Patty James

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Speaker 3 After his family endured a heartbreaking tragedy, she stepped in to fill the void left behind.

Speaker 6 She agreed to adopt us all and become basically our new mother.

Speaker 3 And after years of turmoil, she finally felt she belonged.

Speaker 6 She had a very noticeable and deep scar that she carried with her for the rest of her life.

Speaker 3 He didn't see that.

Speaker 7 He saw the beautiful person on the inside.

Speaker 3 But a terrible crime abruptly upends the life they built together.

Speaker 4 The family found him inside of his vehicle. He was struck lunt trauma right side of the head, over the ear.

Speaker 1 It didn't happen in the vehicle.

Speaker 3 As an investigation launches, detectives must wade through a sea of lies and deception to catch a killer.

Speaker 2 She pretends to be an entirely made-up flight attendant. He seems confused and he says he's never even heard of couple.

Speaker 8 She was using me in a lot of her scams and cons.

Speaker 3 Detectives quickly find that outward appearances can't disguise the monster within.

Speaker 1 When a person closes the door at night, nobody knows what goes on inside.

Speaker 7 They would get into huge fights and they were all yelling fights, screaming matches.

Speaker 1 She goes, I don't remember anything about this murder. I don't remember being part of the murder.

Speaker 6 If the word evil could be applied to a person, it would definitely be applied to her.

Speaker 3 In the late 1980s, Wilton Manors, Florida had all the charm of a beach town without the hustle and bustle of visiting tourists.

Speaker 1 Wilton Manor's been a small quiet area where people move to to get away from Fort Lauderdale and the noise that you would get from the beach area.

Speaker 4 A quiet bedroom community for the most part, definitely a low crime area.

Speaker 3 But on March 24th, 1987 at 9.22 p.m., An urgent 911 call comes in from the family of 37-year-old Bernie James, reporting a dire situation outside the family home.

Speaker 4 It was reported to us that the victim's wife found him inside of his vehicle with the front seat, front passenger seat fully reclined.

Speaker 4 He was slumped over to the side. He was unresponsive and the family, as reported, removed him from the vehicle and began CPR on him.

Speaker 4 EMS responded along with Wilton Manus PD.

Speaker 1 When the first unit responds on the scene, the person was on the lawn being attended to with CPR

Speaker 4 EMS determined that the victim was deceased

Speaker 3 assessing his injuries it's clear 37 year old Bernie James didn't die of natural causes the first officer observes that there's some blood on the right side of the ear

Speaker 4 there was blood inside the car part of the center console

Speaker 4 There was clear trauma to the right side of the victim's head. The victim also had ligature marks around his neck.
That means that somebody was strangling him.

Speaker 1 This was done to him and quite effectively because he was lifeless. First thing the officer is going to find out is how did he get there and what happened?

Speaker 3 When detectives arrive on the scene, they find three of Bernie's family members outside. His brother-in-law, Michael, his mother-in-law, Jane, and his wife, 36-year-old Patty James.

Speaker 2 The family is shocked. This is not someone you would expect to be murdered.
He's known as a man that everybody loved.

Speaker 3 Born on July 1st, 1949 in Washington, D.C., Bernie James was raised within a large family in the Maryland suburbs.

Speaker 6 Bernie was the eldest of nine children. My father was really big into Boy Scouts and nature, and, you know, he loved to camp.
He loved to canoe, hiking.

Speaker 3 After high school, Bernie enlisted in the Marines and ended up in Vietnam.

Speaker 6 He served two tours, was a Lance corporal in the Marine Corps. He wouldn't talk about Vietnam very much, but I do know it had a profound impact on him.

Speaker 3 In the 1970s, Bernie returned to Maryland and joined the fire department.

Speaker 6 He became a firefighter he did have a very protective nature and he loved to help people. He was a paramedic, which is how he met my mother, Lisa Jean Paul.

Speaker 6 They were both paramedics and they actually met on a call. They were both responding to a medical situation.
They kind of hit it off a little bit.

Speaker 6 One thing led to another and they were married within a year.

Speaker 7 My mom and dad just loved each other so much.

Speaker 7 They had like a magnetic attraction to one another.

Speaker 3 Bernie and his beloved wife, Lisa, welcomed three kids in just over three years of marriage, Michael, Irene, and Nicholas.

Speaker 8 My brother is two years older than me. My sister is one year older than me.

Speaker 1 I am the youngest.

Speaker 3 But the close-knit family would be ripped apart just before Christmas 1980.

Speaker 6 My mother Lisa had an aneurysm and collapsed. Unfortunately, there was nothing the doctors could do for her.
And after the 12 hours, they,

Speaker 6 you know, had ceased life support.

Speaker 3 With three children under three years old, Bernie struggled to hold his family together.

Speaker 6 My mother's death had a huge impact on my father. He was completely distraught afterward.
He didn't know what he was going to do because he had raised three children who were all very close in age.

Speaker 7 I can imagine how difficult it must have been to be a single man with three very young children.

Speaker 3 As the years passed, the single father yearned to find love again. And in 1982, yet another chance encounter would bring him just that.

Speaker 6 My father was working dispatch for the fire station

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 6 was working in

Speaker 6 the emergency line. This was the days before 911.
And this woman named Patty called him up.

Speaker 7 She was looking for a different person,

Speaker 7 but he was the one on duty that day.

Speaker 6 They struck up a conversation and, you know, he told her about his problems. They kind of built up a little bit of a friendship over the phone.
They got to talking.

Speaker 3 She would call every single day just to talk to him.

Speaker 6 He'd been a widower for two years now and was having a hard time raising his children. So a woman expressing interest in him was appealing to him.

Speaker 6 She seemed nice. She really seemed to like us.

Speaker 6 Patty and her family were from Silver Spring, Maryland. Her father was a police detective.
Her mother was a banker. She was the middle child.

Speaker 3 Despite her stable upbringing, Patty struggled with her self-confidence.

Speaker 9 She had the scar that literally dragged a portion of her face down. So that's physically is the first thing that you really notice with her.

Speaker 6 Patty developed a tumor when she was very young, young, had to have it surgically removed that left her with a very noticeable and deep scar that she carried with her for the rest of her life.

Speaker 6 It became like the focus of her life.

Speaker 1 She had two prior marriages. Previously, she had been married to Richard Mankin,

Speaker 1 who was a Fort Lauderdale police officer.

Speaker 3 Divorced in 1982, Patty was ready to put herself out there again when she struck up her friendship with Bernie.

Speaker 2 Things are going well with Patty and Bernie on the phone.

Speaker 2 You know, they just clicked, but she was a little apprehensive to meet him in person because, of course, she didn't know how he'd react to that scar on her face.

Speaker 3 Finally, Patty and Bernie agreed to meet.

Speaker 7 He didn't see that scar on her face. He didn't see that.
He saw the beautiful person on the inside.

Speaker 1 As we speed up the relationship, she ends up moving in with Bernie. Patty ended up being the surrogate mom to these three children of his because basically he was working all the time.

Speaker 7 Patricia made it seem like she would be a loving, devoted mother to us, that she would help him.

Speaker 7 And that, you know, like, I could imagine that he saw it as a great weight lifted off of his shoulder.

Speaker 3 The couple quickly married in 1982, and Patty took steps to show her commitment to Bernie's three toddlers.

Speaker 6 She said, you know, she really loved us and she wanted to be our mother, you know,

Speaker 6 legally as well as, you know, in name.

Speaker 6 So, you know, she agreed to adopt us all and become our, basically our new mother.

Speaker 3 About a year after their wedding, the James family made an abrupt move.

Speaker 6 So we were living in Edgewater, Maryland. Our father's family is there, and Patty's family has moved to Florida.
So she decides to move us all down to Florida to be with her family.

Speaker 3 Florida provided a fresh start for Bernie to pursue something he was passionate about.

Speaker 8 He finally landed the Florida State Park job. What affected his decision to become a park ranger and his love of the outdoors stemmed from his time in Vietnam.

Speaker 7 I used to go with him on some of his ride-alongs. He was charged with caring for the alligators.

Speaker 1 So when we got down to Florida, you know, everything is hunky-dory.

Speaker 7 This is going to be good for us.

Speaker 3 But three years later, things have gone terribly wrong.

Speaker 1 Patty discovers him seated in the front seat of the vehicle, unresponsive.

Speaker 3 Patty explains to detectives she is willing to help with the investigation as much as she can. But first, she needs to tend to her children.

Speaker 1 She's got to focus her attention on the kids while the detectives are like standing outside trying to piece together what happened out there.

Speaker 3 While Patty and her family head inside to break the news to her children, outside, a homicide investigation begins.

Speaker 4 EMS and Wilton Manners PD then secures the scene and we come in to do our job.

Speaker 4 We had motor oil off to the side and some tools inside the vehicle. The victim's wallet was a few feet from the vehicle.
It appeared to have been rifled through and it was tossed on the driveway area.

Speaker 1 There was no cash, but his ID and credit cards was just still in a wallet.

Speaker 4 In my experience, If someone's going to commit a robbery and they take a wallet or a purse, they're not going to inventory it right there.

Speaker 4 They're going to run down the street or hop in the car and will find the purse or the remnants of the wallet blocks away, not at the scene.

Speaker 4 That's an inconsistency with a traditional type of robbery.

Speaker 3 With Bernie's murder seeming less like a random act of violence, investigators suspect something more sinister may be at play.

Speaker 2 So police were asking the question now, was this personal?

Speaker 3 Coming up, a potential suspect emerges.

Speaker 1 She came out there and he was talking to a black guy.

Speaker 3 And a calculated scheme is revealed.

Speaker 4 The scene was set up.

Speaker 2 Somebody's not telling the truth.

Speaker 3 March 24th, 1987, Wilton Manors, Florida. Investigators are inspecting a puzzling scene outside the home of murder victim, Bernie James.

Speaker 4 We have the wallet, which was strewn about.

Speaker 4 You also had the victim, who was, again, out laying on the driveway, partially on the grass outside of the vehicle. We also have the vehicle, which is a significant piece of evidence.

Speaker 4 because this is where the crime is alleged to have occurred.

Speaker 3 As the crime scene survey wraps up and Bernie's body is sent to the medical examiner's office for a proper autopsy, reality sets in for Bernie's kids, who are just six, seven, and eight years old.

Speaker 7 At that time, we were living with Jane Donahue, Patricia's mom.

Speaker 7 And Patricia woke us all up and she brought us all into her bed. And she had said, you know, I have something terrible to tell you.
Your father's been murdered.

Speaker 7 And I remember crying. I started to shut down.

Speaker 6 I'm in total shock. I can't believe anyone would ever kill my father.
He was the nicest person in the world. No one should ever have had a reason to kill him.

Speaker 3 After settling her children, Patty heads back outside to recap the chilling events that led to the 911 call.

Speaker 1 Patty initially told the detectives on the scene that they had just gotten home from the grocery store and she was putting the groceries out.

Speaker 1 Bernie told her that he initially had to take care of an electrical problem in the vehicle and also had to do an oil change on the car.

Speaker 1 And she subsequently went inside the house and he stayed outside in the front yard with the vehicle.

Speaker 1 Patty, she's in the house and she decides to go outside and check on Bernie. She came out there and he was talking to a black guy

Speaker 1 who's looking for some matches. Now, he just wanted to light a cigar down the road.

Speaker 3 Patty says though she got a good look at the man, she didn't recognize him.

Speaker 1 He was approximately six feet tall, in his 20s, spoke with a French accent, was wearing a light color shirt and dark colored pants.

Speaker 3 Although she thought the situation was odd, Patty says her husband told her to go back into the house.

Speaker 1 She said she went back inside the house. Approximately 20 minutes later, she come back outside the house, and that's what she found Bernie inside the vehicle and the blackmail gun.

Speaker 1 So she went back in the house and called the mother who came outside and checked on him and found that he didn't have a pulse.

Speaker 2 She then calls her brother Michael, who lives just a few houses down the street.

Speaker 1 That's kind of out of the ordinary to call her brother before she called fire rescue.

Speaker 1 In stressful moments, people react differently and sometimes panic. And the first time thing they do is they call somebody that they know to come help them.

Speaker 3 After speaking with Patty, police turned to her mom and brother, who'd rushed to her side after the discovery of the body.

Speaker 1 Patty's mom, Jane, said that evening she was sick and she went to bed about 6.30 because she wasn't feeling well. And approximately 8.45, she was waken up by Patty screaming,

Speaker 1 telling her to come outside. And basically, her story is consistent with what Patty had said.

Speaker 1 They corroborate everything that she's telling the police, her brother, saying, yeah.

Speaker 1 My sister called me and she's crying. She's screaming.
I couldn't understand the word, but she said, get over here. Something's happened to Bernie.
So he rushes over.

Speaker 1 Her brother came over to the house and removed him from the vehicle and then they began doing cp art

Speaker 2 with the immediate witnesses stories all matching up investigators take a different approach patty works with a sketch artist to give him all the details and describe the man who she saw talking to her husband This is a quiet residential neighborhood in Wilton Manors.

Speaker 1 So things like that don't usually happen and people know who's in the neighborhood.

Speaker 1 So once the sketch is done, the police went around knocking to knocking on doors of several houses in the neighborhood, showing the composite, and they got no response from anybody that has seen this individual.

Speaker 1 So the first night of the search, basically, nothing comes up. There's no suspect located that night.

Speaker 3 The next morning, investigators hope the autopsy will help explain the horrific chain of events.

Speaker 4 The victim was struck, blunt trauma,

Speaker 4 right side of the head, over the ear.

Speaker 4 He had several ligature marks that were around his neck in an ascending position, which means somebody was pulling up on his neck

Speaker 4 with some type of ligature, whether it be a rope, whether it be wire. He died of asphyxiation as determined by the medical examiner.

Speaker 2 Bernie doesn't have any defensive wounds at all, which means he was probably surprised by his attacker.

Speaker 4 So basically he didn't know what's coming. He just got hit, went down, ligature is applied, he's choked out, he dies of asphyxiation.
And that could not have occurred in the car.

Speaker 1 It didn't happen in the vehicle because there was no room in the vehicle to be able to strike somebody in the head.

Speaker 1 And with blunt force trauma to the head, you're going to have tremendous amount of bleeding coming from the ear in that area. So in this instance,

Speaker 1 when you observe the vehicle and the passenger side, you're not seeing that amount of blood that should coincide with the type of injury that he has sustained.

Speaker 2 Now detectives know that the murder didn't happen in that car, it happened somewhere else.

Speaker 3 After reviewing the medical examiner's findings, investigators turned to the victim's vehicle for more clues.

Speaker 4 We have a garage facility where we conduct further investigation about the vehicle. We take blood samples from inside the car.
We look for any other trace evidence that may be present.

Speaker 1 One of the things that Patty had said was that he was going to do an oil change. They checked the dipstick.
They noticed the vehicle was at full.

Speaker 1 So that's inconsistent to what she had said that he was going to do an oil change.

Speaker 3 The discovery casts doubt on Patty's initial story.

Speaker 4 The lack of excessive blood within the vehicle, the way the scene was set up with the oil cans when the car didn't need oil, the fact that the wallet was rifled through within a couple of feet of the vehicle.

Speaker 4 When you look at all the physical evidence, it is absolutely inconsistent with the report to 911 and to the police.

Speaker 2 Somebody's not telling the truth. And investigators begin to look at Patty.

Speaker 1 We need to talk to her again.

Speaker 3 Coming up, investigators learn things aren't all they seem in the James household.

Speaker 7 I could see it in my dad's eyes and face that he just wanted to get as far away as possible.

Speaker 3 And a stunning confession adds a new twist to the investigation.

Speaker 1 She paused for a second. She lowered her head and said that she knows who killed him.

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Speaker 3 Two days after beloved father and park ranger Bernie James was murdered, investigators in Broward County, Florida are beginning to poke holes in his wife Patty's initial statement.

Speaker 1 Patty implied that the murder must have happened outside the house.

Speaker 1 She had just seen him earlier with the black male. And then 20 minutes later, she comes out again and then he's dead.
You know, it just didn't make any sense. I think she totally made up the story.

Speaker 3 Rather than tip Patty off with probing questions, they begin digging into her relationship with Bernie through other means.

Speaker 1 We want to know what their personal life is about.

Speaker 1 So we start talking to other people to see if there's any issues with the two of them.

Speaker 3 On March 27th, 1987, investigators question Bernie's parents, Dolores and Bernard James Sr., and they paint a troubling picture of the couple's relationship.

Speaker 2 Bernie's parents fly into town for their son's funeral, and detectives do meet with them, and they discover that after Bernie married Patty, there was definitely some bad blood within the family.

Speaker 7 Patricia had told my dad, I'm the woman of the house now. Care Care for me, care for your children, don't care for other people.
And so he kind of stopped helping out his parents.

Speaker 7 He stopped buying them food, you know, stopped doing all those things. And she had somehow convinced my dad to move down to Florida because there was this rift in the family.

Speaker 1 Bernie's mother, Dolores, said she hadn't talked to her son. very often.
One of the things that she did brought up is that they left Maryland and moved and they lost contact with him.

Speaker 1 Dolores kind of said that the reason that Bernie married Patricia is to fill a void in his life and have somebody who could take care of his children.

Speaker 1 So in that capacity, he kind of rushed into this whole relationship with her.

Speaker 7 I never saw them kiss. I never saw them hold hands.
I never saw them hug. I saw it more of like a companionship or friendship type relationship.

Speaker 3 Bernie's parents say that a lack of affection wasn't the only issue plaguing Bernie and Patty's marriage.

Speaker 7 They would get into huge fights and they were all verbal

Speaker 7 yelling fights, screaming matches, and she would make him leave.

Speaker 7 As I got older and I started to see their dynamic, I could see it in my dad's eyes and face that he just wanted to get as far away from her as possible.

Speaker 3 Bernie's mother says that after years of silence, she finally heard from her son in the fall of 1985.

Speaker 6 Before my father's murder was the first time he called his mother in years.

Speaker 6 My father told her that he was coming home, that he was going to leave Patty, that he had had enough, that he was going to, you know, leave her, divorce her.

Speaker 3 But Dolores says Bernie never followed through with the move. And almost a year later, she received a disturbing communication from her son.

Speaker 1 Dolores had said approximately six months prior to the murder, she received a typewritten letter supposedly coming from her son that he had been drinking and that he had been abusing Patricia.

Speaker 1 And she felt that was kind of odd that he would send her a typewritten letter.

Speaker 2 It was completely out of character for Bernie, so the family started to wonder if Patty wrote that letter.

Speaker 3 On April 8th, 1987, investigators confront Patty with their suspicions about her story and her strained relationship with Bernie.

Speaker 1 So originally Patty was called down to the station to look at some mug shots and she said she couldn't identify anybody. And from that, they segued into some questions that they wanted to clear up.

Speaker 1 Her story just doesn't make sense. I don't know who has an oil change that late at night, you know?

Speaker 4 Whatever people say from the first time they speak to a law enforcement, they're locked into that. If they change their story, they're going to have to explain why.

Speaker 3 As investigators push Patty, her demeanor suddenly shifts.

Speaker 1 The detectives asked Patricia if there was anything else she had to say. She paused for a second.
She lowered her head and said that she knows who killed her husband.

Speaker 3 Investigators press Patty for more details.

Speaker 2 Patty says she knows who killed Bernie, but she didn't see what happened. And she says the man that did it, she met a few months ago at a bowling alley, and his name is Tim Ott.

Speaker 3 According to Patty, she, Tim, and Bernie were in a bowling league together. And Tim had witnessed firsthand the abuse she'd endured endured at the hands of Bernie

Speaker 1 one of the incidents she recalled is that one time her and Bernie were at a bowling alley and Bernie became abusive with her and Tim had seen that incident

Speaker 3 Patty's new story is that a few weeks later on the night of March 24th She and Bernie went to Tim's house to discuss the bowling schedule.

Speaker 2 Patty says when she gets there, she doesn't feel well, so she asked to use Tim's bathroom.

Speaker 3 Once she went to the bathroom, Patty says things took a turn.

Speaker 1 She noticed the volume of the TV was up. She said when she tried to get out, the bathroom door was locked and she was unable to get out of the bathroom.

Speaker 2 Tim tells Patty to stay inside the bathroom. After a while, he lets her out.
When she gets out, she doesn't see Bernie in the living room. Tim grabs her by the arm and takes her outside.

Speaker 2 And that's when she sees Bernie inside of his car.

Speaker 2 According to Patty, Tim drives her back to her home. Tim then drives back home, gets inside Bernie's car, and drives Bernie's car back to Patty's house and then leaves on foot.

Speaker 2 Patty says, once she felt safe, she went outside and she checked on Bernie, but she says Bernie didn't have a pulse.

Speaker 1 Patricia realizes that

Speaker 1 Bernie's dead.

Speaker 3 Patty claims that she felt she had to keep this horrible secret.

Speaker 9 She was afraid of Timothy Ott, so she engineered this robbery scenario.

Speaker 3 To detectives, the idea that Tim would orchestrate such an elaborate plot to save Patty from Bernie's alleged abuse feels far-fetched.

Speaker 1 The police asked her to take a polygraph test. She says she couldn't take it at that time, that they would reschedule it.

Speaker 3 Though Patty's story sounds extreme, without anything to hold her on, investigators release her and immediately bring Tim Ott in for questioning.

Speaker 1 He agrees to cooperate with the police and go down to the police station. When they get down there, he's very soft-spoken and very intelligent.
And he proceeds to answer all their questions.

Speaker 2 Detectives ask him about his relationship with Patty and Bernie, and he seems confused and he says he's never even heard of the couple.

Speaker 1 They then show him a poloid picture of Patricia James, and he goes and tells them, I know her by the name of Demi. I don't know her by the name of Patricia.

Speaker 3 Coming up, investigators unmask a master of deception.

Speaker 2 She is pretending to be not one, but two different people.

Speaker 8 She was using me in a lot of her scams and cons.

Speaker 3 And a chilling plot is exposed.

Speaker 2 They discussed several different ways on how to kill Bernie. They were going to grind up apple seeds and apricot seeds along with some valium.

Speaker 3 Investigators sitting down with potential murder suspect Tim Ott are shocked to learn that the woman who accused him of murder may be leading a double life.

Speaker 1 They're presenting him with photo IDs of Bernie, the victim, and Bernie's wife, Patricia.

Speaker 1 And he's like confused. And he goes, Wait, what? He goes, that's Booth, and that's demi

Speaker 1 that's how i know them they're all in the bowling league demi's a friend of my fiancé tj tim says tj his fiancé is a woman that he's only met over the phone

Speaker 1 and he goes booth was married to my fiancé tj and she told me he's an abuser

Speaker 2 He also says that TJ told him that Booth was a child molester.

Speaker 3 On the night of March 24th, 1987, Tim says he and Demi, aka Patty, put a murder plot into motion to stop Booth from hurting anyone else ever again.

Speaker 1 Tim says that they show up at his apartment and Demi, he goes to the bathroom and Tim knows that this individual was a child molester.

Speaker 1 And sometime during the conversation, he grabs a baseball bat and hits Booth on the side of the head.

Speaker 1 He said that he didn't go down, so he grabbed some wire and began to strangle him.

Speaker 1 And he said he had a hard time gripping the wires, so he had to have several times where he had to readjust the wires in order to strangle him where he had no breath left.

Speaker 1 Hot went on to say that they then loaded Booth in his car and he drove him back to the house.

Speaker 3 After listening to Tim's chilling confession, detectives attempt to understand the roles of the other people involved in the plot and their real identities.

Speaker 2 At this point, they know that Patty is pretending to be Demi, and they know that Patty brought Bernie to the apartment to get killed. Now they're trying to figure out who is this mysterious TJ.

Speaker 1 Trot, after making the statement, produces a picture of TJ from his wallet and shows the investigators there's not somebody that the investigators knew at all.

Speaker 3 Since Tim says he has never met TJ in person, investigators have a sneaking suspicion she may not even exist.

Speaker 2 Based on all of Patty's manipulations, police are now realizing that Patty is pretending to be not one, but two different people.

Speaker 2 She pretends to be TJ, an entirely made-up flight attendant. And then when she realizes that TJ is going to actually have to meet Tim in person, she creates Demi.

Speaker 2 Demi is the one that actually goes and meets face-to-face with Tim and puts the entire murder plot in motion.

Speaker 3 Tim says he and Demi, aka Patty, had discussed several potential plots prior to the murder.

Speaker 2 They discussed several different ways on how to kill Bernie. One was they were going to grind up some valium and bake it into a cake.
They did that, but it only made him sick.

Speaker 2 Then they talked about shooting him, but they couldn't find a remote field to make that plot happen.

Speaker 3 Ultimately, the pair decides Tim's apartment was the most secure location to commit the crime.

Speaker 1 White after his statement said that he tried to clean everything up, but there were still spots of blood on the carpet.

Speaker 3 Tim accompanies investigators to his apartment on April 8th, 15 days after Bernie's murder.

Speaker 1 He brings the Texas to his house. He shows them where the event took place.
There is still a little bit of blood there, even though he said he had cleaned it.

Speaker 1 It just came together.

Speaker 4 When we did the follow-up investigation at Mr. Ott's apartment

Speaker 4 with luminol, we discovered a great amount of blood there.

Speaker 4 Our discovery is consistent with the explanation that the incident,

Speaker 4 the blood trauma, was initially induced in the bedroom of Mr. Ott's apartment.
And this adds credibility to the confession that was obtained from him.

Speaker 3 Detectives formally charge Tim Ott with first-degree murder.

Speaker 3 But before they go after Patty, they circle back to Bernie's family and uncover more evidence about the extent of her deceptions.

Speaker 6 Patty was a manipulative con artist. Her primary means of income was frivolous lawsuits that she won.

Speaker 1 If you start to look at her background, you go, wow,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 this was a culmination of a lot of years of her going around and scamming people and

Speaker 1 getting what she wants.

Speaker 8 She was using me in a lot of her scams and cons. I was the focus for her scams because I was the easiest to manipulate.

Speaker 1 One of the scams that Patricia did was

Speaker 1 she went and told everybody her son Nicholas was deaf. She tried to raise money for Nicholas and for the family.

Speaker 6 We would go to the library and she would check out books on American Sign Language.

Speaker 6 And, you you know, she would try to teach it to Nicholas and have him do it back to her.

Speaker 2 She used this as a way to scam churches out of money.

Speaker 3 On top of using her children for financial gain, Patty isolated them from the outside world as much as possible.

Speaker 2 Neighbors were shocked to find out that Patty had children. They said they had never seen them before.

Speaker 6 We never really left the house. I mean, we would be allowed to go go to the backyard but we didn't you know play on the street.
We didn't go outside really. People didn't really see us.

Speaker 3 According to Bernie's family, Patty even kept them from their own family.

Speaker 8 I know that she was trying to cause a rift not only just

Speaker 1 between

Speaker 8 him and his family but between him and us.

Speaker 8 One of the stipulations working as a park ranger is that you're on site and she would hardly ever let him see us.

Speaker 8 She was completely trying to isolate us three from everybody.

Speaker 6 We were kids, we absolutely trusted Patty implicitly.

Speaker 6 We didn't really know any better.

Speaker 2 It was clear that those children suffered years of abuse by Patty.

Speaker 1 Her being so abusive to the children and involved in so many other scams, the police come up with she was this person that could manipulate someone to commit a murder.

Speaker 3 Coming up, a layered motive exposes the twisted mind of a criminal.

Speaker 6 She had him take out a life insurance policy on himself.

Speaker 2 She tells them that she has suffered abuse the entire time.

Speaker 1 She knew how people were sympathetic to her and she knew how to manipulate them.

Speaker 3 After learning more about Patty James' capacity for manipulation and violence, investigators are nearly certain she's responsible for the murder of her husband, Bernie James.

Speaker 1 At this point, realizing that she was capable of doing that, they think she is. Now they're trying to figure out what her motive was to have killed.

Speaker 3 Investigators believe Patty felt forced to act when Bernie decided to leave her.

Speaker 1 her. In my opinion, she realized that

Speaker 1 her husband, Bernie, was going to divorce her and

Speaker 1 she couldn't handle it.

Speaker 6 Patty couldn't stand rejection. And this would have been her third, if my father had successfully divorced her, it would have been her third divorce.

Speaker 3 Investigators contact Bernie's insurance agent and learn of another possible motive.

Speaker 6 Before my father died, she had him take out a life insurance policy on himself

Speaker 6 and had all three of his children declared non-beneficiaries. So Patty was the only beneficiary to his policy.

Speaker 2 With the physical evidence, Tim Ott's confession, the life insurance policies, and the history of abuse and manipulation, detectives now believe they have enough for an arrest warrant.

Speaker 3 On June 8th, 1987, investigators make their move.

Speaker 1 Police were able to build a case and meet with the prosecutors that led to her arrest at the children's school. The police go to the school.
She drops off the kids.

Speaker 1 She sees the police and they effect the arrest on her for first-degree murder.

Speaker 3 Now in custody, Patty says she is finally ready to come clean.

Speaker 2 She tells them that she has suffered abuse the entire time she's been married to Bernie and she just couldn't take it anymore.

Speaker 3 But according to Patty, it wasn't really her who orchestrated the plot.

Speaker 1 She literally drops her head down.

Speaker 1 It's quiet for a few seconds. She pops up and then she goes,

Speaker 1 I don't remember anything about this murder. I don't remember being part of the murder.
It must have been TJ who

Speaker 1 is another personality personality in me.

Speaker 3 Investigators are not convinced and she remains in custody to await trial.

Speaker 3 While Patty is ready to take her chances in court, her accomplice isn't willing to risk it.

Speaker 2 So rather than take his chances with a jury, Tim decides to take a plea for second-degree murder and testify against Patty.

Speaker 3 On November 30th, 1987, Patty's trial kicks off.

Speaker 1 The prosecutor painted Patty as being the manipulative one who set up the murder of her husband. The defense came back and said this was all Tim Ott's dealing.

Speaker 1 He was the one who did the murder, and Patty was the victim of the case.

Speaker 3 When both sides rest, it's hard to tell what the jury will believe.

Speaker 9 There was

Speaker 9 one juror who stopped listening, stopped looking at the evidence, would not engage in discussions when it went back to the jury,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 9 he refused to say guilty or not guilty. He just refused to

Speaker 1 work.

Speaker 9 And at that point, the court had no choice but to enter a mistrial.

Speaker 3 But in Patty's second trial, she is quickly convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Speaker 1 I think they did a great job with building the case against her and showing what a manipulative person she was.

Speaker 6 If the word evil could be applied to a person, it would definitely be applied to Patty.

Speaker 6 She has no conscience.

Speaker 6 No compassion, no remorse.

Speaker 6 She truly doesn't care about anyone else but herself.

Speaker 1 I don't view her as human.

Speaker 7 That's why I called her my evil step monster is because she is pure evil.

Speaker 6 If I could talk to my father right now, I would say, you know,

Speaker 6 I wish you'd never married Patty. I wish you'd never met her.

Speaker 6 I wish we'd been closer because I do miss you. I miss you tremendously.

Speaker 3 Bernie's children were raised by their maternal grandparents. Timothy Ott was sentenced to 20 years in prison and has since been released.

Speaker 3 In 2018, Patty James died in prison after serving 30 years of her life sentence.