Former Buffalo District Attorney John Flynn

He was, like I said before, severely burned. Like, almost dead burned. I suspect that you and your listeners have heard in the past... degrees of burns, first degree, second degree, third degree. They don't really use degrees anymore. I mean, some people do, but what they use now is the terms superficial, partial thickness, and full thickness.

He had full thickness of burns throughout his body. He had to have a cadaver skin graft done of his face. He lost all of his fingers. They actually had to put him in a induce coma to actually do the skin graft of his face, and they had to graft on new eyelids on his eyes. To say he was jacked up is an understatement of the century.

There was no way he was leaving the hospital. He was not a flight risk. So there was no rush to arrest him, to keep him in jail. He wasn't going anywhere. So in this case, we made the decision to not arrest him right away and to just work up our case, do the investigation, and then put it in the grand jury.

He had actually moved in with her into her mom's house and was living there in the fall of 2017.

And he moved out. And again, now, this homicide occurred on January 11th. So he moves out now in December, approximately a month before the homicide. And the breakup was not smooth. It was a very contentious breakup.

that month from December to January, was extremely contentious. Contentious, you know, text messages going back and forth between the two of them.

What really happened took it over the top was a bike that he had, that he left there.

And he put... some kind of a fancy engine on the bike. So he turned the bike into kind of like, you know, a motorbike, all right? And so he had this like souped up bike that he left there. Elizabeth apparently put the bike to the curb, to the trash, and either someone picked the bike up or the garbage men did and threw it away.

The bottom line is that he lost his bike and he believed that she threw it away and he was livid. At that point, there were text messages going back and forth saying, where he basically threatened to kill her. He threatened to burn her, like literally said, I'm going to burn you and your whole fat effing family.

He also made threatening remarks to his boss. So Frank was kind of a handyman, laborer, construction kind of guy. He worked for this one guy who became a witness at trial. He basically told his boss that, hey, I'm going to pay her back for what she did, or I'm going to get her, words of that effect.

The early morning hours of January 11th, 2018, he got on a bike. Kind of ironic that he used a bike to go to the murder scene.

He did not break in. The door was open, apparently, at 3 o'clock in the morning. The adult brother who lived there was still up, and he saw him come in. And he didn't think anything of it because, you know, he had lived there up until a month ago. He was kind of coming in and coming out, you know, and he was still around, apparently.

He had with him a satchel. And in the satchel, he had like charcoal briquettes. You know, like charcoal used on a grill. And he had lighter fluid. He had a lighter... And he also had a Hawaiian punch container filled with gasoline.

she was asleep or perhaps passed out in the bed. Now, I say passed out because when the autopsy was done, there was a significant amount of alcohol in her system.

He took his Hawaiian punch bottle that he had with gasoline and he dumped it on her.

When he took his lighter out to light her on fire, the whole room blew up.

She was burnt so bad, just awful, awful, awful way to die. Burned alive, alive, alive.

We then went to the hospital, took a judge with us to the hospital, and we arraigned him in his room in the hospital. And that's when the legal proceedings started.

When the police interviewed the brother, at the end of the brother's statement, the brother made a comment along the lines of, you know, I didn't go upstairs. I didn't see what happened. I didn't see her do it. You know, I don't know what happened. Maybe she lit him on fire.

Why the brother would say that, I have no idea. Not to be disparaging of the brother because he lost his sister. It was traumatic. So I'm not trying to beat the brother up here, but let's be honest. He sees this guy walk in the house at 3 o'clock in the morning. He moved out a month earlier. If I was a brother, I'd be like, what the hell are you doing in my house at 3 in the morning, all right?

But he didn't think anything of it and let him walk upstairs. You know, so again, I'm not blaming him. Don't get me wrong. But again, he did make the comment to the police in his interview.

The defense lawyers made the argument that she was drunk. She had a lot of alcohol in her system. The defense lawyers said that at trial that she also had drugs in her system, but there was no proof of that at all. There was proof of alcohol in her system, though, to be fair. And so they made the argument that she got up in a drunken stupor. They got into an argument.

She dumped the gasoline on him. She lit him on fire. And that's what happened.

His DNA was on the Hawaiian punch bottle and the lighter. And he left the Hawaiian punch bottle in the apartment and the lighter. The lighter was found on the stairs.

He left a trail of blood. He left a trail of burnt flesh and blood. He left a trail of witnesses.

In this case, he admitted he was there. He admitted Elizabeth died. He admitted that he sent these text messages, okay? He just didn't admit to how it went down in the bedroom, which again, that's very, very unusual. But it obviously, thank God, didn't work out for him.

To be honest with you, this really wasn't rocket science. You know, it wasn't really a tough case to prove. 99 out of 100 homicide trials take a week, maybe two weeks at the most. OK, so this was a typical homicide trial. Took about a week and the jury was out like three or four hours and came back with a guilty verdict on the intentional murder.

And the judge gave him the max, which was 25 to life. He drew a tough judge. Quite frankly, he drew the best judge in the building from my perspective because this judge is the hardest judge on criminals.

You get to the point where you do something like that, and you're not thinking clearly, obviously. You're an enraged, psychopathic killer. And I use that word psychopath, you know, not in a medical sense, but in just a... a human sense that you are a sick killer. There are very few smart criminals out there. There are some, but you know, he wasn't one of them, obviously.

He took off out of the house, went to the backyard, jumped a fence, and then ran down the backyards to another street. And he broke into a house on Leroy Street and hid in a closet.

He's now hiding in the closet of this house that he broke into. A little girl who lived in that house wakes up Mommy and Daddy in their bedroom and says, Mommy and Daddy, someone's in the house. Now, put yourself in that situation, okay? I got five kids, all right? If one of my kids did that, I'd be like, you know, honey, you're dreaming. You had a bad dream, go back to bed.

And that's exactly what dad did here. Well, Mom now, who's lying in bed, says, hmm, I think I smell something. Mom and dad are kind of up in the bed now, and they're kind of sniffing now, and mom's like, yeah, I smell something. And so dad gets up. What he's smelling is burnt flesh. Unbelievable.

Dad follows the smell of burnt flesh into this closet and opens the closet door. He now grabs this guy, takes him out of the closet, takes him out of the house, and throws him outside on the front lawn.

Three different people in the neighborhood now have called 911 And police, fire, first responders, everyone's coming to the neighborhood. And as you can imagine, there is a blood trail of him running from these backyards all the way down to where this house was. Again, unbelievable.