Rose Chase

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Rose Chase was different.

She's pretty much always been an outcast.

But so was her husband, Adam.

They're into the sci-fi type stuff, and they just kind of clicked.

They were very happy together.

But then, after 11 years of marriage, Rose's husband vanished.

She just said he he walked out, left his cell phone, his car, everything.

Was it simply a spat?

He went to blow off some steam somewhere.

Or was something else going on?

Color the mother's intuition.

We weren't gonna find him alive.

The search would reveal the truth about their marriage.

They were kissing and touching in a way that she shouldn't be doing.

Expose a shocking secret.

She always said

she alive.

And end with a monstrous revelation.

Head, arms, legs, came off no problem.

June 14th, 2012.

It was around 6 p.m.

when 31-year-old Rose Chase pulled up outside her mother-in-law's house in Stanley, New York, a tiny village village in the Finger Lakes region.

Our area is very rural.

It's just a quiet, a very quiet country little town.

Rose had arrived to pick up her young son.

She and the boy's father, 31-year-old Adam Chase, had been married 11 years and had been together since high school.

I remembered them first starting dating like maybe towards the end of his senior year.

Which made what Rose told her mother-in-law, Sylvia, that much more shocking.

Not only had the couple had a violent argument.

Adam supposedly punched a hole in the wall.

Rose said that Adam had stormed out of the house.

Walked out.

Left his cell phone, his car, everything at home.

He didn't take nothing with him.

And according to Rose, he had been gone almost seven hours.

He said he was walking, and he left the house around 11 o'clock that day.

My mom asked her, why didn't you call me?

We're close.

I could have came and talked to him.

Rose said she hadn't thought there was any need at first.

Rose told Sylvia that she assumed Adam was just going for a walk to calm down and clear his head.

She said, I figured he'd be home by now.

But after seven hours with no word from Adam and no way to reach him, the entire family started to worry.

Storming off without his phone just wasn't like Adam.

He was always on that thing.

He would always get a hold of him no matter what.

So him not shaking a cell phone was just really bizarre to hear.

Sylvia promised to call as soon as she heard anything.

And when Rose left with her son, she said she would do the same.

But that night, as she watched Rose drive away, Sylvia had no idea just how many dark and disturbing secrets the search for her son would eventually reveal about her daughter-in-law.

Born in 1981 and raised in upstate New York, Rose Mooney had a difficult childhood.

She's pretty much always been an outcast.

She had dyslexia, so some of the kids kind of made fun of her when she went to special classes.

Taunted by the other children, Rose became shy and withdrawn, preferring to spend time with her pets rather than kids her own age.

She was thinking about being a veterinarian.

And when Rose's family moved to the remote rural community of Stanley when she was in the seventh grade, she became even more isolated.

She had her animals and mostly kept to herself.

She felt like the girl that sat on the sidelines.

But that was about to change thanks to a boy named Adam Chase.

One year older than Rose, Adam was a popular kid at her school.

Adam was cute.

He was handsome.

He was really tall.

He was a big guy.

But he was easygoing and approachable.

He was a big teddy bear.

He always reached out to people.

He could make you feel comfortable within five minutes of knowing you.

Partly because for all his popularity, he had quite a few quirks of his own.

Adam liked swords, Renaissance stuff.

He loved computer games, a complete computer geek.

And when he first met Rose, he realized that they shared a kindred spirit.

They're into the sci-fi type stuff, and they just had that in common, so they just kind of clicked.

Although at first, their relationship wasn't romantic.

They used to go to like Renaissance festivals and dress up.

They kind of went together as friends.

And with Adam to guide her, the shy girl who sat on the sideline soon learned to embrace and even celebrate the fact that she wasn't like all the other kids.

She always had the crazy hairdos.

We never knew what she was going to wear, so makeup or clothing, and she just always made herself stand out.

No one noticed more than Adam.

After being friends for several years, he and Rose became a couple.

In high school, they really started dating.

It had been a long time coming, but it appeared to have been worth the wait.

They seemed like they were very happy together.

They wouldn't be high school sweethearts for long, though.

Adam dropped out at the start of his senior year.

Because he missed some gym classes and he wasn't making them up, so he quit.

He went and got his GED.

Rose, who still struggled with her dyslexia, strongly considered following her boyfriend's example.

She was a wizard in math and science.

When it came to English and social studies, she fell behind with the kids.

And according to Rose's mother, Adam encouraged her to drop out, but she wouldn't have it.

Adam wanted her to move in, and I go, when she graduates from school, I don't care what you guys do, but she's going to graduate.

Just as her mother promised, Rose did graduate from high school, but she never pursued her childhood dream of being a veterinarian.

Instead, she took an assembly job at a local factory.

She worked all the time, a lot of overtime.

Adam, on the other hand, had a hard time holding down a steady job.

He kind of moved a lot.

He was in business mostly.

He would sell windows.

I think at one point he sold cars.

They weren't making a lot of money, but they had each other.

And in June of 2001, when Rose was 19 and Adam had just turned 20, the couple married in true Renaissance fair fashion.

Rose had not your typical wedding dress that you would see these days.

It was kind of old-fashioned with

some sort of veil that was like a hat and it was different.

After the wedding, the couple lived temporarily with Adam's parents.

She was just like family.

I treated her just like a sister.

My parents looked at her like a daughter.

I mean, she called them mom and dad.

And thanks to the money Rose and Adam saved by living with mom and dad, the couple soon had enough to buy a place of their own in the neighboring town town of Bristol.

It's just the next town over.

They did live in Bristol for quite a while.

It was just a trailer and it was only supposed to be temporary.

Rose and Adam planned to start a family, but after several frustrating and fruitless years, their doctors delivered some devastating news.

Adam was told they

had trouble.

It was correctable if they could afford it.

It would cost $10,000 and their insurance did not cover it.

Unable to afford the procedure, Rose and Adam soldiered on, hoping for a miracle.

And it looked as if their prayers had finally been answered when six years into their marriage, Rose gave birth to a son.

And it was tough to say who was happier, Rose or Adam.

He loved being a daddy, would do anything for that little boy.

In fact, once the baby came along, Adam quit his job and became a full-time dad.

Adam was Mr.

Mom.

He took care of this little boy.

And for the next several years, Rose continued to work.

She was the breadwinner going out and making sure the family was stable.

And Adam focused on raising their son.

It was Adam giving him breakfast and, you know, getting him dressed and all that.

The couple's arrangement appeared to work.

Adam bonded with the little boy, who even as a toddler showed a precocious talent for electronics.

Anything on the computer he knew how to do from Adam.

Or you can type it in.

Oh, yeah.

It's very computer-oriented.

Rose, meanwhile, got promoted at work.

The supervisor described her as being very responsible and very dependable.

In fact, after 12 years together, the couple was doing so well that in 2011, they sold their place in Bristol and bought a bigger house on the outskirts of Stanley.

Adam wanted to move closer to home.

We've always been a very close net family.

Moving closer to home wasn't the only big change the couple made, however.

With their little boy scheduled to start kindergarten in the fall of 2012, Adam began looking for work.

And by May, he'd even managed to line up something.

He was being a debt collector for student loans.

A new home, a new job, and their son about to start school.

Everything appeared to be going well for Rose and Adam.

But less than a month later, Rose would walk into her mother-in-law's house and announce that her husband had vanished.

Coming up, the search for Adam begins.

I always just had that little bit of hope hoping that Adam just needed time.

And at least some members of his family suspect foul play.

Call it a mother's intuition.

By the afternoon of June 15th, 2012, it had been almost 24 hours since 30-year-old Rose Chase had walked into her mother-in-law's house in Stanley, New York, and reported that her husband, Adam, had mysteriously disappeared.

She walked in and said, oh, and by the way, Adam walked away this morning about 11 o'clock.

Him and I had a fight.

Sounded as though he got mad at his wife and went to blow off some steam somewhere.

But when Sylvia Chase spoke to her on the morning of the 15th, Rose said that Adam still hadn't come home or called.

I called her.

I said, have you heard anything from Adam?

No, I haven't.

Even more troubling, Sylvia hadn't heard anything from Adam either.

She thought something was wrong because she hadn't been hearing from him.

They spoke pretty much every day.

Worried about her son, Sylvia decided to contact the authorities.

She had contacted a sheriff's deputy that was a school resource officer at the school where she works.

I said,

What should I do about this?

He goes, let's file him.

I said, okay.

Once the missing person's report was filed, the investigators contacted the last person who'd seen Adam, his wife.

They thought that maybe she just said something to him, which made him so mad that he left.

According to Rose, that was more or less exactly what happened.

But she also said that was hardly the couple's first heated argument.

Rose told the investigators that their troubles had started soon after Adam quit his job to become a stay-at-home dad.

Although, according to Rose, he spent more time playing video games on his computer than he did with their child.

It was a virtual video game that he played with other people online.

They would go until way early in the morning.

He would sit for hours to the point that he wouldn't get up to go to the bathroom.

He would urinate in cans and bottles instead.

Rose told the investigators that she had started to feel neglected.

She didn't feel as though she got enough attention from her husband, that he paid more attention to

video games.

According to Rose, Adam wasn't just neglecting her, he was neglecting his babysitting duties too.

She told the investigators that while she was at work, Adam would sleep in, exhausted from a late night of gaming, and leave their little boy to fend for himself.

There's been times that Adam left him in the same diaper all night.

Rose even claimed that when the child was three, Adam had let the little boy wander out of the house, naked and alone.

He must have wet himself, where he stripped himself down naked,

couldn't find mom in the house, cooked the dad up, got outside, got onto the street, and started walking down the street where a couple found him.

Their little boy wasn't hurt, but according to Rose, the incident did lead to an increasing number of arguments with Adam, especially whenever she suggested he seek help for what she described as his video game addiction.

Adam's temper sometimes got the best of him.

Rose admitted that she had gotten angry too.

In fact, she told the investigators that things got so heated between her and Adam that they had even discussed getting a divorce.

Rose had enough.

Although, according to Rose, she had tried to work things out for the sake of their little boy.

Rose asked to go through some counseling and see if it was worth saving their marriage.

Rose said that Adam had refused to seek counseling, but she did say that he had taken June 14th off from work and they sent their son to spend the night at her in-laws so she and Adam could spend the day together and hopefully sort things out.

Rose and Adam that day had agreed to talk about their problems.

But according to Rose, when she tried to talk to her husband, he ignored her.

Adam continued to play on the computer, which angered Rose.

Tempers flared and voices were raised.

They had a fight.

And at some point during the shouting match, Rose said that things took a sudden turn toward violence.

She said, my son punched the wall.

But that was as far as it went, according to Rose.

Because then, perhaps afraid he would do something he'd regret, Rose said Adam had stormed out of the house.

Adam had walked away and he hadn't taken his phone or his car keys or his wallet.

And by the time Rose finished talking to the investigators, he had been missing for more than 24 hours.

She didn't know where he went.

With no solid leads, the investigators spent the next few days scouring the surrounding countryside.

They searched places they knew he liked to hike.

Searches in the woods and the trails.

Canvassing hotels looking for basically for where Adam might have been.

But all the searches turned up empty.

And by the end of the week, with still no word from Adam, his family was beginning to fear the worst.

Colored mother's intuition, but I knew something was wrong because Adam would have called me.

Adam's mother wasn't the only one beginning to suspect something had gone horribly wrong either.

On June 18th, after Adam had been missing four days, sheriff's deputies showed up at Rose's house with a cadaver dog.

They asked if they could bring the dog inside.

Rose let the deputies inside, although she did apologize for the state the house was in.

The house was really messy, smelly, cluttered.

And the only evidence the investigators found upstairs appeared to confirm Rose's account of her altercation with Adam.

There was a hole that had been patched in the wall.

But then, when the deputies asked to look in the basement, Rose did hesitate.

She told them that there was water down there, the sump pump had broke.

Was Rose hiding something?

When the deputies opened the door at the head of the basement stairs, that was definitely what it looked like, or at least smelled like.

They did at that time find a very strong odor in the basement.

You know, you could smell like something was dead in the basement.

But when the investigators got to the bottom of the stairs, it appeared that Rose had been telling the truth.

The basement was damp and full of soggy trash.

Pieces of furniture, cleaning supplies, dead rats.

And when the deputies brought the cadaver dog down, It gave no indication that a human body had ever been there.

They searched the house and came out and said there's nothing there.

Their suspicions of Rose apparently baseless.

The investigators were back to square one, but their findings did provide a little comfort to his family.

In the back of my mind, I always just had that little bit of hope, hoping that Adam just needed time.

And no one appeared more hopeful than Rose.

She would go to the police periodically for updates.

She would call.

To see if they knew anything, if they were getting close.

Unfortunately, the investigators had little else to tell her.

By November, Adam had been missing for five months, and the authorities were no closer to finding him.

They were stuck.

The authorities essentially admitted as much on November 14th, 2012.

That's when they held a joint press conference alongside Rose and Adam's family.

They came up and pleaded for the public's help, you know, in helping locate Adam.

They also called on Adam to come forward.

They talked a little bit about if he didn't want to be found, he wouldn't be found.

And then, while Rose looked on, her mother-in-law made her own desperate plea to her son.

Adam, if you're out there, please come home.

Coming up, Adam's family makes a shocking accusation.

They were kissing and touching in a way that she shouldn't be doing.

But will they get anyone to listen?

The investigators actually called us crazy.

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On November 15th, 2012, a small crowd of newspaper and TV reporters gathered outside a modest home in the tiny upstate New York town of Stanley.

24 hours after the Ontario County Sheriff's Department held a press conference about Adam Chase, who'd been missing for more than five months, his family had called a press conference of their own.

I instantly sent a letter out to every media source that I knew, and we held our own press conference the next day.

And the press conference focused on one thing, the way the authorities were handling Adam's disappearance.

They were just treating it as a missing person.

Assuming that Adam had simply walked out on his his wife and little boy, the authorities had ruled out foul play.

In fact, when they searched the couple's home after Adam's disappearance, they hadn't found any evidence of foul play either.

They did search the Chase family house on the 18th, including the basement.

They did not find anything.

But as the family told the assembled reporters, they were far less convinced than the investigators.

Adam never would have done this to his family.

His son's birthday, the first day, kindergarten, all those firsts, he wouldn't have missed those.

In fact, as far as the family was concerned, Adam's five-month absence could only mean one thing.

We weren't going to find him alive.

And they believe the person behind it was the same person they'd made a point not to invite to their press conference.

Adam's wife, Rose.

Rose did something to him.

Adam's family claimed that their suspicions were were based on more than just his mother's intuition, too.

They had a bit of a troubled marriage.

Rose had admitted as much to the investigators, but from there, her account and his family's version differed dramatically.

For starters, the family strongly disagreed with Rose's claims that Adam shirked his duties as a stay-at-home dad.

I do not believe a single word that she says about my brother's character.

Instead, they had plenty to say about Rose's character.

I had heard back in 2007 that Rose was having an affair.

And according to the family, that wasn't the only one.

They spoke of Rose having multiple affairs over the years.

But the family said that whenever they had shared their suspicions with Adam, he had always refused to believe them.

He sided with Rose and said that it couldn't happen.

He didn't believe that Rose would do anything like that to him.

But then in June of 2012, the family finally got what they believe to be proof.

A family friend had just happened to be strolling through the park in a neighboring town when she spotted Rose cuddling up to someone on a park bench.

She had to take a double take because it was Adam sitting next to Rose.

They were kissing and touching in a way that she shouldn't be doing with somebody who wasn't her husband.

Concerned, the friend had contacted Adam's sister, Jessica, and forwarded a picture she had discreetly taken with her phone.

Jessica told her mother, and within days, they'd filled Adam in on the situation.

He didn't believe it at first until my parents sent the picture.

Finally, confronted with evidence of his wife's alleged infidelity, Adam realized he had to act according to his family.

He goes, well, I'll talk about it with her.

Whether he did or not, the family didn't know for sure.

But within days of his wife being spotted in a park kissing another man, Adam Chase, had vanished.

But when the family shared their suspicions with the sheriff's department, they said their concerns were dismissed.

The sheriff's department told us it's not an episode of Law and Order and that we needed to stop thinking the worst.

I said, well, have you talked to Rose?

Has anybody interviewed her?

Do a lie detector test?

She hasn't given us any reason for it.

She's been very cooperative.

He pulled me me aside and said that, you know, you need to let this go.

Rose didn't do anything wrong.

The Chases weren't about to give up, however.

In the weeks following their press conference, they decided to put pressure on Rose.

We held rallies outside her house.

We had signs like missing posters, missing Adam, you know, that kind of stuff.

And the result was an all-out war between Rose and her in-laws.

She called the Sheriff's Department.

She had said that we were harassing her.

She said, I always thought the Chases were a nice family, but now they're all psychos.

And the local authorities warned the family to back off or face arrest.

The investigators actually called us crazy.

However, at least one person in town sided with the Chase family, a local private investigator named Rodney Miller.

He's a very good friend of the family.

He agreed very quickly with them that something seemed wrong.

Unfortunately, even if Rose had been unfaithful, they still had no proof that she had anything to do with Adam's disappearance.

We had our gut and what our heart told us, and to me, that was good enough.

Their gut feeling wouldn't hold up in a court of law, however.

So on December 13th, 2012, the private investigator approached the local woman who babysat for Rose.

He called me that morning and he said, will you play a game with me?

And the purpose of the game was to scare Rose into doing something rash.

Perhaps even get her to admit that Adam was dead.

I said, I want you to tell her that you heard somebody's going to be charged with murder.

The babysitter, who shared the family's suspicions about Rose, agreed to help.

We all thought that she had was behind it in some way.

So when Rose arrived to pick up her son that afternoon, Sandra played her part to to the hilt.

She usually always picked him up between 5.10 and 5.15.

It was 5.19 when she walked in the door.

And she says to me, oh, you probably think I forgot to pick up my son.

And I looked at her and I said, no.

I figured you were probably on the phone with the investigators.

And when Rose asked why, I said, because there's been a huge break in Adam's case.

She goes, oh my God, her face just went white.

No, she just says, oh,

I got to get home.

Oh, I got to get home.

And then when Rose rushed out with her son, Sandra called Rodney.

I said, get over to Rose's house now.

I said, she is unraveling.

All she needed was a nudge, which Rodney was happy to provide just as soon as he reached Rose's house.

She comes out of the house, and I walked up and I said,

I think I have enough to get an indictment against you and charge you with the murder of your husband.

He told Rose, hey, the jig's up.

It's over.

It wasn't true, but Rose didn't know that.

She just plopped onto the top step and put her head down in her hands and started rocking back and forth.

Sensing that Rose was about to break, Rodney urged her to come clean.

I said, I want to know where you buried him.

Rose's response wasn't quite what the investigator expected, though.

She popped her head up out of her hands and she said, I didn't bury him.

I burned him.

Stunned by Rose's reply, Rodney immediately contacted the authorities and Adam's family.

Rodney calls Nigos.

I found Adam.

He didn't give Adam's mother the details, though.

She wanted to know where, and I told her to come to their residence.

I didn't want to tell her over the phone what I knew.

Sylvia and her daughters rushed right over, arriving even before the authorities.

And that's when Rodney Miller finally told them the awful truth.

At first, Adam's mother was dismayed by the news.

I just.

I couldn't believe it.

But when the full implications of what Rose had done finally sank in, Sylvia turned on her in a rage.

She turned around and screamed at her, you burned my son, you bitch.

How could somebody be this callous and this monstrous to another human being?

According to Adams' family, Rose showed the same callous disregard for them.

She sat on the porch and just looked at us.

No emotion whatsoever.

She didn't break down and cry

or show any remorse.

And once sheriff's deputies arrived on the scene and took Rose into custody, she just as calmly directed them to her mother's house.

According to Rose, that was where they would find Adams' remains.

They immediately went to the mother's property down on Yates County.

When the sheriff's deputies knocked on the door and asked for permission to search the property, Rose's mother was confused.

I asked, What are we looking for?

Goes,

the body of Adam is here on your property.

Rose's mother said she figured it was all some sort of dreadful mistake.

But then her daughter stepped out of the squad car, led the deputies to a burn pile in the back of the house, and indicated that somewhere in the pile was all that remained of her husband.

They could see all sorts of things, a lot of ash, including some what appeared to be a human bone.

And that was when Rose's calm demeanor finally collapsed.

She's crying.

She's going, I'm sorry.

I didn't really want this to end up like this.

I am so sorry.

It looked like she might have been relieved, you know, that she was finally getting this off her chest.

Coming up, Rose's confession shocks the courtroom.

Head,

arms, legs,

came off no problem.

But her defense is the real surprise.

You can't kill a dead person.

On October 8th, 2013, Rose Chase stood trial in Ontario County, New York.

The 32-year-old was charged with the murder of her husband, Adam, who had mysteriously disappeared in June of 2012.

Rose reported him missing, that they got into some type of an argument one morning and he packed up and left and didn't come back.

But in December of 2012, after a private investigator hired by Adam's family convinced her she was about to be arrested for his murder, Rose not only admitted that Adam was dead, she had led the authorities to his cremated remains scattered in a burn pile behind her mother's house.

They sifted through all that ash and other rubble that was there and collected as many bone fragments as they could.

In their opening statement that morning, the prosecution claimed that Rose had killed Adam in order to get out of an increasingly loveless marriage.

Rose was unhappy in the marriage and cheated on her husband multiple times.

And since being the family's breadwinner and having allegedly been unfaithful would most likely leave her paying alimony to Adam, the prosecution claimed that Rose hadn't considered divorce an option.

She didn't want to share any of the money that she had saved with her husband.

The prosecutors had what they considered to be powerful evidence against her too.

The videotaped confession made after Rose's arrest on December 13th, 2012.

The videotape was pretty

significant in the trial, and they played the entire tape.

Although curiously, much much of Rose's confession conformed to what she'd originally told the authorities after Adam had first disappeared.

According to Rose, she had begun the day intending to save her marriage, not end it.

Him and I called into work so this way we could work things out.

But Rose claimed that their attempt to talk things over had quickly turned into an argument once Adam brought up the fact that someone had seen her in the park, supposedly kissing another man.

I told him it's just me on the park bench talking.

According to Rose, her denials only made Adam angrier.

So angry that he had even started questioning whether he was really the father of their son.

She always said it,

deep down in my heart, I love him down, but I can make him fine.

One way or another, he wanted to know for sure.

Adam wanted a DNA test.

Rose said that's when, in her anger, she had revealed a secret that she had kept hidden for years.

I told him then, no need.

She says he's not yours.

According to Rose, her husband hadn't taken the truth well.

He got serious,

punched the wall.

Then Adam turned to storm away, much as she had originally claimed.

But in the videotape, Rose added a new detail, the fact that she had tried to stop him.

I grabbed him by his left arm.

He takes his right arm, kind of gives me a little bit of push.

And according to Rose, that was when everything had gone horribly wrong.

And that's when his right foot caught the edge of the spirit.

According to her confession, Adam's death had been an accident.

I know we tumbled by I don't know how many times

he tumbled up

his head on the door.

Was it true?

Had Adam simply fallen down the stairs?

The investigators were skeptical.

On the tape, they asked Rose point-blank, did Adam trip or had he been pushed?

If it was the heat of the moment and you got and you thought enough was enough and you pushed him, you pushed him.

It's what it is.

Put on the spot by the investigators, Rose appeared to hesitate.

I don't know if I actually gave him that extra oomph.

She can try and pretend that it was an accident, but I know it was not an accident.

Did you plan on killing him?

Oh, hell no.

Intentionally or not, the result appeared to be the same.

Rose said that when she rushed down to where Adam lay sprawled at the bottom of the stairs, he appeared to be dead.

He wasn't moving.

He wasn't making any noise.

He wasn't doing anything.

But if it had been an accident, why not call 911?

Rose told the investigators that as she wondered what to do, she had come to a shocking realization.

And if he did live, according to Rose, what she just told him about their son's paternity would give him excellent grounds for divorce.

I really get 241k and everything.

In her dementian mind, it was easier just to get rid of him.

So rather than call the police, Rose said that she had heaved her husband down the second flight of stairs.

Basically to make sure that he was dead.

She just let gravity do its work.

She'd let time do its work too.

Rose told the investigators that she had left Adam where he lay.

She stacked wood from the yard and other items on top of him.

Incredibly, according to Rose, he was still in the basement when the sheriff's department brought in cadaver dogs and searched the house.

After I hid the body

and

the dogs came in,

I thought I got pretty lucky.

They brought an outdoor cadaver dog.

An outdoor cadaver dog is different than than an indoor cadaver dog, and they're not trained the same.

They have different expertise.

But with Adam's family increasingly suspicious and the smell in the basement getting worse, Rose said that she knew her luck wouldn't last.

So in late July of 2012, after Adam had been in the basement for more than a month, she had decided to get rid of him once and for all.

Did you cut him up for anything?

Did you need any tools or anything?

Because if you did, where would those be?

He just fell apart.

She said, I took him out piece by piece.

Head, arms,

legs.

Came off no problem.

It's shocking what she's saying, but then just how casual she goes about telling the details.

Including the detail that her five-year-old son had been with her, strapped in his car seat when she drove over to her mother's with Adam's remains in the trunk of her car.

There was no one there to take care of the boy.

She says, well, what the hell?

I'll just take him along.

That video just kind of puts a nail in the coffin and shows just how awful she is and how callous of a person she is.

That's definitely what the prosecution figured.

And when it was the defense's turn, they agreed that Rose's videotaped statement had been appalling.

But they also argued that it wasn't a murder confession.

Rose's lawyers talked about how it was an accident, how Rose didn't mean for Adam to die.

She didn't mean for him to fall down the stairs.

At least not when he'd gone down the first flight of stairs.

But what about the second flight?

According to the defense, that wasn't murder either.

Her defense basically argued he was dead after he went down that first flight of stairs.

The second flight was intentional, but he was already dead, so that's not murder.

They are claiming you can't kill a dead person.

Rose wouldn't make that claim directly, though.

Considering how damaging her videotaped statement had been, the defense decided not to put her on the stand.

I've spoken the truth, but my words have ultimately been turned around against me.

In fact, the defense didn't put anyone on the stand.

Rose's attorney did not call any witnesses.

Instead, before wrapping up their case, The defense requested and received an important concession from the judge, a jury instruction that just might allow Rose to dodge the murder charge.

The defense argued to have a manslaughter put on the jury selection card so they could choose either murder two, which is intentional, or manslaughter, which was accidental.

Coming up, will the jury find Rose guilty of murder?

The longer it took for the jury to come back, the more nervous I got.

Or will they opt for manslaughter?

I didn't do what everybody's claiming.

On October 18, 2013, at the Ontario County Courthouse in upstate New York, the jury announced it had just reached a verdict in Rose Chase's murder trial.

Thanks to the persistence of the victim's family and their private investigator, the 32-year-old mother was accused of killing her husband, Adam, in June of 2012.

I don't doubt for a second that she,

in some sort of way, planned it.

The defense, on the other hand, had argued that Rose was only guilty of hiding her husband's death, not causing it.

Their defense is that he accidentally fell down the stairs and then she panicked.

And the jury had just spent the past seven hours trying to decide which side to believe.

The longer it took for the jury to come back with a verdict, the more nervous I got.

The whole situation was just stressful, not knowing what was going to happen.

In the end, all that stress and uncertainty came down to the crucial moment when the verdict was read.

She was found guilty of second-degree murder.

It was a hard-won victory for Adam's family.

I'm ecstatic that there was a guilty verdict.

I was terrified throughout the entire trial that she would get away with it.

But while Adams' mother was equally pleased that her daughter-in-law had been found guilty, she was less thrilled with Rose's sentence.

24 years to life in prison.

I wish we had the death penalty.

I really do, because I don't think she deserves to live.

A lot of people forgive at sentencing, but this family says they will never forgive her.

That's no surprise, according to Rose.

She claims that the only reason she's in prison at all is because Adams' family was so determined to put her there.

My trial was nothing more than like a modern

day Salem witch trial.

And they had a bed for me waiting in a prison before the verdict was in.

And she'll be there a long time, especially if Adams' family has any say in the matter.

She'll see me at every parole hearing for the rest of her life, fighting for my brother because she took away his voice, but she's not going to take away his memory.

Rose, on the other hand, maintains that no time in prison and no jury's verdict can take away what she believes to be true, her innocence.

I didn't do what everybody's claiming that I said I did.

Rose Chase filed an appeal.

In 2018, she lost her appeal for the murder conviction.

She still maintains charges for second-degree murder and tampering with physical evidence.

She will be eligible for parole in 2037.

She is currently housed at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, New York.

Adams' family has custody of her son.

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