Anette Cahill

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A small Iowa town is devastated by a beloved bartender's murder.

I need somebody to come out to my house.

I think my fiancé is dead.

You just can't believe it at first.

I was just in chuck.

Everybody loved him.

That's just the way it was.

Something very violent took place inside that bedroom.

He's all 20 and he's not breathing and he's cold.

As this small town mystery unfolds over two decades, troubling new details continue to come to light.

She said when she was nine, she heard someone confess to a murder.

The motive was very specific.

You have the epitome of this scorned lover.

Anybody could understand how the anger would have welled up.

We're not done.

I'll be back.

No, not there.

You uncle, I will be.

I'll be back.

Someone who's very enraged, very angry at what has gone on, they're more than capable of having committed this crime.

She says, You know what?

There's something I've never shared with law enforcement ever before today that I remember.

She had quite a story to tell, and it wasn't a very pleasant story.

West Liberty, Iowa is a quaint slice of the Midwest.

It's a very rural farming-oriented atmosphere.

It's a type of small-town community in Iowa where Pretty much nobody locked their doors.

Everyone knows everyone.

Everyone went to the same school as everybody else, grew up together.

But on October 13th, 1992, this farming community comes face to face with a big city crime.

Around 6 p.m., the West Liberty Dispatch Center receives a frantic 911 call.

Hey, I need somebody to come out to my house.

I think my fiancé is dead.

The caller is 22-year-old Jodi, and her fiancé is 22-year-old Corey Winnicky.

Okay, where do you think he might be dead?

He is, he's all sweaty, and he's not breathing, and he's cold.

West Liberty first responders rush to the scene.

As you're looking into that bedroom, you can essentially see the torso of a victim that's lying on the floor.

You could immediately tell if this was a blawforce trauma type of crime and the meeting had taken place.

In the midst of the chaos, Jodi contacts Corey's mother, Susan.

When she called me, she's crying hysterically.

And she said, He's dead.

And I said, No,

it can't be.

You know, how could he be dead?

And by the time I got there, then they had it all yellow taped off.

They wouldn't let me go in.

And I just wanted to go in one more time.

I didn't care what he looked like.

I just wanted to hold him one more time.

Corey Winnicky was born in West Liberty, Iowa on March 25th, 1970.

Corey was a very outgoing person.

His family lived across the street from us.

There was an open grassy field in behind their house and we would get all the neighborhood's kids together and start playing baseball games.

Corey was just like a big brother to everybody in the whole neighborhood.

He was just a great kid.

In high school, Corey poured his energy and enthusiasm into sports.

Corey was very, very good.

They went to state in football.

He played center and defensive line, and he was a very, very good football player.

Corey was definitely very popular.

Everybody knew Corey, and

he just...

was always warm and friendly to everybody.

I'd sit up with him and watch TV even in high school, you know, so

he told me a lot.

We were very close.

During his years at West Liberty High, Corey started dating Jodi.

The young couple fell in love and never looked back.

He truly loved Jodi and Jodi was the one.

She was real level-headed and she was smart and she kept Corey grounded.

Outside of school and extracurriculars, Corey put in hours at the Family Business, a local bar owned by his grandparents.

Winks was a very popular bar.

It was a busy bar.

Around 16 years old, they'd go down and clean the bar on Sundays.

He started going in and filling the coolers and stuff for his grandma.

He never was a bartender there till he was 18, until he graduated.

Winks became a second home for Corey, so much so that after high school, he actually moved in.

There was an apartment above Winks and he moved in up there.

And Jodi moved in with him.

As a bartender, the former football star was hands down the most popular face behind the bar.

Smiley, happy, bubbly made sure that

everybody was there to have a good time.

He didn't care if they called him a mama's boy or anything.

He didn't care.

He would always come down to the end of bar and give me a hug and tell me, Mom, I love you.

And he'd kiss me on the cheek.

By 1992, Corey and Jodi, both 22 years old, had moved into a farmhouse owned by Jodi's father.

Corey and Jodi lived together in a very small house that was

on a farm west of West Liberty.

They were renting it, and Corey worked in West Liberty, and Jodi had a job at a bank in Iowa City, about a 25-minute drive away.

She worked days and he worked nights, so they'd a lot of times only have an hour or so before he'd go into work.

In spite of their conflicting schedules, they found a way to make it work.

In the fall of that same year, they announced their engagement.

When Corey gave her engagement ring,

they'd been dating her for so long that,

in our mind, it's just what came next.

We really liked Jodi.

Unconditional.

Stood by him.

Jody loved Corey very, very much.

With a job he loved and a woman he adored, there wasn't much Corey didn't have.

Everybody loved Corey.

22 years old, had everything going for him.

But a vicious attack on October 13th, 1992 left local officers wondering who would want this well-loved 22-year-old dead.

Investigators with the Sheriff's Department and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation arrive at the scene to assist local police.

It's a very violent act.

This had the appearance to me of a blitz-type, very rapid assault.

There were blunt force trauma wounds to Corey's back and his arms, and then one fatal injury to the back of his head.

That was, you know, as you can imagine, a terrible-looking gash that ran ear to ear.

This is a brutal murder scene.

Lots of passion, lots of intensity, lots of blood force trauma.

Though investigators are unable to locate a murder weapon at the scene, they have an idea of what to look for.

This was probably some type of a cylindrical object.

We don't know at that point in time whether we're looking for a pipe or what we're looking for, but that it may have been some type of instrument like that.

Investigators believe that whoever came to Corey's home likely brought the weapon with them, along with the intent to kill.

The house wasn't trashed.

The house wasn't burglarized.

There wasn't tables and chairs overturned.

So I think the motive was very specific

and

was there to do harm.

Given the brutality of Corey's wounds, investigators think it's unlikely that Corey's murder was random.

This wasn't like a professional hit or something like that.

He was beaten to death with the blunt object.

To me, that says rage.

To my eye, it's pretty clear that whoever killed Corey Winnicky was very pissed off at him.

Coming up, investigators search for a motive and stumble upon a clue.

He noticed a bat laying on the north side of the roadway.

And a logical suspect enters the hot seat.

When you look at a homicide like this with somebody who's very close to the victim, of course the first thing you want revenge, your mind isn't quite right at that point.

On October 13th, 1992, 22-year-old Corey Winnicky was found beaten to death in his rural Iowa home.

It appeared that the crime scene was contained to that one room.

The crime scene would include the bed,

obviously a body on the floor.

There was blood spatter on the walls.

With the hope of finding out who killed Corey, investigators turned first to Corey's fiancé, Jodi.

Quite frankly, you have to be very close to a victim a lot of times in these type of circumstances to get mad enough or passionate enough to want to end someone's life.

So initially, you're always looking at people that are very, very close to the victim.

She was obviously extremely upset at that point.

She did pull it together enough to engage in a short interview with us.

Jodi explains that the last time she saw Corey, he was asleep in their bed when she left for work that morning, just after 8 a.m.

We went through her day.

It had been a very normal day for her.

She had left at 8.15 that morning to go to work.

She had gotten off work.

She'd run an errand or two and returned home like she normally would.

Jodi says she expected Corey to be at Wink's bar for his shift, but when she got home, something was off.

Everything was out of place for her.

From when she pulls in the driveway, the dog was outside.

The dog's never outside, unchained.

Jodi was also surprised to find her fiancé's blue Cadillac in the driveway.

He was supposed to have reported into work at approximately 5 p.m.

Jodi says she entered the home and called out to Corey.

When he didn't answer, she went to the bedroom and found him in the middle of a bloodbath.

When we talked to Jodi at the crime scene, she was very credible.

She was very believable.

It didn't seem like an act was taking place.

She was genuinely extremely upset.

And even though though someone's extremely upset, we're going to check and double-check their story and we're going to corroborate their story.

We actually talked to someone who was present at the workplace and in fairly short order, Jody was eliminated as a suspect.

It doesn't take long for word of Corey's murder to spread.

Corey's loved ones struggle to come to terms with the jarring events.

You just can't believe it at first, you know.

I was just in shock, crazy, you know, falling, hysterical.

Of course, the first thing you want, revenge.

You don't care about a lot of things.

You just, your mind isn't quite right at that point.

You just want

to know what happened.

By dawn, local media is on the story.

Reporters move in on Corey's home where officers have been processing the crime scene through the night.

There are media sources that were present at that crime scene.

One reporter informs investigators of a potential clue.

He was parked in a vehicle to the east of the crime scene behind the barrier tape and he noticed a bat laying on the north side of the roadway.

Luckily, the DCI crime lab team was still at the residence at that point in time.

So they had a crime scene tech proceed to the location where the bat was.

The bat was covered in blood.

The blood was primarily on what you would consider the striking end of the bat.

Well, it was a step in the right direction.

You have now recovered the murder weapon, or what we certainly believed to be the murder weapon.

And we knew that we'd be in a position to try to get some evidence off the bat.

Investigators send the bat for forensic testing.

While they wait for results, they search for witnesses.

We have a lot of unanswered questions.

So we want to conduct a neighborhood canvas.

We want to talk to people in the area.

We want to know if they have seen anything unusual, just any information that they have at that point in time.

They catch a break when they speak with a farmer who lives nearby.

He tells investigators that he'd driven down the road by Corey's house a few times the morning of October 13th.

Iowa farmers are just like any Midwest farmers.

They drive slow down roads to check their crops.

And this particular farmer just

would also look for items in the ditch, maybe for collecting them or maybe just to keep the ditches clean.

But he was very adamant that at 9 o'clock when he drove by, the bat was not on the road.

At 1 o'clock when the farmer goes back to town, the bat is on the road.

The bat's not on the road in the morning and then is on the road in the afternoon.

That's really important to us to show the time period when the murder happened.

With the timeframe of the murder narrowed down, investigators hold out hope that evidence recovered from the bat will help track down Corey's killer.

There's no question that Corey Winnickie was murdered.

The question is, who was swinging the bat?

When results from the crime lab arrive, detectives hope they will point them toward a suspect.

They did the best thing that they could do at the time, and that was look for fingerprints on the bat.

Finding fingerprints is really hard.

You know, especially when you have a bat that's been left out overnight on the side of the road,

condensation, dirt, dust, all kinds of things.

We certainly hoped that we would get some fingerprints.

off the bat.

That did not materialize.

There was no DNA testing available at that point in time.

The best that we could get was that they were able to type the blood on the bat

and the blood type was confirmed as being the blood type of the victim.

With no major breakthroughs from the murder weapon, investigators hope piecing together Corey's final hours will lead them to his killer.

Did he recently have to throw someone out of the bar?

Was somebody in the bar angry with him for some reason?

As investigators interview Corey's coworkers and customers, they find no indication that Corey harbored any dark secrets or enemies.

I never knew anyone that did not like Corey.

A normal 22-year-old didn't do anything different or better, worse.

Everybody loved him.

This was not a situation that involved gambling.

This was not a situation that involved narcotics.

He didn't have any real altercations or problems with anybody from the bar environment, so it began to lean more towards what was going on in his personal life.

According to coworkers, the last time anyone saw Corey was in the early hours of October 13th, when Corey left the bar after closing with longtime friend Wendy Marshall.

Investigators tracked down 20-year-old Wendy to get her account firsthand.

Wendy was someone who was talked with in regards to this crime.

She had quite a story to tell about the events of the early morning of October 13th, and it wasn't a very pleasant story.

Coming up, Corey's final hours come into focus.

Anybody could understand how the anger would have welled up.

She basically jumps out of a moving car, and her and Corey have an argument.

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October 1992.

Investigators in West Liberty, Iowa, are searching for a clear picture of 22-year-old Corey Winnicky's final hours.

They are now pressing Corey's friend, Wendy Marshall, about what happened after Corey's bartending shift the night before his murder.

The bar closes at 2.

Corey would have walked out of the bar with Wendy 2.15, 2.30, somewhere in that timeframe.

Wendy tells investigators that she and Corey planned to hang out after work.

But as they headed to Corey's car, they found 29-year-old Annette Hazen waiting inside.

Annette was a regular at Winks bar and was a bartender at Winks from time to time.

She was a laborer, a drinker, a recreational drug user.

According to Wendy, Annette was noticeably inebriated that night.

Annette was

quite drunk and was agitated.

Corey brings Wendy to the car.

They get in the car.

And Corey announces that he is going to take Annette to her place, drop her off.

Wendy tells investigators that as they drove, Annette's agitation morphed into anger.

Annette is so mad that she basically about jumps out of a moving car.

She gets out, she walks around in front, and her and Corey have an argument.

Wendy is unsure what the argument was about, but when it was finally over, they both got back in the car and Corey took Wendy back to her car at Winks.

Wendy then drove home.

Corey then takes Annette home, but then later comes back to Wendy's.

Corey goes to Wendy's house to an after-hours party

and makes it home and is seen by his fiancé prior to her departure for work.

Based on Wendy's account, investigators are eager to talk with Annette.

As it turns out, Annette is also eager to talk to them.

Annette shows up on her own.

So we had not contacted her, but she made her presence known at the police station and stated that she wanted to talk to the police.

This interview with Annette is going to be really critical.

Born in 1962, Annette Hazen grew up in Nichols, Iowa with six older siblings.

She would steal my grandpa's truck and go for joyrides.

She'd got away with a lot of things that her older siblings wouldn't necessarily have gotten away with.

Fresh out of high school, Annette and her boyfriend started a family.

My parents got married when my dad was 17 and my mom was 19.

I was born in 1982, and they had my brother in 85.

Less than two years after the birth of their son, the couple split.

They were too young to take it seriously, to take a monogamous relationship seriously.

And so there was a lot of around

and hurt feelings.

Despite the separation, Annette shared custody of the two kids.

I was off and on living with my dad, living with my mom, living with my dad.

It just kind of went back and forth from the time we were little.

In the wake of her divorce, Annette moved into a rural farmhouse with her brother and his wife, Jackie.

She picked up a variety of jobs to make ends meet.

Financially, things were were not good.

Definitely not the high point of Annette's life.

She was relatively recently divorced.

She was bartending sporadically at Winks, as well as working other odd jobs, and she drank heavily.

Between bartending and drinking at Winks, Annette got to know Corey and developed a crush.

Annette is six or seven years older than Corey Winnicky.

They had met around town when he was a teenager, but didn't really get to know each other until he was 22 and she was 29 in 1992.

They were both in there every night, it seemed like.

I mean, she just constantly wanted attention from him.

And to be there every night, she was interested, but Corey wouldn't have left Jodi.

However, as Annette speaks with detectives, she reveals that Corey was more than just a crush.

The two had a full-blown fling.

They were just having fun.

They were both young.

They both had life to live.

Annette tells police that on the morning of October 13th, when Winks closed around 2 a.m., she'd waited for Corey in his car.

What Annette thinks is going to happen that night is Corey will finish bartending.

He'll close up the bar.

And then he is going to take Annette back to her place and they will have sex at Annette's place.

And And this is what they do regularly after the bar closes.

And the thing that she sees when the door to the bar opens up is not Corey by himself.

It's Corey with another woman, Wendy.

Annette corroborates Wendy's statement that she and Corey had an argument outside the car that night, but says she and Corey later resolved the conflict.

She was angry at Corey, and then they had sex and made up.

Whatever anger there was was no longer at a boiling point.

Investigators ask Annette to account for her time later that day, especially between the hours of 9 a.m.

and 1 p.m.

when they believe Corey was murdered.

Annette says she spent the majority of the day with her sister-in-law, Jackie.

She says roughly 8:30, 9 o'clock, she gets dropped off to do this roofing job.

She pulls shingles off the roof for a short period of time, and then Jackie Hazen shows up to pick up Annette, and they leave.

They had traveled to Iowa City.

They had stopped different places.

However, Annette admits that before they headed to Iowa City, they did make one stop.

at Corey's house.

The Winnickie residence happens to be along the way, and she indicated that they had stopped there at approximately 10 o'clock in the morning to retrieve a book that she had lent him.

He didn't answer the door, so they haven't talked to him.

Though Annette says they left when Corey failed to answer the door, her story raises red flags.

Annette's timeline happens to place her at the scene of this crime during the period of time that we believe the crime took place.

But when investigators talk to Jackie, Annette's story checks out.

Jackie was Annette's alibi,

her corroboration for what took place that day.

Jackie told law enforcement that she and Annette were together that day.

Jackie Hazen provided receipts, a doctor's appointment notice, other store receipts.

To completely rule out Annette, she is given a polygraph on October 22nd.

Annette consented to a polygraph examination, and the results of that polygraph examination were that she did not display any indications of guilt.

With nothing to link Annette to the crime other than the suspicious timing of her visit to Corey's, investigators initiate a Hail Mary search for leads.

As the investigation began to move forward, the interviews started to climb into the hundreds.

And I think approximately 400 interviews were conducted in connection with this case.

Over a four to six month period of time, you move on to these other leads that are coming in.

And eventually those leads stop coming in.

And that's when the case went cold.

Coming up, a chance encounter shakes the dust off a quarter century old case.

The charge nurse said, What value do you place in a statement from a nine-year-old girl?

She had lit black candles and she was crying, and she said, I didn't mean to kill you.

And a suspect comes back into the spotlight.

This almost killed me 25 years ago.

Literally, almost killed me.

By April of 1993, six months after the brutal murder of Corey Winnicky, police in West Liberty, Iowa still haven't made an arrest.

The case went cold.

The case had been reopened on three or four different occasions over the course of the years, whether we felt that there was some new information that had been developed or whether we just brought it out to see if we could shake some new information into the case and make it a viable case to charge.

But it wasn't until 2017 that that finally came to fruition.

In December of 2017, DCI agent Trent Villida is working a case at the University of Iowa Hospital.

It was early December.

I was there for another case.

The charge nurse, Jesse Becker, comes up to me.

She asked, do you know anybody with the DCI that does cold cases?

I said, yes.

I'm I'm one of the people that actually work on them.

And I asked her why.

And she said, well, when she was nine, she heard someone confess to a murder.

She gives me the name of Corey Winnick.

He is the victim.

Trent is now very interested and fascinated by what Jesse Becker is telling him.

And so he calls and he says, hey, I would like another set of eyes.

Would you come talk to Jesse Becker?

On December 15th, 35-year-old Jesse Becker sits down with two DCI agents.

She explains that as a kid, she frequently spent the night at a friend's house where Annette Hazen also lived.

Jesse was nine at the time, and she was friends with another nine-year-old girl, the daughter of Jackie Hazen.

So, you know, this is Aunt Annette to the girls.

One night in the fall of 1992, Jessie slept over at the Hazen Farm.

Nearing midnight, she crept downstairs in search of food.

She realizes, you know, someone's down there.

And as she gets to the bottom of the stairs, she's peering around into, I believe, what they would classify as a dining room area.

And she sees Annette.

And she starts to overhear Annette.

talking to herself.

She had lit black candles and she was crying and she said, I'm so sorry, Corey.

I didn't mean to hurt you.

I didn't mean to kill you.

She's not seen by Annette, and at some point she turns and goes back up the stairs.

She's scared by what she's heard.

If Jesse's story is true, it could be the key to solving a 25-year-old murder.

What we need is someone to kind of corroborate what Jesse's saying.

Jesse Jesse told us at the initial interview, look, I went home and told my mom, so we go to Jesse's mom.

And Jesse's mom said the exact same thing.

Jesse's mom said, I remember Jesse coming home telling me that she heard Annette say, Corey, I'm sorry for killing you.

Jesse's mom, Cindy, explains that complicated circumstances in her personal life kept her from going to police at the time.

She has two young children and she knew the type of people that Annette was running around with at the time.

And she made the determination for her family's safety that maybe they shouldn't say anything.

The fact that she passed the polygraph test, people placed a great weight on that at that point in time.

Investigators track down Annette and learn she is now Annette Cahill.

a mother and grandmother living in nearby Tipton, Iowa.

She, from everything that we could tell, not long after Corey Winnicky's death, had essentially started a new life, had married a man, had a new family essentially with that individual, and was living a very quiet life in a neighboring county.

Detectives ask Annette to come to the station for questioning.

You're free to take off any time you'd like, Annette, so just feel free to

if you got anything that comes up or something.

Oh, I have about an hour, so that's what I was going to tell you.

She's told me a little bit about herself and her upbringing and how she came to live at the Hazen house.

And then she's told me about her relationship with Corey and her feelings and recollections of him.

It's clear that Annette's 1992 account of a casual fling has changed.

She makes it very clear that she was in love with Corey.

She believed she was going to be be the new love of his life.

We had talked about

skipping town.

In fact, the following Monday, the week after he died,

we were supposed to go to, or following Saturday, I'm sorry, we were supposed to go to Branson

to look at bars for sale.

The idea was Corey would buy the bar, Annette would work there,

and they basically would would start a life together.

Annette cuts the interview short to get back to work.

It was still a workday.

It was still the afternoon.

And then she stayed for an hour, 20 minutes, an hour, 30 minutes, and talked and answered any question he asked.

Agent Turbot returns to Annette's home two weeks later to continue the conversation.

This almost killed me 25 years ago.

Literally almost killed me.

I

was doing drugs and drinking myself to death.

She stops me at one point in this interview and she says, you know what?

There's something I've never shared with law enforcement ever before today that I remember.

By the side of the road, after I made him stop the car, we had this argument and said, I'm nothing to you.

And he yelled at me, you're not nothing to me.

I love you.

Even though Corey confessed his love, Annette tells the agent she was hurt that he left her later that night.

You actually cried when he left.

You felt neglected and wished that he could have stayed with you.

Probably, yeah.

Why were you mad?

Do you know the old saying, fish or cut bait?

When she described it in her interview, this fish or cut bait moment, it was abundantly clear that she's never going to be anything other than his sure thing when the bar closes.

I think for Annette, it was her dream to finally settle down.

When Corey broke up with her, I think that's when her hopes and dreams ended.

When Agent Hurbit confronts Annette with Jesse Becker's statement, things get heated.

You remember being in that house, at Jackie's house?

Corey, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry I killed you, Corey.

I'm so sorry.

No.

Corey, I'm I'm sorry I killed you.

Please, I'm calling my lawyer.

We're not done enough.

I'll be back.

Wait, no, not dare you, Uncle.

I will be.

I'll be back.

Between Jesse Becker's statement and Annette's tumultuous history with Corey, investigators feel they have enough to make an arrest.

I think that at some point,

She was tired of being just someone he was having sex with on the side.

You have the epitome of the scorned lover, and Annette was not going to have that any longer.

Investigators present their case to a grand jury and obtain an arrest warrant for Annette.

On May 31st, authorities arrest Annette at her home.

She told me that I didn't know how wrong I was.

And that was the end of it.

She said that she didn't want to talk without a lawyer.

And at that point, we were done talking.

So, I rode with her to the jail.

Coming up, will new evidence be enough to get a conviction 25 years later?

They couldn't reach a unanimous verdict.

A last-chance witness attempts to save the case.

He saw her dumping clothes into a burn barrel, they had blood on them.

After 27 years, a cold case has new life.

In March 2019, 56-year-old Annette Cahill steps into a Muscatine County courtroom where she faces a first-degree murder charge for the 1992 killing of Corey Winnicky.

Jesse Becker takes the stand and recounts the story she had told investigators.

Jesse Becker testified that when she was a nine-year-old girl, she had overheard Annette Cahill confess to killing Corey.

For the jury, Jesse's testimony isn't enough.

The jury foreman told the judge that they couldn't reach a unanimous verdict.

A mistrial was declared.

We assumed that at that point, then the defense could could rest and the prosecution would drop the whole situation.

After the mistrial, it seems life for Annette could go back to normal.

That is, until a casual conversation brings a new witness into the case.

After a funeral, I just started talking to the wife of a friend of ours, and it always kind of seemed to turn to Corey talk and stuff.

And she said to me, I just don't know why they never interviewed my son in the trial.

I said,

what's his name?

And she said, Scott Payne.

Corey's mother passes the information to DCI agents.

I get a call from Susie Winnickie that she wanted me to talk to Scott Payne.

And she said that he had information that he wanted to share.

Scott Payne may have been one of the 1992 and 1993 interviews, but he didn't reveal that he had any evidence in connection with this crime at that point.

Now, you have to realize that he was very involved in drugs and didn't have any desire to talk to the police.

On July 29th, 2019, an investigator sits down with 54-year-old Scott Payne.

Scott explains that he was at the Hazen farm on the day of the murder and he'd seen Annette.

He said he saw Annette pull up.

He said she had a brown paper sack

with clothes.

He saw her dumping clothes into a burn barrel.

and said that he believed they had blood on them.

I said to him, well, how'd you know it was blood on the clothes?

And he gave me

one of the best answers I've ever gotten out of a witness.

And that was, I used to work at a slaughterhouse.

Between Jesse and Scott, prosecutors hope they can finally convict Annette.

In September 2019, they face her in court once again.

Prosecutors lay out for the jury exactly what they believe happened on October 13th, 1992.

Corey did not feel about Annette the way Annette felt about Corey.

Corey was sick of Annette.

Prosecutors also allege that after Corey left Annette's that night, she didn't stay home crying over her broken heart.

What I argued to the jury is that Annette followed Corey to Wendy's and saw that Cadillac parked out in front.

If you think about how angry Annette would have been when she saw Wendy come out of the bar, bar,

that anger must have been far worse when she sees that car in front of Wendy's apartment.

While prosecutors can't account for exactly what went on between Annette showing up at her roofing job and running errands with Jackie, they believe at some point that morning, Annette paid a final visit to Corey.

And the rage that had simmered all night boiled over.

When you place a bat in the hand of someone who's very enraged, very angry at what has gone on, she's more than capable of having committed this crime.

Jesse Becker makes another appearance on the witness stand and Scott Payne makes his debut.

Scott Payne testified that shortly after the murder of Corey Winnicky, he saw Annette Cahill burn bloody clothing in a burn barrel at the Hazen household.

Annette's defense contests Scott's credibility as a witness.

Mr.

Payne has had a really tough life, including years of heavy methamphetamine and alcohol abuse.

In addition, Annette's attorneys argue their client's track record speaks for itself.

She's always participated voluntarily in the investigation of the death of Corey Winnicky.

She just is is a person with nothing to hide.

It just didn't compute.

After hearing impassioned arguments from both sides, the jury delivers the verdict on September 19th, 2019.

The jury had unanimously found Annette Cahoe guilty of second-degree murder.

I was at work and my fiancé actually texted me and said, I'm so sorry.

The trial's over.

They They found her guilty.

And I just burst into tears right there at work and had to go home,

spend the next couple days at home.

I think it was an appropriate choice by the jury.

Did she go there with the intent to cause someone's death?

Maybe, maybe not.

But I think that everyone can believe that she did go there and that she went there to commit a bad act that ended in the murder of Corey.

And that's essentially what they found her guilty of

for Corey's family the conviction is minimal consolation for the loss they will always feel

you know I don't like the word closure it gives you peace of mind but it's never closure because it doesn't bring my son back

she might be there now in prison but I don't feel sorry for her

because she had a life.

She got married more than once.

She had kids and then she had grandkids.

All the things we wanted Corey to have, and we didn't have him all those years, and we'll never have him again.

I miss going into Winks and seeing him behind the bar.

I miss him telling me, Mom, I love you.

Annette was sentenced to 50 years in prison and is serving her time at the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women.

She maintains her innocence and has since had her appeal denied.

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