Episode 8 - Cycle of Violence

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This episode discusses intimate partner violence and sexual assault.

Please listen with care.

On April 27th, 2022, Claudia Gutierrez took the stand at her son's murder trial.

She recounted how, about a year and a half earlier, Victor had gone missing.

After he didn't didn't come home one night, she tried texting him.

There was no reply.

Then, she texted Daisy.

She figured they were together.

Again, no reply.

It wasn't totally unusual for him not to come home.

He sometimes slept on the streets or stayed in motels.

But after a couple nights passed, and Claudia still hadn't seen or heard from Victor, She started to become worried.

She went to her local police station and filed a missing persons report.

It was February 25th, 2021, just two days after Daisy had been found dead.

A couple of weeks went by.

No sign of Victor.

And then, Claudia told the jury, she got a phone call.

It was him.

He wanted to talk.

And he needed money.

He gave his mother his location and she agreed to meet him, somewhere on the street.

By that point, she must have learned that Daisy had been murdered.

Because when she met up with her son, she asked him, point blank, did you do it?

Meaning, did you kill Daisy?

But Victor didn't respond, at least not verbally.

He just lowered his head.

For me, that is important as the prosecutor presenting evidence because it's what we call an adoptive admission.

That's Deputy District Attorney Leslie Hinshaw.

She was the prosecutor on this case.

And to her, this moment, this moment where Victor's mother described her son hanging his head, it was a big deal.

Basically, the theory on an adoptive admission is that if you didn't do it, you would say, no, I didn't do it.

What are you talking about?

But when you don't say anything, you're basically accepting the truth of it without saying yes, without agreeing.

As the prosecutor, Leslie had anticipated this moment.

She'd interviewed Claudia before the trial started, and she'd questioned her on the stand during the preliminary hearing, about seven months before that.

And during that hearing, Claudia testified that she urged her son to do the right thing, to turn himself in to the authorities.

She said that he responded by telling her that he was going to do it.

He was going to turn himself in.

That was the last time she saw him.

But at trial, Claudia's recollection had become hazy.

When Leslie questioned her, she said she couldn't remember whether Victor had told her that he'd turn himself in.

I don't remember if he said anything like that, she told the court.

I remember being like, oh gosh, now I have to impeach her.

Because I think I had to confront her with some of her statements in the past.

I don't remember the specifics of it, but I do remember thinking that she was minimizing either what Victor had said or done or her interaction with him.

That in and of itself, it didn't surprise me that she did that

because of, you know, obviously she's Victor's mother.

Maybe I was being a little naive and hoping that she would just do what was right.

I mean, she didn't lie.

I think she, I think getting up there and then seeing her son kind of made her really upset.

And

I can't blame her for that.

And I don't blame her for that.

There was another part of the story that Claudia told a little differently at trial.

So previously, she'd said that she gave her son $500 a few days before she met up with him a second time to ask if he'd done it.

But at trial, she said she thought maybe all of these things happened during one single interaction.

Like maybe she'd asked him that question and he put his head down and she didn't take that to be any sort of admission of guilt.

I mean, or maybe the trauma really did just play tricks on her memory.

It's hard to unpack it, either way.

It was almost like Claudia was unsure of herself.

Like, she was questioning reality itself.

Like, did all of these things really happen?

Maybe it was all just a bad dream.

Was she really about to help convict her own son?

It was a tough position to be in.

And Leslie knew that.

She was a witness of mine, and

I have compassion for the position that she is in, that

I am asking her to testify against her son.

And

that's not an easy thing to do.

To think about, like, how

terrible that must feel, that she knows the truth of her conversations with Victor.

And

this is her son, and she's being asked

to be the bigger person, but to tell on her son, the person that she birthed.

And that's a really, really tough thing to ask someone to do.

The magnitude of this testimony was not lost on Susie.

She would send me these voice memos during the trial, especially on days when I couldn't be there in person.

She'd recap some of the testimonies and tell me how she felt about everything that day, as she was driving home or picking up dinner.

And there was something that she said to me in a voice memo on the day that Claudia took the stand.

I haven't heard many mothers that have testified against their kids.

That took a lot, honestly.

A lot of strength, I think, is what she meant.

And in a way, Susie saw how she and Claudia both had a lot in common.

You know, Jennifer, this time it was...

I guess this is the first time I actually feel for her because

I don't know, it was very tough to see her actually facing her son and child with the jury, with us.

It was hard to see.

It was hard to see.

Like,

you know, both of us lost our kids.

I lost my kid to her kid for murder, you know, and it's horrible.

But, you know, it's more horrible to think your kids caused all the pain, you know?

It's something I can't even imagine.

So I honestly feel for her.

I do feel for her.

I am Jen Swan from London Audio, iHeartRadio, and executive producer Paris Hilton.

This is my friend Daisy, episode eight, Cycle of Violence.

I spoke with Leslie at the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles.

It's this big granite building from the 1920s.

It's sandwiched between the courthouses and City Hall.

Leslie was transferred here from the Compton DA's office.

That's where she worked back when she was assigned the case known as the State of California versus Victor Sosa.

We sat in a small meeting room.

It had these kid-friendly illustrations on the wall and stuffed animals on the couch.

Leslie works on cases related to domestic violence and sex crimes.

And it occurred to me that this room that we are sitting in, it was meant to make children feel comfortable talking about deeply uncomfortable subjects.

It made me wonder how Leslie found herself in this line of work.

Can you tell me how you got into this?

Like, have you always wanted to be a prosecutor and how did you end up in sex crimes?

So I know.

I went to law school because I actually wanted to work in sports.

I was a sport managed major in college and I wanted to be a general manager of a Major League Baseball team.

That, obviously, did not happen because somewhere along the way, Leslie ended up taking a class on criminal procedure.

She decided she wanted to become a public defender.

Well, that didn't exactly pan out either.

The public defender's office didn't have any externships open, but the DA's office did.

And I was like, well, I've never had any criminal experience, so I'll go and try it out.

And I loved it.

It was,

I think it helped that I was watching The Wire at the same time.

And so, what I was doing was,

it kind of mirrored what was going on in The Wire that I was watching.

And I was like, this is insane.

This is amazing.

Leslie's been prosecuting sex crimes and domestic violence cases for about six years now.

She said she doesn't know exactly why she gravitated towards it, but she thinks it has something to do with wanting to help vulnerable people.

Women, children, people who don't always feel comfortable or safe identifying as victims.

People like Daisy.

I know that Susanna was trying to report.

I think it was the skateboard incident at one point.

And she says that she was told that she couldn't report it because Daisy wouldn't disclose it.

Like, I'm just curious if that's something you've encountered where someone has tried to report it and they've been told they can't report it because they're a minor.

So.

I don't really know what happened in that.

Like, I don't,

yeah, I don't really know what happened specifically specifically with why the deputies told her what they did but generally speaking if a victim is an adult and they don't want to disclose then there's really nothing police can do right as a child i would think it's different i would think personally

that A parent or guardian could bring their child to the police station and say,

this happened to my kid.

I want you to take a report.

As the police officer, even if the child doesn't want to say anything, I would at least take, I would think,

I mean, I would want them to at least take a report and then notify DCFS, Department of Child and Family Services, so that there can be some involvement in figuring out what's going on.

But to your knowledge, there wasn't reports of domestic violence at all in this case, right?

To my knowledge, there were no actual police reports of domestic violence

related to Victor and Daisy.

Daisy was a minor,

and this system, which was supposed to protect her, it failed.

It's hard not to think about what might have gone differently, or if anything would have gone differently, if a report had been taken.

If just one mandated reporter, like a nurse or a social worker, had intervened.

At the very least, a report almost certainly would have been introduced as evidence during the trial.

Evidence that could have helped to establish a motive.

But because no such evidence existed, and because Leslie felt that the DNA evidence was strong enough on its own, she never told the jury about the domestic violence in Victor and Daisy's relationship.

She said she didn't realize until after she prepared the case that there had been a first-hand witness to at least one of these assaults.

Someone who might have been able to testify.

Daisy's little brother.

And I want to just quickly note that I'm here talking to a prosecutor, someone tasked with working with police to enforce the law and punish those who break it.

But there are plenty of reasons why a person experiencing intimate partner violence may not want to involve the legal or criminal justice system at all.

I mean, for one thing, they might fear retaliation from their abuser.

It could escalate the violence.

And if there's children or a shared household involved, one partner being sent to jail could result in a loss of income or a loss of childcare.

This is all to say that victims have a lot to weigh when it comes to deciding whether to disclose their abuse to authorities.

There are plenty of reasons for them to lose faith in the legal system.

And in Leslie's experience, that's not uncommon.

With domestic violence cases, even if there's an initial disclosure, you find that a lot of times there is a recantation where the victim will tell us that they were making up what they initially said or they lied about it.

You know, a lot of their hesitation or the recantation, the reporting, and then, you know, saying they don't want to be a part of it has to do with the cycle of violence that they go through.

Domestic violence is very, there's a very specific,

very much studied cycle of violence that happens with domestic violence victims.

And this cycle can be really hard to break.

The way it works is when a person has finally almost like had enough, they're like, I'm done, I'm done, I can't do this anymore.

This person has hurt me enough, like I'm done.

That's usually when they report.

But then

the person will come back and say, I'm really sorry.

I promise it won't happen again.

That was terrible of me to do.

I should have never done that.

They may buy them them gifts.

They may take them to take them out.

And then the victim is like, maybe this time this person actually will change.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe this is different.

This is different this time.

And then you start the cycle all over again.

And it can be very frustrating for people on the outside to look in and see so clearly, yet the person that you love can't see it at all.

You really can't force someone

to get out of a domestic violence relationship because unless that person has a self-awareness to say i can't do this anymore

you may take the person out for a little bit but they're either going to go back to the person or they're entered into another relationship that is just as bad

There were people in Daisy's life who tried to take her out of the relationship with Victor, who tried to break the cycle.

And it wasn't just her own mother.

It was also Victor's.

I discovered this while reading a transcript of a conversation that happened early on in the trial.

The conversation was on the record, and it was between Leslie Henshaw, the prosecutor, A.J.

Bain, who was Victor's public defender, and the judge, Sean Cohen.

The jurors had been dismissed for lunch, and Leslie was telling the judge about something she was considering submitting as evidence, which was that when she interviewed Claudia several months earlier, Claudia said that there were times when she would hear Victor and Daisy arguing, times when she saw bruises on Daisy.

Claudia told Leslie that this was the reason she did not allow Daisy into her house.

She wanted to prevent her son from being alone with her.

I had known that Daisy's mother had banned Victor from her home.

But I did not know that Claudia had banned Daisy from hers.

Here were these two mothers, who, as far as I could tell, had never met each other.

They lived in different cities.

They lived totally different lives.

But in their own way, unbeknownst to each other, they were both trying to protect Daisy.

There was something else I learned in these trial transcripts that Claudia had told Leslie, which was that at one point, she drove Daisy home.

And as the two of them sat in the car together, Claudia told Daisy about her own experience with domestic violence.

She urged Daisy to get out of the relationship.

She also told Daisy to get a restraining order against her son.

Here was a mother telling her son's girlfriend, pleading with her behind his back to leave him.

And not just to leave him, but to take legal action against him.

The situation was that serious.

Claudia sensed this, and she had tried to intervene.

I remember reading about this in the transcript and just feeling stunned.

It contradicted this image of Claudia that had emerged during the trial, which was a mother trying to protect her son, agreeing to testify against him, but then changing her story on the stand, omitting or minimizing certain details.

Her testimony raised questions about whether she had known about the murder before she gave Victor the money, whether she had helped him flee the country, and whether she really believed that her son had gone missing when she filed that missing persons report with the police.

Claudia's relationship with her son and with Daisy was obviously more nuanced, more complicated, and almost certainly more difficult than what was conveyed at trial.

I wanted to try to understand more about it, to hear from Claudia outside of court.

So I wrote her a letter.

I told her that I was doing this project and that it was important to me to get her perspective.

I told her that Daisy's story, it seemed to me, was also a story about multiple generations of women.

Mothers, daughters, women whose lives had been affected by various cycles of violence.

I never got a response.

And I wasn't even sure if she'd gotten the letter, so I decided to drive to her house one night.

I was hoping to speak with her in person.

Introduce myself at least.

I knocked on the door and she answered.

And when I identified myself, her face just dropped.

Her eyes started welling up.

She didn't slam the door in my face.

She didn't seem to be angry.

She just seemed sad.

She allowed me to stand there, uncomfortably, awkwardly, on her doorstep and ask for an interview.

And she listened to me, but she shook her head.

No, I can't, she said.

I can't.

It struck me just how painful this must have been for her on a number of levels.

I mean, her son had committed a murder,

and the person he killed was the person she had been trying to protect.

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The day after Victor's mother took the stand, Leslie gave her closing argument.

It was the last day of a nearly two-week-long trial, and it was her last chance to convince the jury that Victor was guilty of of deliberate, premeditated, first-degree murder.

Leslie started by recounting the last night of Daisy's life, how she and her family had been watching television in their living room, how her grandfather had seen a masked man in the window, how Daisy kissed her mother and her grandmother goodbye and said she'd be right back, how everyone went to sleep, and Daisy didn't come back.

And then Leslie started recapping the evidence.

She talked about how the surveillance footage showed a person dragging something near the area where Daisy's body was found.

How this figure appeared to have shoulder-length black hair, the same as Victor at the time, according to testimonies from his mother and Daisy's grandfather and Daisy's neighbor, Jeffrey.

And then there was the adoptive admission, when Victor seemed to confess to his mother by simply lowering his head when she asked if he had done it.

Leslie reminded the jury that after Daisy's murder, Victor fled the country and changed his appearance.

This is because of what she called his consciousness of guilt.

The same consciousness of guilt, she argued, that led to him covering Daisy's body, hiding what he had done with a rug.

The rug that had bloodstains on it.

Bloodstains that presented a DNA match with Victor.

just like the bloodstains on the knife found next to Daisy's body.

Leslie pointed out that there's a kind of intimacy that using a knife on a human body requires:

a literal physical closeness to another person.

And the words that she used, the motions she made with her hands when she described just how many times Victor stabbed Daisy.

They were haunting.

They still haunt me.

They are lodged deep into my brain to this day.

He slit her throat.

And not only did he do that,

but he also

stabbed her right skull 58 times.

Wasn't once.

Was it twice?

It was 58 times.

Maybe you heard me exhale after Leslie said that.

It was an exhalation of dread.

And it wasn't the first time that I had heard this information.

The medical examiner had talked about it at length on the stand just a day earlier.

There were 58 stab wounds on the right side of Daisy's skull.

58.

It was hard to even fathom that number, that repetition of violence every single time I heard it.

Which is why, in this recording, you might hear me literally squirming in my seat, especially when Leslie started clapping her hands and counting.

One, two, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

Leslie kept counting.

She said every single number leading up to 58.

Every number representing a separate stab wound.

54, 55, 56, 57, 58,

58.

58 times.

Susie and her cousin were sitting in the row ahead of me.

You can hear them sniffling in this recording.

They were passing tissues to each other.

Now, I suspect the defense will come up here and say, well, they were just superficial wounds.

And we did hear the coroner say that.

But he also said that this portion of someone's skull

is one of the hardest areas to cut through.

And when he does autopsies on this portion of a person's skull, he will use a saw.

So

you don't use a knife

at someone's head

because

and cause injuries because you want to

play with them or mess with them.

You injure someone's head

because it is an incredibly important part of our anatomy and because you want to kill them.

This injury

is not one

where someone doesn't intend to kill them.

It is gruesome.

It is horrific.

It is a cold and callous act to cause that injury to someone.

And these injuries to a person's head

is a continued, cold, and calculated act.

The defendant

committed a first-degree murder

when he murdered Daisy DeLittle.

He intended to kill her.

He did it with premeditation, deliberation, and with willfulness.

And then, before closing, Leslie acknowledged all the stuff we didn't know.

The lingering questions the jury might still have.

About things she said we might be able to make inferences about, but could not definitively prove.

About things like sexual assault.

And I should warn you, Leslie's speech here is graphic.

It's about 90 seconds long, if you want to skip ahead.

Now,

there was some testimony and evidence that I submit to you I cannot explain to you.

You may have reasonable inferences for what it means.

Daisy was found face down with her pants pulled down

below her buttocks

and her sweatshirt lifted above her back.

You may have reasonable inferences for why that is.

The defendant's epithelial DNA

was found on her external genital area as well as her anal opening.

You may have reasonable inferences for that.

The defendant's sperm DNA was found on her tampon that was still inside her body when she was found.

You may have reasonable inferences for that.

You may wonder, why did Victor Sosa do this?

You may wonder, what came first?

Did he slit her throat first, or did he stab her in the head first?

I can't answer those questions for you.

And what about the knife?

Had Victor come to Daisy's apartment that night carrying the nine-inch knife found at the scene?

Or did he happen to find it laying around near the trash bins?

Was it one of the knives that Daisy's neighbor had reportedly thrown out?

Had he grabbed it in a fit of rage?

These are questions we may never know the answer to.

And according to Leslie's theory of the case, these answers don't change the deliberateness of the murder.

She argued, quote, whether he chose to bring the knife with him or whether he saw the knife and chose to pick it up, those are conscious decisions.

By the time he commits the act, he has made his decision.

In the end,

I know that the only just result that you can come to

is that the defendant is guilty of the premeditated, deliberate, and willful murder of Daisy De Lao,

and that the allegation that he personally used the deadly weapon, the knife, in commission of the crime, is true.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms.

Hinch.

Can you mr.

Payne, this time I wish to make the closer argument?

Yes, Your Honor.

Thank you.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Good morning.

Victor's public defender, A.J.

Bain, he made his closing argument next.

He argued that the DNA testing had been faulty and basically that the whole case was circumstantial because nobody actually saw Daisy being stabbed.

He pointed to the surveillance footage.

You know, it didn't actually show anyone's face.

I get it.

The theory is

Swissa dragged Devila over by the arms and that's where you have this bruising and that's where this murder was said to have occurred.

Can't see any faces.

One, two, at the time doesn't match up.

Jeffrey T was bringing up the money.

He brought up the knife,

which nobody nobody proved had belonged to Victor.

Nobody

from the Sheriff's Department thought to show it to my clients and whether Ms.

Guterres to say, hey, look, are you missing this knife?

Would you mind if we look at your knife to see if it matches any of their knife to see if someone took it from your house?

No one showed it to Ms.

DeLowe's family to say, hey, you guys missing the knife?

It's just lazy.

It's laziness.

And then he mentioned that moment that Claudia had described.

That moment when she had asked her son if he'd done it, and he bowed his head in response.

As to the mom, the mom's the mom, she's all over the place.

She says, he looks down.

I asked her, look, that's mom, right?

Could you tell whether or not it was because

he couldn't believe that he even asked that question, or whether or not it was some type of jail she didn't do?

So it's how you interpret it.

None of us are there.

None of us have that on pill.

Ultimately, he argued, someone else must have killed Daisy.

We know it's not Sosa, because there's no motive for Sosa.

That's been her boyfriend for years.

There's no evidence that he raised hands to her or said anything mean to her, even Jeffrey T.

Leslie had believed so firmly in the strength of the DNA evidence that she had decided not to argue a motive, not to present any of the allegations of violence, of physical abuse.

She barely mentioned Victor and Daisy's relationship at all.

It was a decision that watching it all play out in real time had really surprised me.

And as the judge read the 12 jurors their instructions,

I started to wonder if it was a decision that could backfire.

You shall now retire and select one of your number to act as a four-person.

He or she will preside over your deliberations.

In order to reach a verdict, all 12 jurors must agree to the decision and to any finding you have been.

As everyone shuffled out of the courtroom, ending an exhausting and deeply upsetting murder trial, I thought about Daisy.

The photos I'd seen of her on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook.

The stories I'd heard about her from her friends and family.

I thought about the DMs and the phone calls from strangers all over North America, each of them determined to catch her killer.

I thought about the suffering, the waiting, the longing.

and about how all of it had been leading to this moment.

Now, it was no longer in Daisy's friend's hands.

It wasn't up to the detectives.

And there was nothing more that Susie could do or Leslie could say.

Everything was in the jury's hands.

That's next time.

A verdict has been reached against a man accused of killing his ex-girlfriend.

The suspect was captured after videos on social media helped lead to his arrest in Mexico.

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This is Paris.

Thanks for listening to My Friend Daisy.

If you or someone you love is experiencing abuse, you are not alone.

Help is available 24-7.

Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline for free confidential support.

Call 800-799-7233.

Text start to 88-788 or visit thehotline.org.

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My Friend Daisy is a production of London Audio with support from Sony Music Entertainment.

It's reported, written, and executive produced by me, Jen Swan.

I'm also your host.

Our executive producers for London Audio are Paris Hilton, Bruce Gersh, Bruce Robertson, and Joanna Studebaker.

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Production Assistance and Translations by Miguel Contreras.

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