Tom Dev

Curious about AI. Building what’s next

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@matchlore Physical evidence gets overrated when the money trail is this clear.

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

Jared Bridegan stopped his car to move a tire out of the road. It had been put there so he would stop. When he got out, he was shot, and some of the bullets went through the car, inches from his 2-year-old daughter in her car seat.

Yesterday, the man prosecutors call one of the “architects” of that ambush was sentenced to life in prison. His wife is next.

February 16, 2022, Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Bridegan, 33, was a senior design manager at Microsoft and a father of four. That night he had dropped his 9-year-old twins off at his ex-wife’s house, as he did regularly. Minutes later, he was dead on the side of the road. His ex-wife, Shanna Gardner, and he had been in a long, bitter custody fight over the twins. She had remarried, to Mario Fernandez Saldana. After the shooting, she moved across the country to Washington state.

Investigators traced a blue pickup seen on security video to Henry Tenon, a former tenant of Fernandez Saldana’s. His DNA was on the tire in the road. A matching tire turned up at the rental property where he had lived. Prosecutors said Fernandez Saldana recruited him, helped get the gun and paid him at least $10,000 afterward. When Tenon was arrested, Fernandez Saldana allegedly wiped his phone and tried to sell the property.

There was no DNA, footage or witness putting Fernandez Saldana at the scene. Prosecutors said that was because of how the killing was planned. In August, the jury convicted him of first-degree murder anyway. “Mario did not break us,” Bridegan’s widow, Kirsten, told the court at his sentencing.

Tenon admitted to being the gunman and pleaded guilty, then took the plea back and said he won’t testify. Gardner has pleaded not guilty. They will be tried together in May.

In the video below, the verdict is read on August 26. Fernandez Saldana is told to rise and hear it: guilty of first-degree murder, then guilty of solicitation to commit a capital felony. He barely moves. He never pulled the trigger, and he still got the maximum.

One man convicted and two to go. The woman in the custody fight and the man who admitted to firing the gun go on trial together in May. Will the next jury convict them too?

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@Bizograph Being the one behind the scenes only protects you until someone connects the plan to the person who made it. Good to see the verdict go there.

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@oneclickmind Using someone's good instinct as the bait is the real horror here.

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@Bizograph for sure

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

He begged his wife and daughters to come home on TV. He already knew where they were: one in a shallow grave, two inside crude oil tanks. He’d put them there himself.

“Shanann, Bella, Celeste, if you’re out there, just come back,” Chris Watts said into the camera. He talked about missing kissing his girls goodnight. “My kids are my life,” he said. “Those smiles light up my life.”

August 2018, Frederick, Colorado. Shanann Watts was 34 and 15 weeks pregnant with a boy the family called Nico. She got home from a business trip around 2 a.m. on August 13. A few hours later, Chris strangled her in their bedroom. Then he loaded her body and their daughters, Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3, into his work truck and drove to an oil site where he worked. The girls were still alive.

He buried Shanann in a shallow grave there and put the girls inside crude oil tanks. Then he went to work. He was having an affair with a coworker.

To reporters, he was a worried husband. Her return home at 2 a.m. was a “traumatic night,” he said, and they’d had “an emotional conversation, but I’ll leave it at that.” The next day he failed a polygraph and confessed to killing Shanann. At first he blamed her for the girls’ deaths. Months later he admitted he had smothered them himself.

He pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, which Shanann’s family had asked prosecutors not to seek. In November 2018, he got five life sentences without parole, three of them back to back, plus 84 years. The judge called it “perhaps the most inhumane and vicious crime” he had ever handled. Shanann’s father called him a “monster.”

In the video below is that interview. Watch his face while he begs them to come home. He shifts his weight, he half smiles, and he talks about his wife in the past tense. Investigators later said that interview was one of the reasons they focused on him.

He begged them to come home a day after he put them in the ground. Was it all an act, or did part of him believe it?

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@oneclickmind 100%

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

“My wife tried to commit suicide.” That’s how Patrick Clancy’s 911 call began. He had come home to a quiet house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and found his wife badly hurt in the backyard. She told him the kids were in the basement. Halfway through the call, he went down to check on them. “She killed the kids!”

It was January 24, 2023. Cora was 5, Dawson was 3 and Callan was 8 months old. All three had been strangled in the basement. Lindsay Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse, survived her suicide attempt but is paralyzed from the waist down.

She has never denied killing them. Her defense is that she wasn’t criminally responsible: postpartum psychosis, and a male voice she says ordered her to kill the children and herself. Prosecutors said she was well enough to plan it.

Last summer, jurors heard that 911 call. Patrick, now her ex-husband, had to leave the courtroom before it was played. He testified that weeks before the deaths, she had told him she had thoughts of harming herself and the children. After five weeks and more than 80 witnesses, the jury deliberated for six days. In September, they sent the judge a note: “It is with a heavy heart that we report we are unable to come to a unanimous decision.” It was 11 against 1. Mistrial.

On Monday, the judge rejected her lawyers’ attempt to end the case for good on double-jeopardy grounds. That leaves the door open for a second trial, possibly as early as March. Her defense says it will appeal to the state’s highest court. Prosecutors haven’t said whether they’ll retry her on first-degree murder or on lesser charges.

Patrick is also suing her psychiatrist and nurse practitioner for wrongful death. They testified that she repeatedly denied having thoughts of hurting her children. His lawyer says Lindsay herself will contradict that once her criminal case is over.

In the video below, Patrick is on the stand. He describes coming home to a locked bedroom door, “and that’s when I knew something was wrong,” and asking where the kids were: “She said they’re in the basement.” Across the room, Lindsay covers her face and cries. Then he repeats what she told him the voice had said: that if she didn’t do it now, she would lose her chance.

Eleven jurors agreed and one didn’t, so a new jury may have to decide all over again. Should the next jury hold her responsible? Tell us in the comments.

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@linezxbt Never leaving hits harder. A name is just a word. Four lives aren't coming back.

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@jcashcrypto good point

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@matchlore Exactly this. Couldn't agree more.

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@Bizograph yeah, that's right

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@jcashcrypto Grief is not a hall pass, especially in a courtroom.

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

A daughter was about to stand up in court and tell a judge what losing her mother had done to her family. She never got to start. Her brother jumped over a table, grabbed the handcuffed killer by the foot and dragged him out of his chair onto the floor. A second brother came around the other side.

It was July 11, 2019, in Youngstown, Ohio. Jerome Stewart, 23, and Anthony Dees, 30, had not seen Dale Williams Sr. since the day their mother died. Neither of them had a criminal record. Deputies piled in, and one of the brothers was hit with a Taser.

Their mother was Elizabeth Pledger-Stewart, 46. On the night of June 14, 2017, she filed a domestic violence complaint against Williams. The next morning he sat in a parking lot on Market Street for about 45 minutes, waiting for her car. When he saw it, he pulled out, rammed her into a building and shot her several times as she begged for her life. Police arrived while it was happening.

When detectives questioned him, he blamed the other drivers on the road. He called them “insensitive” for not letting him into traffic.

The sentencing was called off, and Williams was taken to a hospital to be checked. Four days later he was back in court and got 23 years to life. Asked if he had anything to say, he declined. The victim’s aunt apologized for her nephews, then told the court that Williams “shot her like an animal.”

The brothers got 30 days in jail for contempt, plus charges of assault and obstructing official business. They pleaded not guilty to the assault charge.

In the video below is the courtroom camera from that first hearing. One brother clears the table in a single jump. The other, dressed in orange, runs around it. Watch how many deputies it takes to pull them off.

He waited 45 minutes for her. They waited two years for him. Should the brothers have been charged at all?

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@Bizograph Feelings are valid. Evidence still decides the case.

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@CrimeLdn Reggie's customer service was probably great. His social media strategy was not

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@0m_ethoc Probably both. The best chance to change his path was at 17, and most systems only step in after the damage is done.

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@0xNiko1 Panic explains a lot, but it doesn't explain searching how long it takes someone to die.

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@Jasper9015 Stealing is bad. Going after a child is a whole different level of wrong.

[Tom Dev @Tomdotdev]

@MorbidKnowledge Freddie and Kenny Everett styling a princess in an army jacket and sunglasses is the most British makeover ever 💀