All The World's A Stage

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When investigators arrived at the scene of a shooting, they found a most knowledgeable witness.

The victim's husband is a homicide detective, and he said the shooting was an accident.

It took a photograph, a forensic scientist's own blood, and the flexibility of a tendon to solve the mystery.

Pilar Sonyz Nicolau enjoyed an international upbringing.

She was born in Valencia, Spain, educated in Paris, then moved to the United States, where she took a job as a nanny in Boston.

She was very culturally knowledgeable.

She could speak the three languages, our native language, Valencian, Spanish, and French, fluently.

And she loved everything that involved the Spanish or the French culture, she really did.

But then she adopted the American way also, very well.

Not long after moving to the United States, she met Ted MacArthur, a Boston area policeman.

He was good to her.

She fell in love with him.

You know,

why do you love somebody?

They were very attractive.

The couple married, had two children, then moved to Miami, where Ted got a job with the local police and quickly rose through the ranks to become a homicide investigator.

Pilar got a job in the county's criminal justice system as a corrections officer.

You know, inmates can be very vulgar, very, very rough.

And she was just so sweet that even the inmates couldn't cuss her out.

On August 1st, 1989, the MacArthur's two children were in Boston visiting Ted's family.

At 8:33 a.m., Ted frantically called police.

Heavy police in fire.

Do you have an emergency?

Yes, I need rescue.

2145 Northeast 124th Street.

My wife what around with a gun has just shot herself.

Is this a house or a fire?

This is Sergeant McGonzer from Harmony.

Okay, Sergeant McGarter, this is Prince Sarah.

Where is she shot?

Okay, they're on their way.

An ambulance arrived a few minutes later.

Ted was performing CPR on Pilar, but it was no use.

Eight minutes after they arrived, medical personnel pronounced Pilar dead from a single gunshot wound to her head.

Don Slavonik headed the investigation.

He recognized Ted MacArthur as a fellow homicide investigator.

I didn't specifically know the man.

I knew the name.

I had seen him at a homicide school maybe a year before.

His reputation was that he was a good investigator.

Ted told his colleagues that his wife jokingly put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger, not realizing the gun was loaded.

Pilar was trained in the use of firearms, and her family was immediately suspicious.

I don't believe she was going to do something that stupid.

She had more common sense.

She was more intelligent than that.

You don't play with guns.

And that's the bottom line.

Especially,

especially

if you're any type of law enforcement person.

But could forensic science reconstruct what really happened?

35-year-old corrections officer Pilar MacArthur was dead from a single gunshot to her head.

Her husband, homicide investigator Ted MacArthur, was brought in for questioning.

Do you swear that the statement you're about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so I'll be gad.

Ted said Pilar was asleep, and he playfully used a toy water pistol to wake her up.

He said he went into the bathroom to refill the water pistol.

And when he returned, he saw Pilar jokingly holding his police revolver to her head.

And she said, don't worry, it's not loaded.

And then it went off.

Ted said he immediately called 911, then put Pilar on the floor and began CPR.

At the scene, police found the water pistol Ted referred to.

The bullet wound was on the left side of Pilar's head, supporting Ted's account of what had happened.

There was only one empty cartridge in the gun's chamber.

Five unspent shells were on the the nightstand, meaning it was possible Pilar thought she had emptied the gun and didn't realize it was still loaded.

And investigators tested Ted's hands for gunpowder residue, which would have been present had he fired the gun.

Those tests were negative.

But Slavonik was too experienced to merely accept the word of a fellow officer.

When he spoke to the couple's friends, relatives, and co-workers, Slavonik learned there were problems in their marriage.

There was a few people that had good things to say about him, but most of the people that I spoke with

didn't share a very good opinion about him.

He wasn't an overly personable man.

And Pilar told friends that her husband was spending money faster than they could make it.

And she was telling me, you know, he's withdrawing

Two, $300 at a time, and I don't know where this money's going.

There were times several months before her death, she would go and write a check for groceries, not realizing that he had taken all the money out, and the check bounced.

And when Pilar looked in her husband's wallet, she saw the reason for his extravagance.

It was a picture of a woman sitting on a bed with a little nighty on.

And I said, so what happened?

And she says,

you know,

I asked him, and he said it was just a case.

But Pilar worked in law enforcement and knew the numbers written on the back of the photograph were not case numbers.

That's when she decided she was going to investigate herself.

Instead of hiding somebody, she decided to do it herself.

And she started to go places and ask people.

And then one day she's in a bar and

She saw him with her, with the lady in the picture.

I asked him in the interview if he was dating anyone.

He initially denied it, and then he said yes, and he didn't want to give her name up.

And I go, you don't understand.

This is open for debate.

Who is a lady, and I want her name right now.

Ted identified his girlfriend as the crime reporter from the Miami Herald newspaper.

To save their marriage, Ted promised to end the affair.

For her part, Pilar did everything she could to make her marriage work.

She She was making an effort, making yourself look good, losing the weight, getting a makeover,

changing your style of clothing to include, you know, the naughty lingerie and stuff like that.

Ted promised Pilar he would buy her a $30,000 luxury car and made a deposit on a new home.

A few days before Pilar's death, Ted arranged a romantic evening for his wife.

He lit candles, drew a bath, and brought a television into the bathroom so Pilar could watch her favorite programs while relaxing in the top.

And he put the TV up and he hooked it up.

And then he said, oh, I forgot something.

And on his way out of the bathroom, he accidentally brushed against the television and it fell into the water.

Fearing she would be electrocuted, Pilar frantically kicked the TV out of the water.

He explained it as an accident and,

you know, said he was sorry and it was nothing but an accident.

And I said, do you believe?

And he said, she said, yeah.

I said, okay.

This alleged accident just five days before Pilar's suspicious death was quite a coincidence.

When forensic scientists looked into Pilar's shooting, they found even more surprises.

Investigators asked forensic scientist Dr.

Henry Lee to examine Pilar MacArthur's bedroom in an effort to determine

what really happened on the day of her death.

The first thing he noticed was that Pilar's hands were completely clean.

Her hand should have some high velocity impact spatter.

Because when you pull a trigger, when fire ping hit the primer, a rapid oxidation create a lot of force.

That force pushed the bullet forward, impact the side, and blood spatter will project forward, also backwards.

And Ted told investigators that he moved Pilar's body to the floor immediately to perform CPR after the shooting.

But Dr.

Lee saw something suspicious.

There appeared to be too much blood on the pillow.

We weighted all the blood crusts.

Then times the factor, we developed the formula to estimate how much blood original has.

And if somebody lost that much blood, it takes a while, not going to be a few seconds.

By weighing the dried blood, Dr.

Lee determined that Pilar lost one-third of her blood volume from 1,000 to 2,000 cc's while her head was on the pillow.

1 to 2,000 cc of blow, that's quite a bit of blow.

From that volume, Dr.

Lee estimated Pilar had been on the bed for about 15 minutes before Ted moved her to the floor.

This contradicted Ted's story that he moved Pilar to the floor immediately after the gunshot.

So within a minute or few seconds you moved the body already.

How

that much one to two thousand cc blood got on the passenger bash?

Doesn't make sense.

Dr.

Lee then read the statement of the policeman who arrived at the shooting scene within a minute of the 911 call.

He said that the blood on the bed had already coagulated.

When blood coagulates, the serum, which is clear, separates from the cells and platelets, which are red.

The blood smear on the bed, created when Ted moved his wife to the floor, showed clearly that the serum had separated from the cells.

This meant that Pilar's body had been moved after the blood coagulated.

Now the scene could be a staged scene.

To find out how long it takes human blood to coagulate, Dr.

Lee drew 500 cc's of his own blood for an experiment.

You cannot use red cross blood.

Those are

blood preservatives, EDTA.

So fresh blood has to come from a human source.

At room temperature, it took 15 to 20 minutes for Dr.

Lee's blood to coagulate or separate into its components, proving that Pilar had been dead 15 to 20 minutes before the paramedics arrived.

But it didn't prove that Pilar was murdered.

That information would come from ballistics expert Dr.

Vincent DiMayo, chief medical examiner in Bexar County, Texas.

The first thing he saw was that the wound was on the left side of Pilar's head, yet Pilar was right-handed.

You can't say just based on that that he was lying, but that she used her left hand is kind of a flag that makes you think

maybe you should look a little harder on this case than you would normally.

Dr.

DeMayo knew the exact position of the gun because he could see the outline of the gun sight on Pilar's skin.

It was a contact wound

and imprinted on the skin was the imprint of the muzzle of the gun so that I knew how the muzzle of the gun was oriented.

When he placed the gun in the same position with the correct angle of the bullet's downward trajectory, he discovered something interesting.

Let me demonstrate.

If we sweep up this way,

and then we'd have to turn it this way, way,

the problem is, is the way your hand is twisted, the tendons are pulled and you cannot pull the trigger no matter how hard you try

because

the tendons are stretched.

In this position, of course, you can.

This position,

you can't.

That ruled out an accident or suicide and proved that someone else must have fired the gun.

The only other person in the bedroom that morning was Ted MacArthur.

In fact, the gun was held against her head

in this position.

And so really,

the person

who solved this case and proves it was a homicide

is the husband.

Based on his account and based on the findings at autopsy, it was obvious he was lying.

Ted MacArthur went before the public to proclaim his innocence.

I faced the death penalty in this case.

I was offered a plea early on in this case.

I wouldn't plead to making an illegal left turn in connection with this case.

I did absolutely nothing wrong.

Soon, it would be up to a jury to decide.

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My very last words to her were, I love you.

And not a lot of parents ever get to say that, you know.

In 2010, Aubrey Sacco vanished while hiking in the Himalayas.

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Dads are supposed to find their daughters when they're in trouble.

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Ted MacArthur claimed that his wife put a gun to her head as a joke and that it accidentally went off and killed her.

There are enough real homicides in Dade County that occur on a regular basis than to try to take an accidental death for whatever the reasons are and to turn it around and to do this.

Prosecutors believe it was cold-blooded murder and that Ted's motive was money.

The couple's bank records revealed Ted was spending lavishly on his mistress.

He couldn't afford the new house and car.

He never was going to buy the house because he couldn't afford it.

He wasn't going to buy the car because he couldn't afford it.

All these other issues were simply a show to make his wife think that he was trying to save their marriage.

And Ted took out a $250,000 life insurance policy on Pilar.

Five weeks before she was murdered, that is suspicious.

Added to existing policies, Ted stood to collect $470,000 if Pilar died accidentally.

To solve his money problems, end his marriage, and start a new life with his mistress, prosecutors believe Ted killed his wife and tried to make it look like an accident.

He gets money.

He's a recipient of sympathy.

He has a glowing reputation.

No one's going to question him.

Almost four years after Pilar's death, Ted MacArthur was charged with first-degree murder.

During the trial, a relaxed, confident MacArthur stuck to his story that Pilar was joking around when she accidentally shot herself.

I remember saying,

screaming to her, the gun was loaded.

And she was smiling at me and she said,

no, it's not.

And at that point, my feelings are that the gun was coming away from her head

and it discharged.

But the forensic evidence showed otherwise.

Prosecutors believe that Pilar was probably sleeping on her right side when Ted fired the bullet into her left temple.

He took the remaining bullets out of the gun and put them on the nightstand, wiped the gun to remove his prints, then washed his hands to remove the gunpowder residue.

All of this took time, about 15 minutes.

In this delay, Pilar's blood coagulated.

Ted MacArthur made the mistake of shooting Pilar on the wrong side of the head since she was right-handed.

And he could offer no explanation why Pilar's hands were clean and her fingerprints were missing from the gun.

All telltale signs of Ted's deception.

Even though he was an experienced homicide detective, MacArthur was unable to stage the perfect crime.

What happened is they got a very detailed

explanation of what happened so he couldn't change his story and they recorded it.

He in turn didn't realize the significance of the statement he was giving.

He didn't realize that there was going to be a muscle imprint.

A jury found Ted MacArthur guilty of first-degree murder.

He was sentenced to life in prison.

Wizarda forensic.

This case problem remains solved.

Because the forensic evidence, we was able to impeach his alibi, his statement.

He thought he could get away with murdering his wife.

He thought people would believe it.

He was wrong.

His wife is dead, but he's paying the price.