6 After four days of deliberations, the jury found Sarah Dutra

Speaker 6 guilty of voluntary manslaughter and accessory to murder, not first-degree murder.

Speaker 10 Had she not been a young, attractive, tall blonde whose parents were clutching Bibles crying in the first row, one wonders if this verdict would have been the same.

Speaker 6 Sarah Dutra was sentenced to 11 years, served eight,

Speaker 6 and in the summer of 2011 at age 31 she was released.

Speaker 11 It's painful to know that such little time

Speaker 11 was

Speaker 11 given for such a horrific crime and one that seemed so premeditated to me and so thought out and so callous to the end.

Speaker 6 Sarah Dutra has not responded to our interview request

Speaker 6 and Tavia says she has forgiven Sarah as much for her own sake as anything.

Speaker 11 Will I ever forget what she's done? Never.

Speaker 11 But I don't want to have my whole life be their cruelty

Speaker 11 and the things they chose to do to him. I'd rather remember the loving times we had together and they're not going to take that away from me.
me.

Speaker 2 Sriracha?

Speaker 5 Sounds pretty spicy to me.