A Long, Dark Stretch of Road

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Speaker 6 How quickly life can tumble from candlelit dinner to this.

Speaker 7 911. I get high.

Speaker 6 The long-married couple's date night in Manhattan wasn't supposed to end this way. Not on a dark road.
Not with a gunman beside the window of their Mitsubishi. Not with the crack of gunfire.

Speaker 7 I'm telling you, my wife to the hospital. I'm gonna keep you loose.
I need you.

Speaker 7 Where are you going?

Speaker 6 The day had begun like so many other lazy Saturday mornings in a well-heeled New York City suburb of good homes, good schools, and solid families.

Speaker 6 Carlos Perez Olivo, 58, a well-known criminal defense attorney, was puttering around the family's two-story Cobalt Blue Center Hall Colonial, just three doors down from their very famous neighbors Bill and Hillary Clinton in the desirable village of Chappaqua.

Speaker 6 Carlos' wife Peggy, 55, worked as a teaching assistant during the week, and as Carlos joked, reported to her second job of shopping the town's upscale boutiques on the weekends.

Speaker 6 Carlos and Peggy's two older boys were off on their own now. Carlitos, 29, had followed in his dad's footsteps and was now a lawyer.
Merced, 23, was out in Colorado finishing college.

Speaker 6 Alicia, 16, a bubbly high school cheerleader, was still living at home. She was going out with friends that night.

Speaker 6 After raising three children in their almost 30 years of marriage, Carlos and Peggy were enjoying their new freedom from the unrelenting pace of full-time parenting duties.

Speaker 8 We wanted to enjoy ourselves while we were young. I think we both were deathly afraid of getting old.
And, you know, we saw too many people who

Speaker 8 became old and then couldn't really enjoy themselves. They had money, but they couldn't enjoy themselves.

Speaker 6 So that evening, they decided to make a night on the town of it. Peggy went on the internet and bought some movie tickets.

Speaker 6 The plan, drive into New York, see the film, maybe do a little shopping, and have a nice dinner.

Speaker 8 We were going to go in her car, but they didn't have gas, so we went in mine and we had a little bit of gas.

Speaker 6 It was November 18th, 2006, the week before Thanksgiving. And New York wasn't yet overrun with the usual madness the Christmas season would bring.
The calm before the holiday storm.

Speaker 8 And we walked around for about 20 minutes because we were quite early.

Speaker 8 She wanted to see the stores and we walked back, we saw the movie.

Speaker 6 Later, they went to a favorite French bistro.

Speaker 8 We had a wonderful dinner. A lot of cosmopolitans on the table that night? Yes.
Maybe I had two or three. I don't know.
I had about five or six.

Speaker 8 We enjoyed going out to dinner and we enjoyed having a drink.

Speaker 6 But now it was time for the hour drive home north to Chappaqua.

Speaker 6 As they started to make their way out of the city, Frank Farrillo, one of Carlos's closest friends from their college days at Columbia, had played telephone tag with Peggy that evening.

Speaker 10 I could tell that they'd been out to dinner or something because she was very happy and very bubbly and she was actually even trying to speak with a French accent.

Speaker 6 Carlos, as usual, did the driving.

Speaker 8 Normally we'd get in the car and she put on a classical rock station. And invariably she would fall asleep.

Speaker 6 Alicia, their 16-year-old, called her mom's cell phone as they were driving home from the city, asking them to pick her up at a friend's house later that night.

Speaker 11 She was having a really good time, and I told her I loved her, and she loved me, and my dad says he loves me too.

Speaker 6 Carlos said Peggy soon drowsed back to sleep. Meanwhile, the fuel gauge was reading low.

Speaker 6 Carlos said he was determined to make it to his favorite gas station, the one with the rock bottom prices, but also off the highway down a dark stretch of road.

Speaker 6 When it came to a gallon of gas, Carlos was as tight as a tick.

Speaker 8 Whereas I might have spent whatever I wanted to spend on meals or a bottle of wine.

Speaker 8 For whatever reason, the idea of spending 15 cents more a gallon from one station to another was offensive to me.

Speaker 6 The stretch of Route 100 he exited onto was quiet at that hour, but Carlos wasn't apprehensive. He was on familiar turf.

Speaker 6 Even though he was an attorney who defended some of the worst lowlifes New York City had to offer, once he crossed that county line, he always breathed a sigh of relief.

Speaker 8 That's why we moved up to Westchester because we felt up here it was safer.

Speaker 6 But this autumn night, something was very different. In the past three months, Carlos had stopped practicing law.

Speaker 6 He'd been disbarred after some clients had accused him of running off with their money.

Speaker 6 And while he said he was relieved to be moving on to a new stage in his life, he'd left behind a trail of angry former clients.

Speaker 8 There had been some threats and some problems, obviously,

Speaker 8 people that weren't happy with me. You represented some tough customers.
Yes, I did. Were any of them present tense in your life at that point?

Speaker 8 I had gotten some threats a year before or six months before.

Speaker 8 They'd been communicated to U.S. attorneys and stuff like that.

Speaker 6 Carlos made his way toward the gas station. Peggy was sound asleep in the seat beside him, the radio droning oldies.

Speaker 6 He'd look back at that moment later thinking life had never seemed better. What a nice evening out it had been.

Speaker 6 A marriage still intact after 30 years, three accomplished children, and he was finally out from under the relentless pressure of practicing law.

Speaker 8 It was like a big load had been taken off my shoulders. I was enjoying myself.
I was able to be more at home than I was before.

Speaker 6 But the concept of home, time with Peggy, was about to be changed forever.

Speaker 6 A car had loomed up out of nowhere, overtaking, now cutting him off. The car had stopped, and a ball-capped man with a gun had jumped out of the

Speaker 6 He could do the drive from Manhattan to his home in Westchester on autopilot.

Speaker 6 But in seconds, on this Saturday night, on a dark stretch of road, shrieking trouble had found Carlos Perez-Alivo as he recounts the night.

Speaker 8 I'm driving and all of a sudden this car just kind of cut in front of me.

Speaker 8 My concern at the moment was not to get into an accident for the obvious reason that I didn't want the cops coming because I had been drinking.

Speaker 6 Cut off and forced to the side of the road by an older model dark-colored sedan that looked to him like a Toyota.

Speaker 8 My initial reaction was to get out of the car and yell at them.

Speaker 6 But in an instant, a man wearing jeans and a baseball cap, and who Carlos thought vaguely looked Colombian, was standing by his car window, pointing a gun at him.

Speaker 8 Type froze.

Speaker 4 I should have

Speaker 4 put the car in reverse, or I should have

Speaker 4 tried to hit the car, but I didn't.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 8 he got into the back seat. I then reacted.

Speaker 6 Carlos started wrestling with the gunman.

Speaker 8 I tried to grab the gun and twist it. We started struggling.
He was pulling away.

Speaker 9 I was trying to pull this way, turn, twist.

Speaker 8 I was using this hand as leverage. Shots went off and I wound up in the backseat.
You know, I remember a burning, stinging sensation.

Speaker 6 Carlos knew he had been shot. Peggy still looked asleep in the passenger seat up front.
The gunman fled because Carlos got back in the driver's seat.

Speaker 8 I turned the car on. I picked up the phone and as I started to drive away, I called 9-11.

Speaker 7 We got some

Speaker 7 side of the road. I'm okay.

Speaker 13 I'm trying to get, I'm trying to get a new, I'm trying to get northern Westchester.

Speaker 6 Carlos, bleeding from his lower left side, started driving frantically to the nearest hospital about 15 minutes away.

Speaker 9 Are you in Ostene? Got shot. Okay, are you in Ostene?

Speaker 7 Are you in Ostene?

Speaker 8 Instead of asking me more about what I was trying to tell them about the description of the car or whatever, all they kept asking me was, where are you? Where are you?

Speaker 8 Pull over and wait for the ambulance.

Speaker 7 I can't stop.

Speaker 14 I gotta get my wife to the hospital.

Speaker 8 I kept telling them, I'm not pulling over. I'm taking my wife to the hospital.
I'm taking my wife to the hospital. I'm not gonna pull over.

Speaker 7 I'm trying to get my wife to the hospital. I know she's my.

Speaker 7 I knew she.

Speaker 6 Peggy was now slumped over in the passenger seat.

Speaker 8 She didn't move all the way on. I drove as fast as I could.
I just wanted to get somebody out

Speaker 8 and get attention to her because it was my job to take care and protect of my

Speaker 8 and protect my family.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 8 I obviously didn't do a very good job with it. So, you know, at least I could try to do is make sure that she got whatever medical attention she could as quickly as she could.

Speaker 7 Look out on me! My wife! My wife is important! Money! Money!

Speaker 6 At the hospital, Carlos lands the SUV in the guard post. The hospital security cameras catch him leaving the Mitsubishi, trying to get help for himself and his wife.

Speaker 8 I just got out of the car as soon as I could, and I tried to get in to get medical assistance.

Speaker 6 Carlos was rushed into the emergency room.

Speaker 8 They took me into a room, and I remember

Speaker 8 being upset because I thought they were working on me and not doing anything with her.

Speaker 6 The doctors gave him a sedative to calm him down. He'd been shot in the side of his stomach.
Peggy had taken a bullet to the head.

Speaker 6 The couple's daughter, Alicia, waited at her friend's house for a ride home that never came.

Speaker 11 I kept on calling my parents and they weren't picking up. And my parents always pick up the phone, no matter what.

Speaker 6 Alicia's brother, Merced, was away at college when he got the news to call home.

Speaker 15 Got my brother on the phone. He said that, you know, mom and dad had been in a car accident.

Speaker 15 Dad was going to be okay. They weren't sure about my mom.
I needed to get home as soon as possible.

Speaker 6 Alicia got the same news before dawn. Her parents were in a car accident.
Family friends came to take her to their house to spend the rest of the night.

Speaker 6 On the way there, she convinced herself it was just scrapes and bruises.

Speaker 11 I was like, oh, mom's fine, because my mom was always very healthy. And I was like, maybe she has like a, you know, a bruised elbow or something like that.

Speaker 6 But when she woke up the next morning, older brother Carlitos told her what had happened to their parents. She went to see her dad.

Speaker 11 He was crying hysterically, just saying, my Peggy, my Peggy, I just asking for my mom, my girl Peggy.

Speaker 11 He was holding on to my hand and I've never seen my dad cry. I've never seen him just crumble and be so disheveled.

Speaker 6 Other family members and friends started descending on the hospital as the awful news spread. Robert Buckley found his close friend Carlos in human wreckage.

Speaker 4 In shock, in grief, drugged.

Speaker 16 I mean, even shot himself, he was almost inconsolable.

Speaker 17 He wished he was dead.

Speaker 6 Frank Farrillo also rushed to the hospital to be with Carlos.

Speaker 18 He was broken.

Speaker 18 He was really a broken man. Everybody was distraught.
Carlos was distraught. The kids were distraught.
Friends were distraught.

Speaker 18 You know, how could this happen?

Speaker 6 Exactly.

Speaker 8 How could this have happened?

Speaker 6 Peggy, 55 years old, the mother of three, was down the corridor still alive, but only barely.

Speaker 6 The 55-year-old woman being kept alive by machines in a suburban New York City hospital was an unlikely target for an unknown assailant's bullet to the head. She was wife, mother, teacher's assistant.

Speaker 6 In the 1970s, before flying became a misery, flight attendants were still known as stewardesses, and Peggy was one of them flying for the now-defunct Eastern Airlines.

Speaker 6 It was a career that still had a slight aura of glamour to it, and it got Peggy up and away from her big family of seven sisters and one brother in their little bungalow in Lexington, Kentucky.

Speaker 6 Laura Lebowski said her older sister Peggy was determined to find adventure and escape the slow lane of their small southern city.

Speaker 12 Peggy wanted excitement. She was the first one in the family to get out of town.

Speaker 6 And Peggy, with her thousand-watt smile and personality to match, would soon catch the attention of one of the frequent flyers on her trips to Puerto Rico, a charismatic up-and-coming lawyer, Carlos Perez Olivo.

Speaker 12 Carlos was very

Speaker 12 romantic, sensitive. He spoiled Peggy Gratten and, you know,

Speaker 12 most of us were pretty jealous that Peggy was doing exciting things and here she had this man who gave her just everything that she could dream of.

Speaker 6 Carlos, with his impeccable manners and big spender ease, swept the small town girl and her family right off their feet.

Speaker 12 He was very much the ladies' man. He could charm us.
Carlos loved to take

Speaker 12 everybody out for dinner and buy wine and stuff.

Speaker 12 The types of things we weren't accustomed to.

Speaker 6 And soon the dashing lawyer and the pretty stewardess were married and the couple's first baby arrived a year later.

Speaker 6 Peggy turned in her wings to be a stay-at-home mom and new babies arrive like clockwork.

Speaker 8 And every six years she had a child and I used to kid her and tell her that she would have a child because she didn't want to go back to work.

Speaker 6 The family was finally complete with their two boys and a little girl. Alicia says she couldn't have picked a better family.

Speaker 11 I love my family so much. My mom spoiled me to death and and so did my dad and I have very very protective brothers and I think I really had the perfect childhood.

Speaker 6 Both Carlos and Peggy dove into parenting.

Speaker 8 Our joy was our children and I did the things that other parents I guess do. I became a soccer coach not knowing anything about soccer.
Basically enjoying life with my children, with my wife.

Speaker 8 Work was something I did because I was good at it and because I had to earn a living to support my family.

Speaker 6 Some families may run on a well-calculated master plan of upward mobility, but the Pereza Libos weren't one of them. The money came and went.

Speaker 18 Money wasn't particularly important to Carlos, in a sense.

Speaker 10 If he had it,

Speaker 10 they spent it. When he was making a lot of money, you'd pull out your wallet to pay for something, you'd say, don't put it away.

Speaker 6 Looking back, even Carlos thought sometimes he was a little too free spending.

Speaker 8 Maybe we went a little bit too overboard.

Speaker 8 My Carlitos was driving a Porsche convertible to high school.

Speaker 6 But when the money dried up, the family simply trimmed its sales.

Speaker 11 Our family is like a roller coaster. It's always been that way.

Speaker 11 We'll have these wonderful highs of, you know, doing what we like to these kind of lows, but it was never stressful in our house or a time of panic. It was just like, all right, hold off a little bit.

Speaker 15 That's how it just went in my family. Sometimes, you know, we had a lot of money, sometimes we didn't, but I mean, eventually everything always evened out and was fine.

Speaker 6 But in 1996, Carlos's practice hit the skids hard, so much so that Carlos decided to leave Chappaqua for Puerto Rico to jump-start his law career.

Speaker 6 He also hoped it might pull him out of a growing depression that he believed was triggered by a bad bout of Lyme disease.

Speaker 8 All of a sudden,

Speaker 8 I couldn't stand the cold weather, I couldn't stand the snow, I couldn't, I thought I was going to basically die. So I told Peggy, look, Peg, you know,

Speaker 8 let me go back to Puerto Rico. I have contacts there.
I can work there.

Speaker 6 The family tried to make the best of it, but in 1999, after three sometimes restless years in Puerto Rico, Carlos was itchy to move back to Chapaqua, the moneyed Manhattan suburb. Weather be damned.

Speaker 8 I figured I was well enough because I'd come two or three times to the United States on cases during the winter, and it didn't seem to bother me, so we moved back.

Speaker 6 What followed was almost a vagabond experience. The family living in in a hotel, then a cramped apartment over an upholstery shop.

Speaker 6 They even relied on the kindness of a family friend for a simple roof over their heads.

Speaker 11 We lived in our friend's basement for, I think, the summer, and then we lived in a hotel room for a little bit, all of us.

Speaker 17 Gee, that had to be tough as a family.

Speaker 11 No, things never really got tough. Even in the worst times, we were living above an upholstery store.
It never was hard, it was never stressful.

Speaker 11 I still remember really great memories and just hanging out and really loving each other.

Speaker 6 And soon Carlos was up and running again with new clients and before long they'd settled into a nice home in Chappaqua.

Speaker 6 Even after all their years together Alicia says her parents still held hands and cuddled as though they were teens themselves.

Speaker 11 They were always together. I don't think I could ever find them not together.
It would be reading together, sitting together, watching TV. Everything was together.
They got along beautifully.

Speaker 11 They were constantly holding hands, which sometimes as a teenager especially, I was like, oh, come on, like, stop it.

Speaker 6 With her kids all but full grown, Peggy had found work as a teacher's assistant at one of the town's grade schools. Rewarding despite the paltry salary.

Speaker 11 She was a wonderful teacher. She worked with special needs kids, and the students really loved her, and they made her like cards, and

Speaker 11 it was really good.

Speaker 6 By 2006, seven years after their experiment in Puerto Rico, the family seemed as good as ever. Carlos even took his girls, Peggy and Alicia for a splurge trip to Florence in February of that year.

Speaker 11 Got to go to all the art museums and shopping and it was beautiful.

Speaker 6 Everyone in the family seemed to be doing well. Carlitos, the oldest, had gotten married that August and Carlos and Peggy had thrown him a nice party at the house and helped pay for the honeymoon.

Speaker 6 Alicia was soaring at the high school and Merced, who transferred from West Point to a Colorado college that he felt was a better fit, was finishing up his senior year.

Speaker 6 It was a good season in the family, all in all.

Speaker 15 I had everything I wanted, you know,

Speaker 15 family's good, I was good, I was about to finish school, I was doing stuff I loved, I had my whole future ahead of me, and

Speaker 15 you know, yeah, things are going great.

Speaker 6 But there were secrets in that nice colonial in Chappaqua.

Speaker 6 Carlos had been disbarred in August, his law career finished in disgrace after clients had accused him of spending their money that he'd held in trust. Was his own family even aware?

Speaker 6 And of course, he hadn't told Peggy about the mistress of 10 years, the one-time shop assistant from Puerto Rico. Nor had he owned up to calling escort girls for occasional sex.

Speaker 6 So that night the car with the gunman ambushed them on a dark road, there were things that Peggy would never learn about her husband, Carlos.

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Speaker 6 While Carlos lay wounded in his hospital bed, the grim reality started to break through the haze of drugs the doctors had given to sedate him.

Speaker 6 Doctors had been unable to save Peggy after she suffered a catastrophic shot to the head.

Speaker 8 My wife is dead, yes.

Speaker 8 And I'm alone.

Speaker 8 And I'm responsible for it one way or another.

Speaker 8 Because if it was random,

Speaker 8 I didn't react well. And if it wasn't random, it was because of me.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 she never hurt anybody.

Speaker 8 She never did anything wrong to anybody. She didn't deserve that.

Speaker 6 What had happened that night? Was it a failed carjacking? Or perhaps a disgruntled former client out for revenge?

Speaker 16 As a defense attorney, I mean, he dealt with some strange guys.

Speaker 16 And he'd been doing it for about 25, 30 years.

Speaker 6 Carlos' friends had always worried about some of the rough characters he'd represented.

Speaker 17 If you're a lawyer defending heroin dealers and you get poor results, you could develop a set of enemies.

Speaker 10 You could. And in fact, there were instances where he actually did have some threats.

Speaker 6 And Laura Lebowski knew her sister Peggy had always been concerned about the high risk that attended her husband's work as a criminal defense attorney.

Speaker 12 Carlos and Peggy did get pretty reliable

Speaker 13 threats.

Speaker 12 And I know that they had very elaborate lock-in systems and whatever on their house.

Speaker 17 She bolted herself in at night.

Speaker 12 Yeah, she said, well, in Carlos's line of work, you know, he gets threats and stuff, and we're just, you know, kind of cautious.

Speaker 6 But now all of Carlos and Peggy's precautions were for naught.

Speaker 6 Detective Mark Simmons got the call that Saturday night that there'd been a double shooting in the upscale bedroom community he served.

Speaker 17 What kinds of crimes are you usually called to investigate?

Speaker 4 I would say mostly property crimes, burglary, theft, larceny, criminal mischief,

Speaker 4 drunk driving, and so forth.

Speaker 17 So when you get a call of gunshot victims.

Speaker 6 That's unusual.

Speaker 6 Detective Simmons raced to the hospital. The first thing he sees is the Mitsubishi rammed into the guard post.

Speaker 4 All four doors were open. The car had blood in it.
There was a noticeable bullet hole in the window. There was a shell casing sitting on the back seat.

Speaker 4 There was a black coat sitting on the back back seat with a white plastic bag protruding from within the folds of the coat.

Speaker 6 First glance observations. Little that explained itself.

Speaker 4 I don't have very many facts at this point other than to ask the person who was involved what happened.

Speaker 6 Detective Simmons was led into Carlos' hospital room. Carlos told him about the ambush.

Speaker 4 The person had gotten into his vehicle, into the back seat, with a weapon, and he attempted to take that weapon from the assailant, during which time shots were fired in the car.

Speaker 17 Yes, he's telling it to you. Does it make sense to to you?

Speaker 4 Is it plausible?

Speaker 6 Well, yes.

Speaker 4 He tells me, you know, he's an attorney that he's represented

Speaker 4 various clients, some of which weren't happy.

Speaker 17 He's got some tough characters he's represented.

Speaker 6 Absolutely.

Speaker 17 People that might be out for revenge, because they thought they got a raw deal.

Speaker 6 Absolutely. The police worked through the night collecting bits and pieces of evidence from the SUV and from the general roadside area where Carlos had described the ambush taking place.

Speaker 4 They found blood on the road and a shell casing was located there as well.

Speaker 17 So that was X-Marks the spot of where this took place, huh?

Speaker 4 Basically, yes.

Speaker 6 Merced finally arrived at the airport.

Speaker 15 When I got there, my brother and his best friend and my best friend were there waiting for me in the baggage claim.

Speaker 15 And you know, I knew right away that my mother had died pretty much.

Speaker 6 The facts were overwhelming. His mother dead from a gunshot wound to the head.
His father shot, lying wounded in a hospital bed. Merced paced the corridor while he waited to see his father.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I found me in and he burst down crying, you know, and uh

Speaker 15 he was like, yo,

Speaker 15 I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I couldn't protect her.

Speaker 17 Did he tell you anything about the incident itself at that point, Merced?

Speaker 15 Nah.

Speaker 15 Nah, he was just crying. I mean, he looked skinny, looked pale.
I mean, he was shot in a stomach, and from what I was told by the doctors and stuff, it had been an inch to the side.

Speaker 15 It would have hit a major artery and killed him.

Speaker 6 From his hospital bed, Carlos told the police the details he could remember.

Speaker 17 Did he have a make model color the vehicle?

Speaker 4 Yes, there was a Toyota-like vehicle, and he described it as boxy, not rounded as the newer models are.

Speaker 6 Has he given you a description of the assailant?

Speaker 4 He did say he was a Spaniard.

Speaker 6 Detective Simmons summoned a sketch artist to the hospital. Carlos described an olive-skinned man, maybe Colombian, scruffy, wearing a baseball cap and jeans.

Speaker 6 As an experienced criminal defense attorney, he urged investigators to get the sketch out immediately before the gunman disappeared.

Speaker 8 When I gave him the sketch, I also told him, look, if this is a hit, because they're the ones that started asking me if I had gotten threats in this sentence.

Speaker 8 I said, if this is some kind of a hit, this guy's going to be out of the country.

Speaker 6 Even as the police released the sketch to the local media and gave them some details of the crime.

Speaker 13 Now, it's not clear if they were victims of road rage or a calculated ambush.

Speaker 6 The shocking news was filtering out to Peggy's large family spread all across the country.

Speaker 12 My sister Joanne called me and I just picked up the phone and she was quiet for a minute. She goes, Peggy's dead.

Speaker 12 She's been shot and she was just pretty hysterical and I was just, you know, dumbfounded.

Speaker 6 The family had the sketchiest of details about the roadside ambush, but it sounded to them like a revenge killing rooted in Carlos's criminal defense practice.

Speaker 12 We were concerned that, you know, somebody was unhappy with him and had ordered a hit.

Speaker 6 And now the family had even more to worry about. Would the hitman return to finish the job?

Speaker 6 Peggy Perez-Alivo had been murdered on a Westchester roadside. Her family and friends gathered to say their goodbyes.

Speaker 6 At the funeral, Alicia remembers thinking a small urn of ashes was all that remained of her mother. Alicia was at childhood's end.

Speaker 11 This is my time to be a grown-up. This was the first time that I had to pull myself together and take care of people.

Speaker 17 Alicia became an adult.

Speaker 11 Yep, that was the day.

Speaker 6 The detective, Mark Simmons, was among the mourners.

Speaker 4 A detective and I went to the memorial service.

Speaker 17 What do you expect to get in that kind of thing?

Speaker 4 You're going to try to pay a little respect. I mean, you are now going to be charged with investigating the death of this woman, but you do watch.

Speaker 4 You watch to see who's there, to see if, and you never know you're going to be around people that may have info to share with you.

Speaker 6 The police so far had turned up nothing. No older Toyota, no Colombian with a baseball cap.
At the house after the funeral, Carlos could not stop talking about the shooting.

Speaker 12 The one way he put it to me was the one time in his life that he was called on to protect Peggy and he failed.

Speaker 12 And you know, it was a lot of, if I had this, if I had that, if I I hadn't, you know, fought with the gunman, you know, just second-guessing himself.

Speaker 17 He felt guilty about your sister's death.

Speaker 12 And he was just destroyed. He had nightmares, he couldn't sleep.

Speaker 6 Restless nights, bleak days. The father Alicia knew was gone.

Speaker 11 He wasn't there. He just wasn't.
Part of him just died. My mom made him whole, tried to give me a hug, but he couldn't really move because of

Speaker 11 the shot wound. And

Speaker 11 after that, it was just a very, very different.

Speaker 11 My life was turned upside down for sure.

Speaker 6 Peggy's sister, Laura Lebowski, did what she could to help her brother-in-law.

Speaker 12 He had a room off of the kitchen, and he had a rocking chair, and he would just sit in the corner. And people would go in and, you know, spend time sitting with him.

Speaker 12 If he felt like talking, we would talk. And if he, you know, just wanted to sit and stare out into space,

Speaker 26 that's pretty much what he did.

Speaker 17 Just staring.

Speaker 12 And just crying. Carlos was.

Speaker 12 He was in agony. I mean, there's just no way to describe the grief.

Speaker 6 Merced, who'd always been particularly close to his mom, tried to comfort his father while confronting his own grief.

Speaker 15 No one would ever love you the way your mother does, you know, and

Speaker 15 I don't know. I feel like I had like a

Speaker 15 support being taken out from underneath me.

Speaker 6 Alicia was having a hard time even accepting that her mother was dead.

Speaker 11 For a long time afterwards, I believed that my mom was still going to pull into the driveway and that it was a bad TV show prank. I was like,

Speaker 11 this is not true. This wouldn't happen to my family.
My family's the perfect family. That's what my friends say.
It wouldn't happen to us.

Speaker 6 As the family struggled with grief in the days after the funeral, They were also on edge that the killer might come back to finish the job.

Speaker 6 So much so that Frank Farullo, a former former college football player, spent the first week sleeping at the end of Carlos's bed.

Speaker 10 I was just concerned with his general safety. I slept at the foot of the bed, and one of his friends actually slept out in the hallway because we weren't sure whether or not this was a hit or not.

Speaker 17 So you're a big guy. If someone was going to come back, they'd have to get past you to get to him.
Right.

Speaker 6 Three days after the shooting, as friends and family kept their round-the-clock vigil in the house, Carlos, barely functional in his grief, offered to speak to the detectives alone as he sat in his bedroom wearing his bathrobe.

Speaker 8 I told him, I know you have to look at the husband first. So, you know, talk to anybody you want.
You want the names of people that we know, hear the name, you know,

Speaker 8 talk to them. Because I want you to realize that there is no reason why I would do this.
There's absolutely no reason.

Speaker 6 And yet the detectives were soon to discover there may be plenty of reasons to look at Carlos Perez-Alivo.

Speaker 6 Starting with his precarious situation as an out-of-work attorney with lots of bills piling up, there was also a big insurance policy on his wife Peggy.

Speaker 6 It was falling to the police officers of this small community in Westchester County, New York, to determine what had happened on a darkened roadway in their town where things like this just never happened.

Speaker 6 Carlos Perez Olivo had told the police a horrifying story.

Speaker 6 After a night out in Manhattan, he and his wife had been ambushed by a gunman. She was shot in the head, fatally.
He was shot in the stomach.

Speaker 6 12 days after the shooting, Carlos Perez-Alivo agreed to accompany the detectives to New York City to retrace the route of where he'd gone on that Saturday of the shooting.

Speaker 8 I had nothing to hide.

Speaker 6 Detective Simmons and his partner picked up Carlos at his house.

Speaker 4 We said, take us the way you went. And he did.
And we drove down to the city. Initially, when he got in the car, he had a pen and he was clicking the pen.

Speaker 17 Click, click, click, click, click, like this. Why did that strike you?

Speaker 4 Well, I just wondered,

Speaker 4 are you nervous?

Speaker 4 Are you upset? What's causing you to do that?

Speaker 6 When they returned to Westchester, Detective Simmons asked Carlos to guide them to the spot where the ambush occurred.

Speaker 4 We recovered items from that scene where we think this at least occurred.

Speaker 4 Initially, we went past that spot and he stopped us and I said, no, we're too far north. Turned around and we start back up again.
And he stopped us, no, I'm too far south.

Speaker 4 So we've we played for a little while in that area until he finally settled on where he thinks this occurred.

Speaker 17 It is a long dark stretch of

Speaker 4 the area where we believe this occurred, he started to click and lock and unlock the electric door locks in the car.

Speaker 6 Maybe if Carlos was edgy, it was because of a secret he'd disclosed to the detectives the day before. He told the investigators that he knew they'd look for a girlfriend and that they would find one.

Speaker 4 He brings that to our attention. That's how we first learn of this woman.

Speaker 6 It was an affair with a younger woman he had met in Puerto Rico, and it had lasted for a decade.

Speaker 8 It was, in a sense, out of character. I had never looked at another woman for the first 20 years that I'd been married.

Speaker 8 I don't know.

Speaker 8 My wife didn't deserve it.

Speaker 8 I have no excuse. Was she current tense in your life? No, we had stopped about two years or two and a half years or a year and a half before.

Speaker 8 And it was like an on and off situation. And I had always basically told her, look, you know, I'm married, I have children, I'm not going to break up my family.

Speaker 6 Yet some months before the shooting, he said the lover had called to say she'd married and had a baby. They resumed as phone friends.

Speaker 8 We talked maybe once every two weeks or three weeks, you'd call her.

Speaker 6 The day of the shooting, it would turn out, was also the former lover's birthday. Carlos had sent his old flame flowers.

Speaker 8 I did. I did.
I had not sent her anything the year or two years before that. I always would send her flowers.

Speaker 8 And I chose to do it that time because we had talked every so often. And I felt that as a friend, as a

Speaker 8 it was a goodwill kind of gesture.

Speaker 6 Carlos had called the woman from the city hours before the shooting to see if she'd gotten the flowers.

Speaker 17 So now you have a wife who's been shot to death and a man who's telling you that he has a lover who's maybe past tense, but this is a

Speaker 17 classic part of a homicide case.

Speaker 4 It was a long-term affair, 10 years.

Speaker 4 Whether or not it was concluded when he said he did, you know.

Speaker 4 But so yeah, that adds an element to this. It adds an element to this.

Speaker 6 Not good facts for a man with a murdered wife and no sign of the assailant from the back seat. But to Carlos, it was as meaningless as it was only circumstantial.

Speaker 6 He, of all people, a criminal defense attorney, would never be that stupid.

Speaker 8 I mean, stop and think about it, okay? You think I'm going to send an ex-girlfriend, or if she is a girlfriend, flowers, the night I'm supposed to go and kill my wife?

Speaker 8 It'd be the stupidest thing to do. Okay?

Speaker 8 And I'm the one that told the police, I said, look, I sent flowers, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 8 You're not going to find, I made a phone call that night, you're not going to find it on the phone because I used a card that I had that I used to call outside the country.

Speaker 6 His friend Robert Buckley knew all about the girlfriend and shrugged it off.

Speaker 16 A number of us knew of the affair.

Speaker 4 We

Speaker 16 knew when it ended. It had been over 18 months before the incident.

Speaker 17 And yet, right at the time of the crime, he sends her birthday flowers.

Speaker 26 She was still a friend.

Speaker 17 Do you believe it was a hot and heavy, ongoing thing?

Speaker 16 Absolutely not.

Speaker 21 The affair was sex.

Speaker 16 It wasn't the kind of relationship that Carlos and Peggy had.

Speaker 17 Does it say, therefore, the marriage was unhappy?

Speaker 14 No.

Speaker 16 It says that at that point in the marriage, as people get older,

Speaker 16 as women change,

Speaker 16 interests in their sex life changes. He would never leave Peggy.
Never leave Peggy.

Speaker 6 Laura Lebowski doesn't know whether her sister knew about a girlfriend or not. But she wasn't shocked to learn that there was one.

Speaker 6 One thing everyone seemed to know about Carlos was how much he doted on women.

Speaker 12 He loved women and Carlos needed, you know,

Speaker 12 he was a person who liked attention and affection and I

Speaker 12 don't know what was going on in their lives, but

Speaker 12 it just didn't surprise me that

Speaker 12 Carlos would have somebody to fulfill needs if he felt he needed more attention than he was getting.

Speaker 6 But while the adults could maybe understand it in the big picture context of a 30-year marriage, the news hit his son hard.

Speaker 15 I wasn't happy to find that out.

Speaker 4 Were you mad at your dad?

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah, I was very mad with him.

Speaker 6 But while Carlos admittedly may not have been a model husband, no one could say he wasn't cooperating fully with the police, laying out his imperfections, giving them potential leads, trying to help.

Speaker 6 Carlos even suggested that he offer a $100,000 reward to anyone with information leading to the arrest of his wife's killer. And he pushed the detectives to wire him up to a polygraph.

Speaker 8 Give me a lie detector test. I don't care.
You'd be willing to take one anytime. I have nothing to hide.
I have nothing to hide.

Speaker 6 The detectives decided not to give Carlos a polygraph since they can't be used in New York state courtrooms.

Speaker 6 But they also didn't need a lie detector test to tell them that there were strengths in Carlos's account of an unknown armed assailant.

Speaker 6 Chief among the reasons to believe him, he'd taken a shot himself. And there was a long-as-your-arm roster of former clients who potentially might want to settle a score with Carlos.

Speaker 6 From the outset, detectives had wondered whether Peggy Perez-Alivo was a wrong-time, wrong-place victim of a hitman.

Speaker 6 Someone intent on taking out her husband for getting sideways with one of the tough customers he represented.

Speaker 6 And Buckley, who'd worked briefly with Carlos in his law practice, told detectives that they might want to check out one of them from a recent high-profile case that the two had worked on together.

Speaker 6 A man named Elio Cruz believed Carlos had botched his defense when he got sentenced to prison for killing his wife's lover. Had Cruz hired a hitman from his prison cell as payback.

Speaker 17 You believe that he had made a threat directly against Carlos and his family?

Speaker 16 I had been told that he did.

Speaker 17 So maybe the mystery of what happened out in that dark roadway might be explained by talking to Elliot Cruz?

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 6 Prior to the shooting, Carlos says he heard that Cruz was trying to even the score.

Speaker 8 I got a call from an ex-client telling me that he had overheard conversations afterwards of Mr. Cruz saying that he was gonna ruin my life like his life was ruined.

Speaker 6 Detective Simmons chased down that lead.

Speaker 4 What he had told us is that he would have it. Both he and his family were very unhappy with the outcome of the case.

Speaker 6 Hey, maybe.

Speaker 6 Absolutely. But detectives had hopes of a breakthrough in the case.
They didn't have the murder weapon, but there was a large lake right near where the ambush had taken place.

Speaker 6 Had the gunman thrown the firearm into it. Police divers were assembled for a what do-we-have-to-lose kind of search.

Speaker 6 The shoulder of the road where Carlos said a gunman shot him and killed his wife is just yards from the bank of a good-sized lake.

Speaker 27 Here's a body of water. It's a perfect place to get rid of a gun.

Speaker 6 New York State Trooper Christian McCarthy's dive team was dispatched to the lakeside on little more than the homicide detective's haunch. Check out out the lake.

Speaker 27 We were just told that there was a murder weapon that was missing and it might be in here.

Speaker 6 The lake was covered with ice and snow when we asked the trooper to meet us and tell us about that search his dive team made four days after Peggy's death.

Speaker 6 Their point of reference was the spot on the shoulder where blood drops had been found. Had the killer perhaps tossed the gun from that very place?

Speaker 27 The thought being that if somebody got out of their car, that that might be where they threw the gun right there rather than walking up and down the road or driving to another location.

Speaker 6 As they've done on hundreds of investigations, the divers mapped out a grid with lines coming back to the ground zero of the blood drop and plunged into the murky lake.

Speaker 27 Once you hit the bottom, the silt gets mucked up and you're in a cloud of silt and you just can't see anything, not even an inch. It's total blackness.

Speaker 6 Finding a handgun mired in a silty bottom, if it even existed, struck the veteran divers as long odds. They figured they'd be days searching the grids.

Speaker 27 I would say it's astronomical, the odds of us finding it.

Speaker 6 As Trooper McCarthy kicked his way just above the bottom, he trailed a gloved hand, finding stones, muck. Then, there it was, the heft.

Speaker 27 I held it up out of the silt, and I'm staring at a handgun. I was amazed.
It was a needle in a haystack, and now I'm looking at what might be a murder weapon.

Speaker 6 Very lucky day of diving, huh?

Speaker 27 Very lucky day.

Speaker 6 Amazingly, they'd retrieved a gun, an old semi-automatic. But was it the gun used to murder Peggy? That was a question only the experts could answer.

Speaker 6 Tony Tota did the ballistics work for Westchester County at the time. In the homicide of Peggy Perezzo-Levo, he now had three valuable things to compare.

Speaker 6 The actual bullet slug the medical examiner had removed from the victim's head, spent shell casings found at the scene, and the mystery gun fished out of the nearby lake.

Speaker 6 Tota always examined the gun in question and fired a sample round. Standard procedure to help him make his finding.
That was the weapon that produced those shell casings.

Speaker 17 And you can say that with a certainty out a lot of decimal points.

Speaker 6 Oh, absolutely. This weapon fired this bullet.
I have no wavering fact that to when I say it's the firearm, it's the firearm.

Speaker 6 The needle in a haystack recovery of the handgun and the ballistic test finding that it was definitively the murder weapon was a major breakthrough.

Speaker 17 How huge is this for your case at this point?

Speaker 4 Well, it's huge. I couldn't have hoped or imagined that in a million years.
So we now have the murder weapon.

Speaker 17 And then you've got to put the murder weapon in someone, somebody's hands.

Speaker 6 With his initial interviews concluded, the detective stepped back to look at the big picture of his case. And there was a part of the husband's story he didn't quite get.

Speaker 6 Something common sense, really. And it had to do with going down out-of-the-way roads looking for gas.

Speaker 4 It did strike me as odd to get gas there to save... I think what was kind of a nominal amount per gallon.

Speaker 17 He had to go out of his way to save a few cents, huh?

Speaker 4 It seems a bit odd having been in the city at a fairly, not an inexpensive dinner just an hour before. Struck Nizak.

Speaker 6 As the detective speculated on the hitman revenge theory of the crime, how was it that the assailant knew Carlos would be on that stretch of highway where he said he was overtaken, miles from his home?

Speaker 4 If you're going to lay in wait for somebody, you have to pretty much know where they're going to be and when.

Speaker 6 It only made sense if the husband had been followed. So Simmons found security camera pictures documenting parts of Carlos and Peggy's day in New York.

Speaker 4 You're looking to see

Speaker 4 video, what's the demeanor? What are you seeing on that camera? Is somebody following them?

Speaker 6 The video shows the couple entering a theater, but there isn't anyone obviously casing them.

Speaker 4 Didn't see anybody lurking in the back or apparently following them. We had video of them both purchasing the tickets, walking through the theater.

Speaker 4 waiting outside, I believe, the bathroom at one point, then walking into the movie there. It was fairly unremarkable footage, just a man and his wife at a movie.

Speaker 6 And coming home at the toll booth, the camera doesn't record a vaguely older japanese car following them detective simmons spent hours analyzing the video from that night looking at a video you can't tell if somebody's following somebody or not there's a constant flow of vehicles through it new york city toll barrier on a saturday night though the detective noted with interest there was a car matching that description ahead of them at the toll plaza what i did see is a car a boxy kind of toyota four door similar to the one described to us could one of those cars have belonged to the gunman?

Speaker 6 But the detective was also learning more about that backseat struggle Carlos had related in some detail, arm wrestling the man for the gun over the front seat console, ending up himself in the rear of the vehicle.

Speaker 4 We saw no evidence of any footprints or scuff marks across the dashboard or the seats.

Speaker 4 We also found in the back of the car there was a newspaper on the floor of the passenger side rear where this assailant got in, but the newspaper wasn't torn or stepped on.

Speaker 4 It didn't look like it had been disturbed.

Speaker 17 It didn't look as though there had been a struggle in this back seat.

Speaker 4 Well, it didn't. And again, remembering that the coat was still sitting in the center of the seat with this bag coming out of it, still on the seat in the middle.
Two people had slid out that car.

Speaker 4 It almost seems to me that that would have been dragged out onto the floor or at least out the side of the vehicle. But that wasn't the case.

Speaker 6 The county crime scene techs had also analyzed scorching from the muzzle blast, measured the angles of the bullets' trajectories, and mapped out the blood spatter.

Speaker 6 And what they found wasn't matching carlos's account of the struggle it just didn't seem possible that for the sequence of shots to have occurred the way he described them start with peggy the victim the me determined that the gun had been fired right near the back of her head the bullet went straight and true not angled up or down an amazing shot for a gun being wildly fought over The medical examiner tells me that, in his opinion, the bullet that struck and killed her was fired from about about an inch from the back of her head, and it was straight and level.

Speaker 6 Another bullet went into the fabric beneath the roof. The angle of entry dictated to the county ballistics experts where the gun had been when it was fired.

Speaker 4 When they looked at the angle of entry of that bullet hole, it appears to be coming from towards the outside of the car rather than inside the car.

Speaker 6 Another bullet shattered a rear glass panel. The angle told the county's experts it was fired straight into the glass like Peggy's fatal wound.

Speaker 6 My findings were that that hole in that glass was straight on 90 degrees.

Speaker 6 It was hard for investigators to understand how that same bullet could go through the side of Carlos's stomach during the struggle and then continue through the car window, exiting at a clean 90-degree angle.

Speaker 4 It seems like it would be impossible to get yourself up into that position where that bullet could go through him and then go through that glass at the angle and height that it did.

Speaker 6 Other questions? Carlos's overcoat folded on the back seat. Sticking out of the pocket was a small white garbage bag.
Inside the bag, crime scene analysts found gunshot residue.

Speaker 4 It seemed that that was a tremendously high concentration of gunpowder residue inside that.

Speaker 17 My totally non-expert brain could see gunshots being fired in a contained area and it's raining down particles of something that's going to be detectable to the lab.

Speaker 4 For it to get down inside.

Speaker 4 In a pocket, in a bag, down in there in the concentration that it is, that it did,

Speaker 4 is

Speaker 4 very difficult.

Speaker 6 There was so much that didn't add up to the detective. Peggy, as Carlos told it, had remained snoozing as this fight in a confined space broke out.

Speaker 6 Carlos Perez-Alivo, despite his willingness to take a lie detector test, wasn't entirely eliminating himself as a suspect. After all, there was the admitted former girlfriend of many years.

Speaker 4 It's hard to speculate, but it's also impossible to discount the coincidence that the night Peggy dies is this woman's birthday.

Speaker 6 But the detective also knew that if sex and passion are very often part of the mix in domestic murders, then so often is money.

Speaker 6 And now the investigators began the tedious paper chase of tracking down the Perez Olivo's finances. What jumped out at them was how little cash on hand Carlos apparently had.

Speaker 6 The family banking account was down to the last $300,

Speaker 6 and the investigators believe he hadn't told his children or even his wife Peggy the monumental news that he had been disbarred.

Speaker 4 His sole means of making money and supporting himself and his lifestyle and his family's lifestyle is now gone.

Speaker 17 This is an enormous fact in a relationship of 30 years.

Speaker 16 Absolutely.

Speaker 17 My ticket's been pulled to practice law, and this is how we make our money.

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 17 The children didn't know.

Speaker 4 I don't believe that they knew.

Speaker 17 And the wife didn't know, Peggy.

Speaker 4 That's what we believe.

Speaker 4 She didn't know.

Speaker 6 With his livelihood gone, no money was coming in that the detectives could see, but the bills kept piling up.

Speaker 4 We got a financial picture of people that, on the surface, seemed to have money. Beautiful home, beautiful community, a wealthy suburb.
But

Speaker 4 when you delve deeper, you find that, okay, he doesn't own the home, rents the home.

Speaker 4 Okay, you don't own this car, they're leased, bills are late, credit cards are not paid, and then new credit cards are open.

Speaker 4 You start to see a financial picture of people that may be living beyond their means.

Speaker 6 And then they came upon the life insurance policies, Peggy's.

Speaker 4 What we found was that while Mr. Perez-Alivo was by all accounts the primary supporter and breadwinner, he had fairly low amount of insurance on himself.

Speaker 4 But we found that there were approximately five policies that had Ms. Perez-Alivo as the insured, where the payout was somewhere in the area of $850,000 to $875,000.

Speaker 17 She's making maybe $25,000 a a year with a wind at her back in a good year.

Speaker 4 If that, as a teacher's aide.

Speaker 17 And she's got a $900,000 payout policy on her.

Speaker 4 Right. We also found that the policies on Ms.
Perez-Olivo had had the

Speaker 4 payouts increased somewhere in the area of 04 and 05.

Speaker 6 The investigation was a year old. On the anniversary of Peggy's death, Alicia and her older brother Carlitos took the urn with her mother's ashes to the beach.

Speaker 11 It was a beautiful day, and it was time to really think about my mom just as a person, not as

Speaker 11 a victim, not as anything like that, just my mom.

Speaker 6 And then a few weeks later, Carlos had something to tell Alicia, by then a senior in high school.

Speaker 11 In 20 minutes, the police were going to be coming to arrest him. He told me that money is over here.
You know, use this money to pay the bills, get food, and, you know, you're a big girl now.

Speaker 11 You can take care of yourself.

Speaker 6 The investigators had put together a picture of a failing Lothario in late middle age, disgraced in his career, tapped out at the bank, unable to keep up the good suburban, happy family facade.

Speaker 6 Killing his wife for the insurance money, they theorized, was the solution to his problems. From the upstairs bedroom, Alicia pushed aside the curtain to watch the detectives take her father away.

Speaker 11 I don't know why I did that. That was kind of a bad memory, but they pushed him up against the car and they took him away.

Speaker 11 And I was left there.

Speaker 6 Carlos Perez-Alivo was charged with the murder of his wife, Peggy.

Speaker 6 Carlos Perez-Alivo was now on trial for shooting his wife to death on a darkened suburban road as they drove home from Manhattan.

Speaker 12 When it comes to this guy, the evidence will show

Speaker 12 that what may at first appear perfect

Speaker 12 is not.

Speaker 6 The prosecutors believe Perez-Olivo was a man in a personal tsunami and saw killing his wife as the solution to his problems.

Speaker 13 Mr. Perez-Olivo, without any doubt in my mind, planned the murder execution of his wife.

Speaker 17 So he went to New York, knowing full well that he was going to kill her on a dark road.

Speaker 13 Knowing full well he would kill her on a dark road.

Speaker 6 Janet DiFiore, then the Westchester County District Attorney, believes that Perez Olivo was all but dead broke with a lifestyle in an affluent suburb he could no longer afford to keep up.

Speaker 13 The payoff of the insurance policy provides motivation with a capital M.

Speaker 6 Money and another woman. The former mistress of many years he'd sent flowers to and called on the very day his wife was murdered.

Speaker 26 What does that tell you about the perfect family?

Speaker 6 In court, the big picture the prosecution team was trying to draw for the jury was of a desperate man coming unraveled, the secret compartments of his life breaking open.

Speaker 13 This was a man who obviously was a very narcissistic person. And after all, he was disbarred for stealing money from his clients.

Speaker 13 He showed that in his relationship with his wife before he murdered her by being involved with another woman. This was a man who elevated his own self-interest above all those around him.

Speaker 6 Carlos' story was that he and his wife were run off the road on a Saturday night in November and a gunman climbed in the back seat of their car. There was a struggle for the gun as Carlos told it.

Speaker 6 Shots fired, killing Peggy, wounding him. Roll him.
The investigators made a video demonstration of the sequence of events as he told it to them. I'm jammed against here.

Speaker 6 This knee is jammed against here. Right.

Speaker 6 In the confined interior of the Mitsubishi, they couldn't understand how Carlos ended up in the back seat as he struggled for the gun with only the narrow opening of the console to get there.

Speaker 21 He can't get back here without this thing popping up.

Speaker 13 There is no

Speaker 13 way imaginable that Mr. Perez-Olivo could have gotten through the space in between the seats.

Speaker 13 The space as measured was nine inches and he would have you believe that he is tussling with the assailant in the back seat and he gets into the back seat of the car. Not possible.

Speaker 11 Well his knee is in my side. Right.

Speaker 6 And what's more, to believe Carlos' version of events, the prosecutor argued, he would have clambered into the back seat without ever waking up his wife beside him.

Speaker 13 I think it defies common sense that if you are in the passenger compartment and your husband's in a struggle for his life and your life, that you're not aroused in some way.

Speaker 13 Very unusual and highly unlikely.

Speaker 6 And the prosecutors thought the very fact that Carlos drove to the hospital instead of waiting for EMTs to come to him was also part of his master plan.

Speaker 13 He needed to get away from the exact location of the murder because he tossed the gun not far from the location of the murder.

Speaker 13 He wanted to divert the police away from that location so that they wouldn't recover the gun.

Speaker 17 Because if the crime scene moves, it makes it all that much more difficult for the investigators, doesn't it?

Speaker 13 Absolutely.

Speaker 6 And something caught their eyes as they played back that security camera video taken when Carlos arrived at the hospital.

Speaker 13 His shirt was tucked into his pants.

Speaker 13 This is a man who had just claimed that he was in a life and death struggle for his and his wife's life and he's arriving at the hospital a few short minutes later with his shirt tucked into his pants and looking perfectly neat and trim.

Speaker 6 And if it was a professional hit or even a carjacking, why, the prosecutor asked, would the gunman put himself in a vulnerable position in the back seat of Carlos's Mitsubishi?

Speaker 13 But common sense tells you, if this were a carjacker, as Mr. Perez-Olivo offered to us, the carjacker wouldn't get into the back seat.

Speaker 13 He'd yank you out of the front seat of the car and get in the car and take the car. He didn't do that.

Speaker 17 So if you get into the back seat of the car, you're in an unsafe area if you're the perpetrator.

Speaker 13 You've lost all control virtually, and there would be no reason. What would be the advantage for the perpetrator to get into the back seat of the car? None.

Speaker 6 And perhaps most importantly to the prosecutor, also from a common sense point of view, was if this was a professional hit or a carjacking, why would the gunman kill the wife and leave the husband an eyewitness with little more than a treat and release wound?

Speaker 17 The assailant leaves the car?

Speaker 13 And he leaves.

Speaker 17 With the male with a very minor wound and the female dead, does that make sense?

Speaker 13 Of course that doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 17 If you're a robber, if you are the hitman.

Speaker 13 If you were the carjacker, you'd take the car. No.

Speaker 13 And if you were the hitman, you'd shoot him dead.

Speaker 17 And that didn't happen.

Speaker 13 And that did not happen.

Speaker 6 Suspicions about the husband's story. But they'd need much more than that if they were going to convince a jury that Carlos Perez-Alivo killed his wife.

Speaker 6 Why would this seemingly happy 30-year marriage end in a morgue?

Speaker 17 This is a family not unlike many others in Westchester.

Speaker 13 Absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker 17 Very good appearance, accomplished.

Speaker 13 They did appear to be a loving couple. But, you know, there's no telling what goes on behind people's closed doors.

Speaker 6 So investigators started pushing those doors open, looking into deeper psychological terrain.

Speaker 6 They saw a man who had been at one time hospitalized with clinical depression and who'd now lost his ability to practice law.

Speaker 6 He'd been disbarred, a disgrace they believe he'd concealed from his family.

Speaker 13 Practice was done over. There was no apparent means of income.

Speaker 6 What the prosecutor saw left was the life insurance on her.

Speaker 6 $900,000 wasn't a fortune by Chappaqua standards, but enough the authorities figured for Carlos to set himself up for the next chapter in his life.

Speaker 6 Perhaps with the old girlfriend he'd sent flowers to that day. There'd be no costly divorce for him.
A movie and dinner date in New York, followed by a bullet to the brain, would be the way out.

Speaker 13 All part of a plan, a very devious and diabolical plan to commit murder and get away with it.

Speaker 6 But this case would turn out to have a star witness having to do with that very handgun the divers had retrieved from the lake.

Speaker 17 How often do the legal gods give you a witness like that?

Speaker 13 It's unbelievable. It's the gun, the gun, the gun.

Speaker 29 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 29 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 29 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, 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 29 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 6 The court was about to hear from the prosecution's star witness. His testimony would be about the vintage German handgun used to kill Peggy that divers had fished out of the roadside lake.

Speaker 30 That's the gun? I mean, there was no mistaking it.

Speaker 6 Mark Gizzola would tell the court that he'd seen the distinctive Walter PPK semi-automatic inside Carlos's house five months before Peggy was murdered. His story starts back in June of 2006.

Speaker 6 Carlos and Peggy were renters boxing up for yet another house move.

Speaker 6 Mark Gizzola was helping out his uncle, the Perez-Alibo's landlord, in making sure that the tenants had left the property in broom-swept condition. He found the house was anything but packed up.

Speaker 30 Boxes were in the living room. Furniture was still there.
It was just, it was chaos.

Speaker 6 So Gozzola made a distressed call to his father to come help him get these tenants out quickly because the house had been sold. We started upstairs.
We started sweeping floors.

Speaker 6 As they worked their way through the bedrooms, his father noticed a partly opened manila envelope.

Speaker 30 I saw a gun inside of it. So he called my attention.
I turned around.

Speaker 30 And we looked, and

Speaker 30 it was a pistol that was on the floor. Did you know what it is? Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.
I have a pistol permit.

Speaker 30 I know my firearms. It was a German Walter PPK.

Speaker 6 No doubt in your mind. No, not at all.
The pistol in question is one that some collectors like Mark Gazzola keep their eyes out for.

Speaker 6 The Walter PPK is known as the James Bond gun and has a certain cachet. Gozzola said he went downstairs and asked Carlos to come up to the bedroom.

Speaker 30 As we're walking up the stairs, I tell him we found a pistol in the closet.

Speaker 8 Oh, yeah, yeah, that's his pistol.

Speaker 30 We walk into the bedroom. I walk up to him.
He picks up the firearm. He and I are both looking at it.
He's handling it for me. He says, hey, do you know what this is?

Speaker 30 I said, sure, that's a German Walter PPK. He says, you know what it's famous for? Yeah, James Bond movies.
We go back and forth, small talk about the firearm.

Speaker 6 Gazzola, it turned out, had been shopping around for a Walter PPK, and the pistol Carlos was holding was exactly what he'd been looking for.

Speaker 30 I tell him that I was actually interested in purchasing that firearm. I said, listen, would you love to sell it? I'd love to buy it from you.

Speaker 6 Carlos, he said, answered that the gun had sentimental value, something about it being a gift from a client, and he wasn't interested in selling it. End of the conversation.

Speaker 6 Back to sweeping out the house.

Speaker 22 A night out in Manhattan ends in violence and gunfire for a Westchester couple.

Speaker 6 Then that November weekend, it was all over the news. That ambush shooting of Carlos and Peggy Perezalevo.

Speaker 30 My immediate response was, I felt horrible, I felt bad. I just helped them clean up.
I knew her. she was nice, she made me something to drink while I was at the house.

Speaker 6 As he followed the news of the shootings, Mark Gazzola told his coworkers about that June day when he saw the gun in the Perez-Alibo home.

Speaker 30 I went to work and I said, you know, if they ever turn up with a German Walter PPK, I have to come forward and I have to say something.

Speaker 17 And lo and behold, divers fish out from that lake, a German Walter PPK.

Speaker 6 In the courtroom, the prosecutor saw him as an unshakable witness. He spoke with encyclopedic certainty about Walter PPKs.

Speaker 13 He was an extraordinary witness. As luck would have it, he was a gun enthusiast, very familiar with that particular gun, and in fact, searching for that particular gun.

Speaker 6 And Marcozzola identified for the jury the murder weapon as the very gun he saw in the Pereza Livo house that day.

Speaker 17 Is the gun in evidence the very same one that you saw at the house that day?

Speaker 6 Sure.

Speaker 30 Yeah, that's the German Walter PPK I saw.

Speaker 17 Not close, not like it, not sort of in the middle of the day.

Speaker 30 No, no, no, no, that was the one that, yeah, that I wanted to buy.

Speaker 6 Carlos dismissed Marc Gozzola's story altogether. No way could he have seen a Walther PPK in his house.

Speaker 8 You think he's lying? He's making a gun. I don't think he's lying.
I know he's lying.

Speaker 17 He did not see that distinctive gun in your house.

Speaker 8 He couldn't have seen that gun because there was no gun in the house. I don't got guns.
I've never...

Speaker 8 had any guns. There have never been any guns in the house.
The only thing that was in the house that looked like a gun was a a pellet gun that looks quite similar to what that gun looked like.

Speaker 8 Do you think the guy that came to your house today saw that? I know that's what they saw. A pellet gun.
Yes, that looks like a real gun, but it's not.

Speaker 30 Our discussion was not of a pellet gun. It was a German-Walter PPK.

Speaker 6 Are you sure it wasn't a pellet gun you saw?

Speaker 30 Absolutely. It was definitely not a pellet gun.

Speaker 6 The gun. The story of a troubled marriage and teetering finances.
The defense had its work cut out for it.

Speaker 6 But Carlos Perez-Alivo, a one-time criminal defense lawyer who had represented clients accused of murder, would fight back with all he had.

Speaker 8 Did you murder your wife, Becky?

Speaker 4 Of course not.

Speaker 8 If there was any way that I could change places with her, if there was any way that I could be dead,

Speaker 4 I'd be very happy.

Speaker 19 Their case has been nothing more than innuendo and speculation.

Speaker 6 The The defense was up, and it had to undo the prosecution's damaging version of the story of Peggy's murder.

Speaker 19 Just not credible, just not believable. He has no idea what he saw.

Speaker 6 Defense attorney Christopher McClure took on the biggest problem. Mark Gozzola's testimony about seeing the murder weapon in Carlos's hand five months before his wife was murdered.

Speaker 6 Was it funny, posed the defense, that anyone could have such a vast knowledge about the Walther PPK at their fingertips, the way Gozzola seemed to on the stand?

Speaker 19 The question is, when did he learn that? Did he learn it from Wikipedia two weeks before trial? Did he learn it a month before trial? No one knows when he learned that.

Speaker 6 And co-defense attorney Richard Portali would also try to poke holes in the forensic evidence, starting with that reconstruction demonstration.

Speaker 21 And I don't have enough room over here.

Speaker 6 It didn't contradict Carlos's account, the defense team argued, because significantly, it failed to take into account the position of the driver's seat during the struggle.

Speaker 6 They argued the seat was pushed back further at the time of the shooting, leaving enough room for Carlos to be dragged into the back of the Mitsubishi.

Speaker 15 The seats were not placed in the same position that they were in at the time of the incident.

Speaker 6 The prosecutors had argued that Peggy was shot at close range with the gun put beneath the space of her headrest. But the defense said that was just one possible scenario.

Speaker 15 Their claim that the muzzle of the gun was under the headrest and that was not supported by any of the forensics, any of the gunshot residue pattern analysis that we had done.

Speaker 6 And they pointed out to the jurors: don't forget, Carlos himself had been shot.

Speaker 19 It was a wound to the stomach,

Speaker 19 and it went fortunately went in and out. But

Speaker 19 even their own doctor testified there are major organs around there.

Speaker 6 And the defense team pointed out that Carlos could have been shot in the stomach during the struggle with the gunman with that same bullet exiting the rear window.

Speaker 15 We actually introduced an anatomically correct doll

Speaker 15 with a dowel going in and out of the doll and out the hole in the window to show that it was certainly possible.

Speaker 6 And to further prove its point that someone else was in the car that night, the defense pointed out that investigators had found some male hair that didn't belong to Carlos in the backseat area of the Mitsubishi, as well as other DNA they couldn't trace.

Speaker 19 They found a substantial amount of blood in the backseat. They just couldn't link it to anybody.

Speaker 6 And the defense lawyers also believed that the police had failed to fully investigate Carlos' former client, Halio Cruz.

Speaker 19 There are witnesses that claim they heard him make statements indicating that Mr. Cruz believed that Carlos threw his case, that he knew

Speaker 19 everything about Mr. Presalivo.
He knew where he lived. I think the quote was, when he's dead, send me the press clippings upstate so I can laugh.

Speaker 17 So maybe this was what, a hitman? Somebody hired by a guy with a major beef against your client?

Speaker 19 What we do know is Mr. Presalivo represented a lot of people that are capable of such acts.

Speaker 6 But Detective Simmons chased down the Elio Cruz lead and came away convinced that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the shooting. Could he arrange a hit from prison?

Speaker 4 I don't know if it's as easy to do as maybe movies or television have it portrayed to do, but we did pursue that angle, but we're unable to corroborate that this individual was able to mastermind this.

Speaker 6 But perhaps the most important point the defense wanted the jury to take away was that Carlos Perez-Alibo's family and friends believed that he was incapable of killing Peggy, the woman he loved, the mother of his three children.

Speaker 6 I

Speaker 15 know he didn't kill my mother. If I thought for a second that my father had to do anything with my mother being killed, I would not for a second be supporting him or defending him.

Speaker 15 And I am defending him because I'm 100% sure there's no way he could have done this.

Speaker 6 His sister Alicia is equally emphatic.

Speaker 11 There's just no possible way. That's ridiculous.
The DA is nothing.

Speaker 11 They have nothing.

Speaker 6 Peggy's own sister even testified on behalf of her brother-in-law.

Speaker 12 I can't say Carlos is a perfect guy. He had an affair.
He had money troubles. He's been disbarred.
I can't say he's a model citizen.

Speaker 12 But just because you do all those things, that doesn't make you a murderer. No matter what you think of Carlos as a person, I knew that there was no way that he killed my sister.

Speaker 6 But what would a jury think?

Speaker 24 You know, we tried to understand the marriage, and here's a guy who says he loves his wife, but he had a mistress for a number of years. He told the detectives that he went to escort services.

Speaker 24 I mean, it wasn't quite the picture that he was trying to paint.

Speaker 6 In the courthouse, the case was now in the hands of the jury. District Attorney DiFiore was confident it would be a guilty verdict.

Speaker 13 I think if anyone sat through that trial that took place in this courthouse, that there would be absolutely no doubt that Carlos Perez-Olivo murdered his wife in cold blood.

Speaker 6 But Defense Attorney McClure felt just as strongly there was no way a jury could convict based on the evidence.

Speaker 19 They speculated the entire trial as to what happened. And you can't convict somebody on speculation.

Speaker 6 But of course the stakes were highest for Carlos Perez-Alivo. If the verdict was a gamble, his life was what was at stake.

Speaker 6 As a veteran criminal defense attorney, he knew exactly what he was up against.

Speaker 8 You've waited for a lot of juries to come back. How strange was it for you to be waiting for a jury to come back? Bizarre is the only way to describe it.
It's like sometimes I

Speaker 8 feel like, you know, I'm somebody and I'm looking at something that's happened to somebody else else because it just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 6 But now a jury of 12 would decide his fate.

Speaker 6 They included an IT director, a customer service supervisor, a marketing project manager, a housewife, an auto mechanic, an IT manager, a phone company worker, a retired executive, and an MRI technician.

Speaker 31 I felt that we were all keeping an open mind.

Speaker 6 In a circumstantial case with no eyewitnesses, no confession to the crime, the jury was going to have to work its way through the evidence evidence piece by piece.

Speaker 6 They started by debating the central question. Would Carlos Perez Olivo, one-time successful lawyer, father of three, brutally kill his wife of 30 years?

Speaker 17 This is sort of a dilemma for you because everything on the exterior from the sidewalk before you peel away the roof seems to be pretty good. They've been together for a long time.

Speaker 26 But inside, there was something else going on.

Speaker 24 You got a sense that,

Speaker 24 you know,

Speaker 24 this is a family that was, despite their what appeared to be a kind of wealthy lifestyle, was really kind of one, you know, one event away from being completely bankrupt.

Speaker 6 In addition to the family's money problems, Carlos had also carried on a decade-long affair, even sending the woman flowers for her birthday and calling her the night his wife was shot to see if she'd gotten them.

Speaker 24 If nothing else, what it showed was this wasn't the ideal, the idyllic marriage that the defense tried to paint. This was somebody who

Speaker 24 clearly wasn't entirely happy with his wife.

Speaker 6 But Carlos, a former criminal defense attorney, had been disbarred just three months before the murder. Had one of his angry clients ambushed him by the side of the road? Was this a revenge killing?

Speaker 24 He defended tough guys. He'd defended drug dealers and

Speaker 24 people who may have been in organized crime.

Speaker 6 Did you have to consider whether his practice defending tough guys might have come back to haunt him?

Speaker 22 I thought about it.

Speaker 24 It was a story that you could imagine might be true.

Speaker 28 Maybe there really was a hitman.

Speaker 17 So you had to consider that.

Speaker 28 Oh, absolutely. You definitely considered that.

Speaker 31 It was more the fact that he was a criminal defense lawyer and that he defended people that perhaps were disgruntled and were looking to get back at him.

Speaker 31 I mean there are situations where you don't have happy customers and if those unhappy customers are criminals,

Speaker 31 you gotta factor that in a little bit.

Speaker 6 And remember, Peggy's own sister, as well as her children, had taken the stand to say there was no way their father had killed their mother.

Speaker 22 For me, that was a tough emotional thing to get by in thinking that, gosh, these kids love their dad so much.

Speaker 22 How could he do this?

Speaker 17 Maybe because he didn't do it, huh?

Speaker 17 Absolutely.

Speaker 6 But the jurors were also going to have to take a hard look at the forensics of the case. The angle of the bullets, the size and shape of the Mitsubishi.

Speaker 6 Could the struggle in the car with the gunman have happened the way Carlos described it? The jury was prepared for a long deliberation.

Speaker 6 The jury deliberated late into the night. And the longer they were out, the more confident the defense team was that they would find their client, Carlos Perez-Olivo, not guilty.

Speaker 19 I can just say that we're encouraged by the fact that they are looking at the case carefully, which is what we could ask them to do, looking at the evidence, and

Speaker 19 we think they'll come to the right decision if they're not guilty verdicts.

Speaker 6 Upstairs in the courthouse, the jurors were taking a hard look at the forensics in the case.

Speaker 6 Remember, the prosecution had argued the struggle in the Mitsubishi could not have happened the way Carlos said it did.

Speaker 6 They'd shown jurors a video demonstration to show how difficult it would have been for Carlos to end up in the back seat.

Speaker 19 Well, his knee is in my side.

Speaker 6 He'd have had to go through the narrow opening of the SUV's console, end up in the back with the gunman, and all the while not wake up his sleeping wife. What are his feet doing right now?

Speaker 6 Right now, he's kneeling on the seat and they're... Then the prosecution argued there was the angle of the bullets.

Speaker 6 Peggy shot level in the head, another gunshot fired at a 90-degree angle through the back window. All of this during a wild struggle.
Was it possible? Some jurors thought yes.

Speaker 28 They alluded to the fact that he's too tall, too big of a guy to be able to fit through such a small area between the driver's seat and the passenger seat.

Speaker 17 What did you you think? Could it be done?

Speaker 28 Yes, I think it could be done based on the circumstances. It could have happened, absolutely.

Speaker 6 But some of the jurors weren't so sure.

Speaker 26 You know, it was a narrow car.

Speaker 26 It was a very strenuous, tough job to get into that back seat.

Speaker 26 And

Speaker 26 then

Speaker 26 what was left in the back seat seemed to be in a very orderly shape.

Speaker 17 For me, I found that most damaging. I mean, the fact that his wife never woke up, car traveling at 45 miles an hour, comes to a stop.
She does not wake up.

Speaker 17 Someone forced you off the road in a dark road, and not once did he wake his wife up and says, we might be in trouble.

Speaker 6 But remember, Carlos had also taken a shot to the stomach.

Speaker 25 When I first heard about the case, I said, are they kidding? Who's going to shoot himself in the stomach? You know,

Speaker 25 somebody had to shoot him. It is strange.

Speaker 17 She's dead. He's wounded.
That's a long way to go. Absolutely.

Speaker 17 To throw the police off your case, huh?

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 6 And there was the prosecutor's star witness. Mark Gazzola had testified that he saw the vintage Walter PPK in Carlos's house just five months before the shooting.

Speaker 19 He really identified the gun very clearly.

Speaker 17 How believable a witness was he to y'all?

Speaker 14 Very,

Speaker 14 very knowledgeable.

Speaker 6 Finally, after a day and a half of deliberations, they had reached a decision. Their verdict, Carlos Perez-Alivo, guilty of murdering his wife, Peggy.

Speaker 8 Guilty.

Speaker 8 Yeah, to me, it was a shock. I believe to the attorneys it was a shock.
To my family, it was a shock.

Speaker 6 His son, Merced, was away from the courthouse when the verdict was read. He ran back to get the news.

Speaker 15 I didn't even know how to react. It just felt like the sickest joke of my life had been played on me.
You know, just

Speaker 15 like it didn't compute. It didn't make sense.
I didn't understand how he could be guilty. The trial had gone so well.
From that, it was just like a fuse going off.

Speaker 15 And I remember just seeing, like, blacking out almost like not being able to see, just going red.

Speaker 6 He was was so angry, he put his fist right through the plaster of the courthouse wall.

Speaker 15 I broke the wall. You know, I was, I was,

Speaker 15 I went ballistic.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 I just,

Speaker 15 just the rage, it was uncontrollable. But it caught me so off guard because I was so sure they were going to find him innocent.

Speaker 6 Alicia learned of the guilty verdict by phone. She headed to a park.

Speaker 11 I was just in shock. It was just like, it was just take a deep breath and

Speaker 11 time to, you know, keep going because obviously there's nothing I can do about it. I have to deal with this now.

Speaker 6 But the jurors, those with the beliefs that mattered, were convinced that Carlos Perez-Alibo had indeed murdered his wife of three decades.

Speaker 25 And it was like a puzzle. It was like all the pieces fit in.

Speaker 25 You know, it was the money.

Speaker 25 the fact that he did have this other love interest, and then the fact that he was a criminal attorney he elevated himself in his own mind that you know he can now fox all these policemen and the fact that he shot himself I think he thought that would be the coupe de grace that nobody would ever figure that he would shoot himself.

Speaker 6 District Attorney DiFiore had no doubt that Carlos Pereza Livo did indeed kill his wife in cold blood.

Speaker 13 I believe that there are people who are willing

Speaker 13 to put their own selfish, self-focused needs above all those around them, including the people that they are supposed to love and protect and care for.

Speaker 17 Justice served.

Speaker 13 I think that justice has most definitely been served.

Speaker 6 And the judge apparently agreed.

Speaker 13 The defendant is a master of deceit who contrived a diabolical plan to murder his wife for his own financial gain.

Speaker 6 She sentenced Carlos to the maximum, 25 years to life.

Speaker 8 I'll die in jail. I do believe that we all have a destiny, and there's nothing you can do to change it.
I can put up with anything.

Speaker 8 I can put up with the humiliations, people asking me questions if I killed my wife or not. I can put up with being in jail for the rest of my life.

Speaker 8 Maybe in part it's easier because I'm kind of half-empty after she died. You didn't shoot her? No.

Speaker 3 You know.

Speaker 6 But that's not what the jury thought happened on that November night.

Speaker 6 So the one-time criminal defense lawyer who used his skills to keep clients out of prison is now himself an inmate with a number and a jumpsuit.

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