The Gambler

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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Gambling has a lot more visibility than it used to.

It's on the internet, it's on prime-time television, and it's almost a varsity sport on some college campuses.

But several young men learned the hard way that gambling can put your money at risk and sometimes your life.

Gambling isn't confined to casinos, church, bingo, and backroom card games anymore.

Now, it's everywhere.

There are poker tournaments on the computer.

You can play sports wagers offshore, and you can play the daily lottery, now run by local governments.

28-year-old Jason McGuigan saw gambling as a way to have fun and also make a living.

He dabbled in casino gaming, but his real love was sports handicapping.

He was known to wager thousands of dollars on a single event.

He was not a bookie.

He had made the offer to quite a few people that if you give me some money, I'll sign you up with a betting service and give you advice.

He was essentially trying to sell his advice.

McGuigan had spent some of his time with his associates and acquaintances boasting about the gambling.

He almost was starting to emerge as sort of a wannabe gangster.

On a warm June afternoon, Jason's aunt stopped by his apartment to pick up an old computer.

She found the back door open.

Inside were the remnants of a massacre.

Jason McGuigan is laying on his back on the bed with his feet curling over the bed to the floor.

McGuigan had been shot twice with a nine millimeter handgun.

Jason's two friends, Daniel Swanson and Dustin Wilson, were shot to death in the living room.

It could have been a professional hit just because of the way these bullets went into people.

Inside Jason's apartment was a receipt for a 9mm Glock pistol.

He had purchased it just a few weeks earlier, but the gun wasn't found in the apartment.

Also missing was the key to Jason's bank's safe deposit box.

Investigators believe Jason McGuigan was the intended target and that his two friends sleeping in the living room were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It's just totally unexpected that he didn't really have any enemies that we knew of at all.

So when this happened, it was a big surprise to us.

Jason, Dustin, and Daniel, they were just normal kids trying to make something out of their life.

They weren't bad kids.

When local news agencies reported the murders, a witness came forward with some revealing information.

A few hours before the murders the witness saw three men in a Cadillac escalade shouting obscenities and making inappropriate gestures to an Asian man in the car behind them.

She remembers it clearly.

She thought it was a road rage incident, and these three white kids were somehow racially attacking this Asian kid.

The witness identified the three men in the escalade as Jason McGuigan, Daniel Swanson, and Dustin Wilson, the three murder victims.

In a case that had so many stunning revelations, this one ranked right up there with it.

Police in Verona, Wisconsin were investigating a triple homicide.

An analysis of the crime scene indicated that Jason McGuigan's two friends were killed first

as they slept in the living room.

The killer took Jason into the bedroom.

There was some sort of discussion before he too was killed.

In a search for suspects, Police learned that Jason McGuigan and his upstairs neighbor, Todd Vincent, got into a fight a week or two before the murder.

McWiggan had slapped Todd.

Todd retaliated by choking Jason or throwing Jason to the ground.

Jason reported it to the police.

It turns out that there wasn't enough of a conflict there that anybody even got charged.

Todd denied any involvement in the murders.

Gunshot residue tests on his hands were negative, but he said something curious, that he didn't hear any gunshots from Jason's apartment.

Ballistic experts say that's not necessarily unusual.

If they don't expect to hear a gunshot, when they do hear something, they'll interpret it some other way.

Next, police started to run down the vehicles parked outside Jason's apartment.

One was Jason's Cadillac Escalade.

The other was a Red Toyota, one of two vehicles owned by Jason's friend, 19-year-old Mark Wu.

He was from Taiwan, the son of a wealthy businessman and an honor student at the University of Wisconsin.

When police tracked him down, Mark Wu was in New York City and about to board a plane to Taiwan to visit his family for the summer vacation.

Mark said he left one of his two cars in Jason's parking lot because it was safer than parking in the city.

Wu had a residence downtown in Madison and parking down there is very difficult and he had a number of vehicles and so by keeping one out at the Jason McWigan's residence in Verona he didn't have to worry about parking tickets.

On the night of the murders, Mark Wu said he was in his apartment in Madison, Wisconsin and spent the night alone.

But Mark's cell phone records indicated he was in Verona, about 30 miles away from his apartment, which is where Jason McGwigan lived.

Wu makes a call at 8.16 p.m.

and it hits the Verona Tower.

Verizon tests show that that any cell phone call that hits Tower 165, the Verona Tower, is basically going to be confined to someone that's within the city limits of Verona.

He didn't really give a good explanation on why he had lied,

but the gist of it was that he didn't know anything about these murders and he just thought that he should have basically an alibi.

And Mark Wu had no history of violence or erratic behavior.

Mark Wu

was about as unlikely a suspect in a triple homicide as you're going to get.

His yearbook entries, his classmates, former teachers, there wasn't really a sense of Mark Wu being a person who had been in trouble.

I'd say naive,

helpless, really nice guy.

I was laughing out loud when the FBI suggested that he could be in a gang or something.

But police found evidence that Wu and McGuigan were both involved in gambling.

We learned that Mark Mark Wu,

through his family, it appears primarily, had resources.

So he had money to burn.

Five days before the murders, Mark Wu gave Jason McGuigan a large sum of money to bet on a professional baseball game.

One game in particular was the Major League Baseball game Pittsburgh versus Cleveland.

That game happened to go 15 innings and lasted about five hours.

Mark Wu used his cell phone to call a sports betting service that night to find out which team won.

The pitcher takes the sign, winds up, the pitch.

It's in the dirt.

Past the catcher.

The runner from third is heading home.

And there's the throw.

Safe.

The game ends on a wild pitch, and Pittsburgh wins 7-6.

I don't believe it.

For the second night in a row, Pittsburgh wins in 15 innings.

According to friends, when Mark realized that he won, he couldn't contain his excitement.

Wu is ecstatic.

He's screaming.

He's excited.

17 grand, I won 17 grand.

When Mark Wu asked Jason McWiggan for the $17,000 he had won, he learned for the first time that Jason never placed the bet.

Jason reacts to that by pulling his newly purchased Glock pistol out of his pants, waves it at him, and says, shut the f ⁇ up.

There is in fact no bet placed.

Nothing documents that Wu had any money put down.

Jason did not have any money put down.

So this bet is completely a false bet.

Why Jason didn't place the bet is unclear.

Either he forgot or decided to pocket Mark's money instead.

Regardless, this gave Mark Wu 17,000 reasons to seek revenge.

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Investigators now suspected that Jason McGuigan was murdered because of his gambling activities.

In Jason's personal files was evidence he placed bets through Olympic Sports, an offshore betting agency in the Caribbean.

He would call in and they would tell you the lines, the spreads, and what the picks were on those games, and he would then place bets on those.

Gambling agency set up shop outside the country to circumvent U.S.

law enforcement.

All of his bets throughout his entire account history with Olympic Sports were made by telephone.

Olympic Sports records all incoming phone calls and the reason they do that is just in case somebody has an argument over whether or not they made a bet or did not make a bet, they've got some kind of proof to back up what happened.

When police listened to the tapes, they heard someone else on the phone with Jason.

The voice sounded like Jason's friend, Mark Wu.

And it was clear that Wu was also betting big on sporting events.

You have Jason actually taking over, grabbing the phone in some manner because you can hear the voice change on the tapes.

You can also hear him in the background telling Wu what to do.

So you can see that McGuinen is really sort of the mastermind behind any of this gambling that's going on.

I'd like to know who the pitchers are for the baseball game Atlantic at New York.

No, Atlanta Brees.

New York Met.

Yeah.

Jimmy Maddox and Glavin.

Maddox and Gravin?

Yes, sir.

I'll play with my bet on Risk.

Risk 100.

He didn't know what he was doing.

He didn't know pitchers' names.

He didn't know team names.

He didn't understand the odds.

An investigation into Mark Wu's finances revealed a telling piece of information.

When we began to discover that Mark Wu

had, over a four or five month period, drawn more than $70,000 out of his bank account, that Mark Wu was telling investigators that he,

you know, at one occasion had dropped $15,000 on a single bet.

And investigators already knew there was a disagreement about the baseball bet and that Mark Wu believed Jason owed him $17,000.

So it tells us that there's definitely some money issues going on between the two of them, and they're very severe in nature.

Mark gave police permission to search his apartment.

They found no bloody clothes or weapons.

But in the parking lot was the second vehicle Mark Wu owned.

This one was silver.

like the one seen following Jason McGwigan the afternoon before the murders.

Inside was the owner's manual for a Glock 9mm pistol, like the one missing from Jason's apartment, the same caliber weapon used in the murders.

Ballistic expert Bill Newhouse compared the shell casings from the murder scene to the ones provided by the manufacturer when Jason purchased the weapon.

It was clearly printed as having been cartridge casings fired in and it specified the Glock pistol, which it had been fired in with the serial number and really nice information that we don't see very often.

They matched, proving that it was Jason's own weapon that killed him.

Hoping to find the murder weapon, police searched the garbage dumpster behind Mark Wu's apartment.

Instead, they found a pair of sandals in a white plastic bag, along with some of Mark Wu's credit card receipts.

Police also checked other dumpsters in a four-block radius.

They find out specifically where that particular garbage would be dumped.

And they dig and they, you know, do that dirty work that so often is

the key to solving crime.

And they find this gun case.

To see if the case contained any fingerprints, forensic analyst Mike Riddle used superglue fuming, a process where the chemicals from heated superglue adhered to finger oils.

Riddle saw what he thought might be some partial prints and used yellow dye to enhance the image.

These partial prints were in an unusual location.

They were in one of the corners in a curved portion of the gun case.

partially covered by the

foam rubber that was in there.

Had I not removed the foam rubber, I probably would not have been able to develop develop these prints using super glue.

The prints belonged to Mark Wu.

And on the sandals from the garbage dumpster, scientists found tiny mist-like droplets of blood.

DNA testing revealed the blood on the sandals came from the youngest murder victim, 17-year-old Dustin Wilson.

Ironically, the dumpster should have been empty the day after the murders, but the garbage truck driver didn't pick up that day.

We spoke to the garbage collector, and he admitted that he often fibs on the document, indicating that he did pick it up when in fact he does not pick it up.

Mark Wu was arrested and charged with three counts of first-degree murder, but he would never be convicted.

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Mark Wu's parents flew to the United States from Taiwan because they sensed trouble.

Mark had withdrawn over $70,000 from his bank account and wouldn't give his parents an explanation.

Wu had been involved in some sort of money losses and, in their words, hadn't been a very good boy.

And they were taking him back to Taiwan to make him sort of a good boy again.

Prosecutors say Mark Wu tried to collect the $17,000 Jason McGuigan owed him for the baseball bet.

He wanted to deposit this money into his bank account to placate his parents.

But Jason didn't place the bet, so he refused to pay.

Around 3 p.m.

on the day of the murders, A witness saw Jason McGuigan's friends threaten Mark Wu, angry apparently, because Wu had been following them.

Later that night, around 8 p.m., Mark broke into Jason's apartment, but Jason wasn't there.

So he stole Jason's 9mm Glock pistol,

then called Jason, asking him what time he was coming home.

Mark Wu returned to Jason's apartment around midnight, and Jason still wasn't there.

Instead, Jason's two friends were in the living room, asleep, the ones who harassed him a few hours earlier.

Mark Wu killed them to eliminate potential witnesses.

In doing so, he got Dustin Wilson's blood on his sandals.

Jason didn't come home until close to 2 a.m.

And Mark was waiting for him.

Again, Mark demanded his $17,000.

But Jason didn't have that kind of money in his apartment.

In desperation, he handed Mark the key to his safe deposit box.

Then Mark shot Jason with his own gun.

No one knows what Mark did with his bloody clothes and Jason's gun.

He threw the gun case containing his fingerprints in a garbage can a few blocks from his home.

He put his bloody sandals in a garbage bag and tossed them into the dumpster behind his apartment with the identification provided by his credit card receipts.

The next morning, Mark flew to New York City with his parents.

They were about to leave for Taiwan when police intervened.

He's holding a plane ticket to Taiwan, a country that does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.

If Mark Wu gets to Taiwan, Mark Wu never becomes the criminal defendant in this triple homicide.

But the day before the trial,

There was a stunning development.

Mark Wu hanged himself in his jail cell.

He's about to be essentially humiliated in the public.

His parents are going to find out what he did.

He's 20 years old.

He's going to prison for the rest of his life.

He killed these three boys to try to cover up what he had done with all his parents' money.

Then he had to kill himself again at the last minute to cover up what he had done and not face the truth.

As a courtesy to the victims' families, prosecutors laid out their entire case just as they would have presented it to the jury.

And the science left no doubt there would have been a conviction.

We gave what would have been an opening statement or a closing statement to these family members and went through the evidence we had so that they knew we took care of their family members, their friends, killer.

that this was the right person, there is not somebody else out there.

To me, they showed that Wu was guilty.

And it was one of the better things that they ever could have done for us, short of us having the actual trial.

The DNA, the spatter, the shell casings, and the fingerprints are all what really wrap up this case and take it from a circumstantial case to a case that's proven by forensic evidence.