Erin Moriarty

Inside the courtroom, Daniel looked noticeably different from the year before, when he had first confessed to killing Chip Northup and Claudia Maupin.

Gone was the long, scruffy hair.

Now it was cut short, neater, and darker.

This is Amanda Zambor, the Deputy District Attorney for Yolo County.

I spoke with her in 2018.

At the time of the trial, she was one of the two prosecutors.

Had you ever run into a defendant like this?

And did that add a whole other, the fact that this defendant was a kid?

is it possible to change them?

Zambor, along with co-prosecutor Michael Cabral, began prepping for the trial as soon as Daniel was arrested in June 2013.

What about, though, the defense argument that this guy, this young man, had a lot of trauma?

His mother left the family for another woman.

He was in this car accident when his father had a heart attack.

He had to save his father.

He was bullied in school.

possible that that could cause this kind of anger and lashing out?

But Zambor needed to convince the jurors that Daniel had intended to kill.

To put Daniel behind bars, Zambor needed to make the case to jurors that Daniel knew exactly what he was doing, and if given the chance, he'd do it again.

And if that happened, he'd be even better at it.

In the courtroom, the prosecution questioned dozens of witnesses, including friends of Chip and Claudia, Daniel's former friend, Alvaro Garibay, police officers, and psychiatrists.