Valerie Pape

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Valerie Pape was a glamorous divorcee.

She was blonde, she was petite, a very, very fashionable lady.

She had this beautiful French accent.

And she came to America hoping to put her failed marriage behind her.

She had some friends in Scottsdale, and she jumped on a plane to make a life here.

One that would be even more upscale and dazzling than what she left behind, thanks to Ira Pomerance.

He was the Playboy kind of guy.

He had airplanes.

He had several Jaguars.

Their courtship was swift.

On their first date, he took her to Las Vegas.

But barely four years later, Ira would suddenly disappear.

They said, Valerie, listen, we need to put in the missing person's report.

Was the wealthy Playboy on the run?

He was involved with bad people.

Did Valerie know more than she let on?

The delivery driver had seen

something being put into the dumpster.

And would the missing man ever be found?

It was a torso.

No arms, no legs, no head.

There's no dental.

There's no way to identify the body.

Scottsdale, Arizona is a glitzy town of 200,000 just northeast of Phoenix.

It'd be like the Beverly Hills of Phoenix, I would say.

Upper class,

kind of shopping, art, restaurants, jewelry stores, and salons.

Scottsdale is the place where people want to live, the place where the movers and shakers live.

People like 60-year-old Ira Pomerance, a successful businessman who enjoyed everything that life in Scottsdale had to offer.

He loved to play golf.

He was a pilot.

He had a plane.

He loved people.

He loved being around people.

We were very, very close.

We were good buddies.

Which is why Louis Milazzo was worried about Ira on the morning of January 26, 2000.

The old friends hadn't spoken in almost a week, which was unusual.

Yeah, I mean, I spoke to him four times a week, you know, and I was concerned.

So concerned that Lewis contacted Ira's wife, 47-year-old Valerie Pape.

Yeah, I called Valerie.

I said to her,

where's Ira?

She said, I don't know.

And I said, when was the last time you saw him?

She said, I think I saw him late Sunday,

but I don't know where he is.

He didn't come home.

And I said, he didn't come home.

She said, yeah, he probably went to Las Vegas or something.

Ira would sometimes leave town without warning.

That's really how he had lived his entire life.

You know, very spontaneous, always

on a whim, taking off to Vegas, just doing things

for himself.

Still, Lewis wanted to make sure nothing had happened to his friend.

They said, Valerie, listen, I think we need to put in a missing person's report.

Was Ira's friend simply overreacting?

Was it possible he'd really gone to Vegas?

Or was Lewis right to think that something was wrong with Ira?

Something bad enough to cut off all contact?

The police would eventually find the answer, and Valerie would lead them to it.

Born in 1952, Valerie started life far from Arizona in a picturesque town in the French countryside.

She was the daughter of a French doctor, the person who

really hadn't had to struggle a great deal in life, who was born with the silver spoon, essentially.

She was kind of prim and proper, brought up that way.

Growing up, she attended the best Catholic boarding school in the province.

She called it a white glove school in France, which meant they wore white gloves with their uniform.

After graduation, Valerie married well and moved to Paris.

She was married to a wealthy man, a certified public accountant.

They lived in the Paris suburbs.

They had two homes.

She would take vacations to Italy, where she enjoyed winter sports.

She was a lady of means.

And she was everything a sophisticated Parisian woman was supposed to be.

She was was blonde, she was petite.

She was a woman who would be noticed.

A very, very fashionable lady.

She always had beautiful clothes on, designer clothes, designer bags.

She always was dressed to the T's.

She was basically living the good life

in France.

But there was one thing lacking in Valerie's life.

Children.

She'd always wanted a baby and could not conceive.

And that always made her very unhappy because she wanted kids really bad.

Eventually, Valerie and her husband adopted a little girl.

She loved her daughter very much.

But just as it appeared that Valerie finally had it all, her life fell apart.

She and her husband divorced and the final settlement cost Valerie her daughter.

When her and the husband divorced, she lost custody completely, had no visitation rights.

Over 40 and suddenly alone, Valerie decided to start over in the United States.

She had some friends in Scottsdale.

She jumped on a plane, I guess, and came over and tried to make a life here.

Once settled into Scottsdale, Valerie began taking cosmetology classes at the local community college.

She

had this idea of opening a very prestigious salon in downtown Scottsdale.

And thanks to Ira Pomerance, Valerie would realize her dream and more.

13 years older than Valerie, Ira wasn't from Arizona either.

He was from Montessalo, New York, and then Brooklyn.

He'd been married and divorced twice, failed marriages that were largely Ira's fault, according to the youngest of his two daughters.

Marriage is probably the most difficult relationship there is.

So

if you're not willing to work at that relationship every day, it's going to fall apart.

And my father being a free spirit and not wanting to be told where to be or what to do, I think he had issues.

However, even as Ira struggled in his personal life, his career flourished.

He was in the garment industry.

He imported garments, you know, sold the fabric

to manufacturers.

Manufacturers like his old friend, Luis Milazzo.

We were in the same industry.

and over time we became friends and

the relationship just grew.

And when Lewis moved to Scottsdale in 1992 he convinced Ira to follow.

Lewis told my dad I was much more kicked back and you can kind of semi-retire.

Ira was in his early 50s when he made the move to Scottsdale but unlike Lewis, he wasn't ready to retire just yet.

He went and started up some businesses, restaurant businesses, nightclub businesses.

Although owning nightclubs was more than just a business venture for Ira, it was also a chance to make the most of his midlife crisis.

He was the Playboy kind of guy.

Women were attracted to him.

He was a good-looking man and, you know,

he really didn't have a problem getting a date.

There were plane rides, there were fancy dinners, drive around in his Ferrari.

He lived a lavish lifestyle.

However, it wasn't Ira's flashy car or Playboy lifestyle that led him to Valerie.

In 1994, as part of her cosmetology courses, Valerie volunteered to cut and style hair for residence at a Scottsdale-assisted living facility.

And one of her clients just happened to be Ira's elderly father, who'd moved to Scottsdale soon after his son.

Ira's father asked Valerie about her marital status.

And when he discovered that she was single, he told her that, I have a son who you have to beat.

The result was a whirlwind courtship.

On their first date, he took her to Las Vegas.

She had never seen anything like it before.

You know, all the glitz and glamour of the strip.

Valerie, with her conservative Catholic upbringing and upper-middle-class Parisian background, had never met a playboy like Ira before.

He had a boyish charm about him.

It was a lot of fun to be around.

Definitely like the life of the party.

And Ira was just as taken with Valerie.

And the way she spoke, she had this beautiful French accent.

I think,

you know, it was alluring to him.

Within six months, Valerie had moved into Ira's condo.

And within a year, he bought the couple a house in a fashionable Scottsdale neighborhood.

It's a huge 4,000 square foot home with a pool.

And, you know, it was everything for Valerie.

Her house was gorgeous.

Persian rugs, a lot of wrought iron, very well decorated.

And soon after buying Valerie a home, Ira bought her an engagement ring.

They got married at the house.

The wedding, held before an intimate gathering of family and friends, was in November of 1995.

Ira,

any last words here?

So long, it was nice to know.

Moving on to bigger weddings.

He's ready.

You may now kiss the bride?

And soon after saying, I do, Ira helped Valerie achieve her dream of opening a salon, too, in Scottsdale's trendy old town.

It was, you know, it was like in the heart of Scottsdale.

It was a happening place.

He leased the place and...

Did whatever they had to do to fix it up.

Although at the last minute, the salon almost failed failed to get off the ground she was supposed to open it with the girl from beauty school and that fell through in need of a partner to help handle the workload and with few contacts in scottsdale valerie turned to an old friend from france a man named michelle they knew each other when they were children she called him in france and said come over you have to help me so he came over to own half the business with her With Michelle's last minute assistance, the salon opened as planned.

And thanks to its upscale French flair, it was an instant success.

The salon was very popular.

It was always busy when I was in there.

Besides hair, we had a lot of art and a lot of very boutique-y type clothing.

We had a lot of parties in the atrium.

We'd have a band, you know, stuff like that.

And by the end of 1999, two years after Ira invested in her salon, Valerie had made a name for herself in Scottsdale.

She was well loved in the community.

But would she be able to hang on to her status and her salon after Ira suddenly disappeared?

Coming up, a delivery driver makes a gruesome discovery:

it was a torso, no arms, no legs, no head.

But are the dismembered remains Ira's?

There are no prints, there's no dental, there's no way to identify the body.

It was January 26, 2000, when 47-year-old Valerie Pape walked into the Scottsdale, Arizona Police Department to report her husband, 60-year-old Ira Pomeran's, missing.

I called her and asked her to file the missing persons report, and I met Valerie at Scottsdale Police and filled out a missing persons report.

She showed up and was in and out in five minutes, fill out the report.

She said, maybe you went to Vegas to have a good time.

And knowing Ira, Valerie may have had a point.

My father had a zest for fun and was more of a free spirit and wanted to come and go as he pleases.

However, Ira's friend Louis Milazzo and his daughters were still concerned.

None of them had heard from Ira in almost a week.

Maybe you'd have to go off to Vegas to have a good time, but that's maybe a couple of days worth of no-calls, but not this is like the fifth day or fourth day or something.

Like there's something wrong.

And that wasn't the only reason they were worried.

According to friends, Valerie and Ira had always kept separate schedules.

He would work at night.

See, he owned nightclubs.

So he would start work at two in the afternoon and work till very late, where Valerie would be in bed at 10 o'clock.

So they had separate lives.

She was up and gone before Ira ever got up during the day.

And the distance between them only grew when Valerie opened her salon, especially once her friend and business partner Michelle arrived from France.

He was a family friend from a long time.

They knew each other when they were children.

So he had come over to help her with the salon.

And in return, Valerie and Ira helped Michelle make the transition to America.

He needed a place to live, and of course she insisted that he move in.

The house was big enough where he could have his own area.

It was an unusual arrangement, but it appeared to work.

They all connected, and my father seemed to like Michelle.

Plus, since Ira was always working late at his clubs, having Michelle around meant that Valerie had someone to escort her to the gallery openings, cocktail parties, and other events that the salon owner's socialite status demanded.

She liked to go out to nice restaurants.

She liked to socialize with her friends.

She liked to be involved and know what was going on with people.

The friend accompanied her to a lot of these things that Valerie liked to do.

In fact, Valerie and her friend spent so much time together at parties and events that Scottsdale's society gossip soon took notice.

It looked like to a lot of people out there that they were the couple.

According to his friend Louis Milazzo, it was starting to look that way to Ira, too.

Ira had told me what kind of relationship am I going having.

She spends more time with him and the relationship just became estranged at that point.

He would say, I feel like an outsider in my own house now.

As a matter of fact, he moved to a separate bedroom.

And according to Ira's attorney, that was only a preliminary step.

I am a certified family law divorce specialist in the state of Arizona.

And he had discussed filing of an action to terminate the marriage.

He was saying that he might have made a mistake.

And one way or the other, I just want to end this peacefully.

And according to Lewis, what Ira told him wasn't the only reason he was worried.

It was when he'd told him to.

That's the last time I saw him.

He was missing the next day.

But did that mean Ira had gone off to Vegas alone?

To put some distance between himself and Valerie before filing for divorce?

Or was it possible things hadn't ended as peacefully as Ira intended?

The next morning, less than 24 hours after Valerie and Lewis reported Ira missing, a driver was making an early delivery to a supermarket in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb just south of Scottsdale.

This was like five o'clock in the morning, very early in the morning in January.

It would have been dark, and there was a delivery man

and he was parked behind this supermarket.

Basically, he saw this woman pull up, he saw her get out of her jaguar, and he saw her pop open the trunk and lift up a very heavy looking object and throw it into the dumpster

and then

you know, take off.

The whole thing looked suspicious to the delivery driver, but he had a schedule to keep.

He actually continued on his route, finished his route.

And it was only after finishing the day's deliveries and talking over his suspicions with another driver that he decided to find out if the mystery woman had really been up to something.

They both went back and checked the dumpster.

And they quickly found what the woman had left behind.

It was in a plastic bag, looked like a garbage bag, and it looked suspicious.

So suspicious that one of the delivery drivers decided that rather than open the bag, he'd poke it with a knife first.

It was an X-Acto knife, probably what he used to cut his packages open.

The blade went through the plastic easily and when it came out, the driver's suspicions appeared to be confirmed.

He saw blood on the knife.

At that time, he, of course, figured that it was something that needed to be reported to the police.

So he flagged down an officer that he saw in the area that happened to be driving through the area and asked him to come check it out.

And when the officer opened the garbage bag, he made a gruesome discovery.

It was a torso.

And when I say torso, literally no arms, no legs, no head.

The head had been severed at the base of the neck.

He had been cut at both shoulders.

And his bottom half had been cut at the waist.

And his identity was a mystery.

When you find a torso from a criminal perspective, there are no prints.

There's no dental.

There's no way to identify a body.

You can get a gender, and that's it.

Unless the body contains visible scars, visible tattoos, something to match up with a missing person's report.

The police didn't have any easy way of finding out who the dead man was, but thanks to their witness, they might be able to identify the woman who disposed of the remains.

The delivery driver said that

appeared to be very slight, somewhere around five feet.

He estimated her weight at about 100 pounds, 105 pounds, somewhere along in there.

She was fashionably dressed, wearing a jumpsuit and high heels.

The quick-thinking delivery driver also provided a detailed description of the woman's car.

The car was a jaguar, and he also got us the license plate, which he had written down.

So while the medical examiner's office began the grim task of removing the torso from the dumpster so that they could autopsy and hopefully identify the dead man, the investigators followed up on the only lead they had.

We ran the plate as a part of our investigation and it came back to a woman named Faleria Pape.

Coming up, the investigators locate a possible crime scene.

The police found a bullet lodged in a wall.

But that's not the most gruesome find.

This would have been an excellent tool to use for the actual dismemberment.

How hard is it to kill a planet?

Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere.

When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.

Are we really safe?

Is our water safe?

You destroyed our town.

And crimes like that, they don't just happen.

We call things accidents.

There is no accident.

This was 100%

preventable.

They're the result of choices by people.

Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime.

These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet.

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We're your hosts, I'm Alina Urquhart, and I'm Ash Kelly.

And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy.

The stories we cover are well researched.

Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group.

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Shout out to her.

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There's been like eight of them.

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By Friday, January 28th, 2000, it had been 24 hours since police had found a man's dismembered torso in a dumpster outside a Mesa, Arizona grocery store.

We were alerted by a citizen, actually was a delivery driver, who said that he had seen

something being put into the dumpster by a lady when he was making a delivery.

And the witness's tip led the police to Valerie Pape's salon in Scottsdale's tony Old Town neighborhood.

The delivery man wrote down the plate, gave it to the police, and that's why they arrested Valerie.

They got her about five o'clock in the afternoon.

I don't know if she was done for the day or in the middle of a haircut, but they came and arrested her.

Not only had a witness placed the 47-year-old at the scene of the crime, Valerie had reported her husband, 60-year-old Iroh Pomeranz, missing less than 24 hours before the witness spotted her, throwing what turned out to be a man's dismembered body into the dumpster.

But did that mean the body was her husband?

The missing persons investigators had already uncovered trouble in Valerie and Ira's marriage.

They were estranged and we thought that she had a lover.

But for the moment, the police had no way of identifying the dismembered torso.

We didn't have any fingerprints or any facial features or things like that.

Confirming the body's identity would have to wait on an autopsy and DNA tests.

But since she'd allegedly been seen dumping the body, the investigators had more than enough probable cause to question Valerie.

We contacted Valerie to try and establish if she would

at least admit that she was in the area, which would give us a starting point for the investigation.

At first, Valerie tried to deny that she was the one who dumped the torso.

We'd never believed her from the beginning.

Based on the witnesses, a witness account that they had seen a woman dumping the torso.

And when the investigators made it clear that she'd basically been caught red-handed, Valerie's story suddenly changed.

What she discloses is that she came home and the body was there.

She had found her husband on January 24th, that she had came home in the morning, found her husband in a pool of blood, laying face up on the kitchen floor.

But if that were true, if she had come home to find Ira dead on the kitchen floor, why not call 911?

She said that she did not call the police because she was afraid.

She was afraid that she would be accused, and she did what she did because she thought she was protecting herself.

And according to Valerie, that fear led her to tell her husband's friend Louis Milazzo that Ira had probably gone to Vegas and to file a missing persons report.

All of those things are just so far-fetched.

I mean, you know, you look at her, you look at the body, you look at the circumstances involved, and you say, come on.

I mean, really?

Because what was more incriminating, finding your husband dead or getting caught dumping his dismembered body?

She clammed up when it came to talking about the dismemberment.

She lawyered up, and so they had to end the interview right there.

However, she was adamant about one thing.

She denied responsibility for the murder completely.

Not that her denials made any impression on the investigators, who proceeded to book Valerie into the Maricopa County jail.

She was charged with first-degree murder.

It all clued in.

They were in the middle of a divorce, so there was a lot of...

You know, anger and resentment between the two of them.

But while the investigators suspected the dismembered torso was Ira's, could they prove it?

A few days after Valerie's arrest, the autopsy provided the answer.

They just took our DNA with swabs, and then they told us we all matched, and it was our dad, and that was just devastating news.

It all felt very surreal, like this only happens in a movie.

The torso's identity wasn't all that the autopsy revealed, however.

The striations that they saw on the body indicated to them that they thought the body had been killed earlier and had been frozen.

And while Ira's head had been severed at the neck, there were traces of a gunshot wound just below the cut.

He had been killed by a gunshot to the back of the neck.

They theorize that the bullet had gone into his head by the trajectory of

the wound.

But where was the rest of Ira's body?

If she had been doing what

we anticipated she was driving from dumpster to dumpster, it would have been impossible to find a body at that point in time, given all of the pickups and the large area of the city she could have covered.

Which meant the investigators were extremely fortunate that any of Ira's body had been found.

The person who saw her putting it in a dumpster, had he not been there, had he not seen that,

we may not have even discovered the torso in the trash bin prior to it being taken away and dumped.

Without a body, body, it's very hard to prosecute a murderer.

But could the police find the murder weapon?

In the days following Valerie's arrest, the Mesa and Scottsdale police served a search warrant on the couple's Scottsdale home.

Apparently, there were guns all throughout the house.

That wasn't the only place they found guns either.

The police found a gun hidden in the backseat of the Jaguar.

But was the gun from Valerie's car or any of the guns found in the house the murder weapon?

Since no bullets had been recovered from Ira's body, it was difficult to say, although the investigators did have one tantalizing clue.

During the investigation, the police found a bullet that was lodged in the wall of the home.

The bullet wasn't just in any wall either.

It was in the kitchen, exactly where Valerie claimed she'd discovered Ira's dead body, leading the police to believe they'd found the crime scene.

They believed that the bullet that they recovered from the kitchen was fired from the gun that they found in Valerie Pape's car.

The gun and the bullet both went to the crime lab for ballistics testing, but they weren't the only intriguing pieces of evidence that the search warrant produced.

They have found receipts for a reciprocating saw.

This would have been an excellent tool to use for the actual dismemberment.

The police never found the saw, but she had bought it with her credit card.

And according to the date on the receipt, she bought it before Ira's murder.

If you look at the fact that she bought the reciprocating saw a month before the body was dismembered, that seems to imply some premeditation.

Dismemberment seemed like the only way she could have gotten Ira's body out of the house, too.

Ira was probably probably 5'10, 5'11, probably close to 200 pounds.

Valerie was tiny, maybe five feet tall, 100 pounds, tops.

And even Ira's dismembered torso alone had almost been more than Valerie could handle.

The eyewitness said it was a big struggle for her just to get it out of the car.

Which left the investigators pondering one more possibility.

So we believe to remove it from the house, she had to have someone helping her.

There's no way she could have done this on her own.

And as far as the investigators were concerned, there was one obvious suspect.

She had this friend, Michelle, who was conveniently staying with her.

We believe that they had a relationship past being friends.

And that was one of the reasons why we thought that she got, that she committed the murder to begin with.

But had Valerie's friend been more than a possible motive for killing Ira?

The police thought he may have helped her out with the,

at least the dismemberment.

But while the police suspected it, proving it was an entirely different story.

There was no hard evidence that there was a

accomplice involved.

However, when the ballistics test on the bullet embedded in her kitchen wall came back from the crime lab, the evidence against Valerie kept piling up.

They concluded that it had been fired from a gun that was found in her car

the ballistic evidence the reciprocating saw and the body in the dumpster taken together it was more than enough for the grand jury the grand jury comes down with a first-degree murder indictment but since the prosecutors couldn't prove that the bullet in the wall was the one that killed ira would it be enough for a conviction This is all circumstantial evidence because there was no witness.

Coming up, the investigators dig into Valerie and Iris' finances.

Some of his business dealings had went south.

And that leads them to wonder, had the Vegas high roller gotten in over his head in a desperate attempt to keep afloat.

He was involved with bad people.

He owed him money.

In February of 2000, 48-year-old Valerie Pape sat in Arizona's Maricopa County jail, held without bond while awaiting trial for the murder of her husband, Ira Pomerance.

From a prosecutor's side, she was a French citizen.

She had committed first-degree murder.

It gave her every reason in the world to flee.

So the court decided that she was non-laudable.

But was there another way Valerie could get out of jail, or at least out of an American jail?

Valerie's friend Michelle, after being cleared of any involvement in Ira's murder, brought her case to the attention of the French consulate's office, who took an immediate interest.

First-degree murder could have put death penalty on the table.

And since France had outlawed the death penalty, that could have caused an international incident if the prosecutors pushed for it.

The decision that was made was: okay, we're not going to seek the death penalty.

We're going to go for first-degree murder without the death penalty, which means life in prison if convicted.

It was a bitter disappointment for Ira's daughter, Stacey.

I was very upset about that because as far as I could see, if they have enough of the criteria to seek the death penalty, I thought they met that criteria easily.

Although for the prosecutors, their first priority was securing a conviction, and they felt they had a strong case against Valerie.

At that point in time, the prosecution's case is that was planned, and evidence of that planning was obviously the purchase of a saw weeks before the murder.

But as Valerie's trial date approached, would new evidence put the prosecution's case in jeopardy?

At the time of Valerie's arrest, what motivated the murder had appeared obvious.

Ira's family thought that Valerie was a gold digger, that the only reason that she was with their dad was because of the fact that he had money.

And the police suspected that she had killed Ira because the couple was heading for a divorce.

If they were still married when he was dead, she stood to have his money.

That's what the investigators and prosecutors believed.

But when they looked into Ira's finances, they made a surprising discovery.

Ira had filed for bankruptcy.

Some of his business dealings had went south.

And

there's no question that

there was some financial duress going on in the home.

In fact, while preparing for trial, Valerie's defense team and supporters hinted that ira who'd made his fortune in new york's garment trade and made regular trips to vegas might have gotten in over his head trying to stave off bankruptcy he was involved with bad people is what i think was the problem he owed him money was it possible valerie was telling the truth that someone else had killed ira

she said that she had found him dead in the kitchen.

She did not say that she shot him.

She said she found him dead.

dead.

But even as Valerie claimed she had nothing to do with his murder, she made a shocking accusation about her late husband.

Valerie had reported that there was domestic violence going on in the home.

Ira's family was outraged.

I was like reading this article, one of the first articles that hit the paper, specifically the part where Valerie states that she was the victim of domestic abuse.

I was just like, what?

In all the years that I knew Ira, Ira,

the one thing he wasn't was violent.

He just wasn't violent at all.

But while Ira's family and friends dismissed the claim, Valerie's accusation did win her considerable sympathy in the community.

Valerie had a lot of friends in Scottsdale.

She was very well liked.

She hung out with all the right people.

And so she had her group of cheerleaders.

Ira had been a longtime businessman here in Arizona.

And so he had his fallen.

And so there was a huge dispute over whether or not she actually was a victim of domestic violence.

And some of Valerie's friends said they had seen the evidence.

There was a day that Valerie came into work kind of upset.

And I said, what's wrong?

And she goes, look, I have bruises.

And she lifted up her skirt way up high.

She had a short skirt on.

And she showed me the bruises.

And I said, that's crazy.

That's not right.

Thanks to the defense, pictures of a bruised and battered Valerie even made it into the local paper.

They showed this picture with her having two black eyes.

But was the picture really evidence of abuse?

Or was it simply a calculated piece of character assassination on the part of Valerie's supporters?

According to his daughter, the photograph had nothing to do with domestic violence.

I saw the dates that she said this was from.

I called right away and told the newspaper, I don't believe that the domestic abuse was the cause of these black eyes, but rather the facelift that she had the day before that picture was taken.

We gave them the information that they needed to check it out and they retracted the whole domestic abuse thing.

But did Ira's daughter know the whole truth about her father?

The bogus facelift picture wasn't all that the defense had.

There are records of, you know, the police showing up to the house for various reasons.

Most of the calls were for domestic disturbances.

The scenario with Valerie, she would instigate an argument and, you know, there would be yelling and there'd be shouting and fighting and

you know, two people in an argument.

But I don't think it would have gone physical.

He never hit us.

And, you know, never hit my mom, never hit

his second wife, and never was violent with Valerie either.

That's what Ira's daughters claimed.

But Valerie's attorneys also had documents suggesting that what was going on was more than just a shouting match.

Valerie had taken out an order of protection against Ira.

The protection order dated to 1999.

It was well before the murder, which was verified by the police department.

But there were no other police reports reference any sort of abuse.

Still, the order of protection, the couple's history of domestic disturbances, and Valerie's claims of abuse were enough to give the prosecutors pause.

Domestic violence might have been a stumbling point.

You could see why a jury would not find first-degree murder.

If the jury comes back not guilty, it's not guilty.

She walks, she goes free, and there's no justice for the victim.

So in the summer of 2002, the prosecutors decided to offer Valerie a deal.

They were going to plea it out to second-degree murder.

The plea agreement terms allow her to be sentenced for anywhere between 10 and 16 years in prison.

Considering what Valerie had done to Ira, his family didn't think 16 years was nearly enough, but they resigned themselves to the deal.

The DA's office was really pushing this thing.

You know, there's no guarantees with a trial.

It could go either way in some big crop shoot.

And I was just like,

would Valerie take the deal or would she risk going to trial?

In the end, she ran into the same dilemma that dogged the prosecutors.

You have one shot at a trial.

That's it.

You have one shot.

So rather than risk going to prison for life, Valerie Pape appeared in Maricopa County Superior Court on August 20th, 2002, and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

It took almost three years before,

from the time of her arrest until...

The time that she pled guilty.

It was a shocking reversal, considering Valerie had always proclaimed her innocence, a stance she strangely tried to maintain, even while pleading guilty to murder.

Her words were that she fired a gun in the direction of Ira Pomerantz and hit him.

And I'd never heard wording like that, and it

sort of like took a little bit of the culpability away from her.

It seemed to me, at least,

that she wasn't fully admitting to it.

There was no remorse or taking responsibility for what happened.

I think, you know, she took the plea because that was

she was going to get something and that was the shortest jail sentence she could get.

And then when Ira's daughter made her own plea to Valerie during her victim's impact statement to the court, Valerie had even less to say.

I turned around to her directly and I'm like, just tell us where the rest of his body is so we can bury him whole, you know?

And she just looked at me dumbly and blankly and didn't say anything.

It may have been a mistake.

The judge was not too happy that she never

said where the rest of the body was.

And his displeasure may have been reflected in Valerie's sentence.

The judge

gave her the harshest he could.

he could give.

She ended up getting sentenced to 16 years.

Coming up, will a guilty plea be enough to keep Valerie in prison?

The U.S.

and other countries have these treaties where they exchange prisoners.

They were very, very worried that France would release her on parole.

By 2006, it had been four years since Valerie Pate pled guilty to the murder of her husband, Ira Pomerance, a plea that surprised her friends and supporters.

She had to snap or have some kind of breakdown to do what she did, because that's not the Valerie that I knew and loved at all.

She's a very wonderful person and was a very good friend to me.

So it would be hard for me to think of her doing anything.

that would hurt a human being.

In prison for second-degree murder, the 54-year-old had almost 10 years remaining on her 16-year sentence.

She was given credit for, you know, the nearly three years she spent in the county jail.

But would Valerie, who was a French citizen, stay in an American prison?

In 2006, there was an effort to have Valerie transferred to France.

to serve out the rest of her sentence.

The U.S.

and other countries have these treaties where they exchange prisoners.

That didn't make the transfer any less of a surprise to Ira's family, though.

When Ira Pomrant's daughters heard about this,

they just were aghast.

I was like, oh my God,

the courts here have no say-so over what they do with the prisons there.

They were very, very worried that France would release her on parole.

I was on the phone immediately.

Like, I'm like, call them, tell them, no way, don't let them do this, don't let them do this.

We found out about it like in the nick of time and she was already en route to back to France the state of Arizona had basically signed off on this and she had been transferred to a federal holding facility but once the Arizona authorities found out that the family objected the transfer came to a halt She was returned to Arizona and served out the rest of her sentence.

Although at the age of 62, Valerie finally did go home.

So Valerie completed her sentence in February 2016 and she was deported back to France.

And apparently that's where she's living now.

I don't know what she's doing in France now.

I really try not to think much about her.

It's disappointing.

I know this is our legal system, but you know, in this situation,

my father being murdered, I don't feel there was true justice justice for what happened to him.

The rest of Ira's remains were never recovered.

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