Reenactment: The Killer

We monitor the funeral, as morbid as that may sound. Who shows up? Who didn't show up? Who wasn't appropriate? Who was appropriate? It was a good way to see who should we go talk to.

Pamela Phillips wasn't at the funeral. She was conspicuously absent. But based on the acrimony and the separation, that didn't really surprise us.

This is the car he was driving.

Essentially, right. It should lay right along this line. And if you get a look down here at the frame, you can see where the floorboards have been blown off of the side body panels.

By the force of that blast downwards.

Yeah. And this, you know, if you looked at this, almost looks like the path of travel of a bullet. Well, technically it was. It's a projectile shrapnel.

He'd lock his car, lock his doors. So I'm the killer. Right. I walk up here. I got my duffel bag, my gym bag, which fits in the country club scenario. Right. Open the door, put it down, close the door.

There's a lot of people that talk about how volatile Robin Gardner was.

But having met Robin and talked to her, it's like, nah. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen right there. It wasn't going to be she was going to come back in six months and blow his car up.

What we could find out about Neil McNeese is that he was in a lot of loud mouth, but very little follow through. Nothing to connect McNeese to a device. And if he killed Gary, that didn't get him his money back. And he wasn't so financially hit that, you know, he was down to his last dime. So did he do it? Again, not a strong connection.

So what was an Aspen fraud case now is firmly interwoven with our homicide case.

So the way the device was built fit Ron's profile. So it's just another brick on the wall kind of thing.

I'm the killer. I got my gym bag, open the door, put it down, close the door.

It was great because we had no association with Pam and the murder until then. Before we had Pam was in Aspen, the bomb went off in Tucson. How could Pam have pushed the button? Okay, now we have that connection. We have Ron Young bridging that distance for us.

And then when you go to interview Pam, she minimizes Ron Young. Oh, he was not involved in my life. He gave me a little financial advice and things like that.

Pam had two million reasons to kill Gary.

When Pam moved up to Aspen, she purported not to have any money and was in financial hard times.

They were the beneficiaries, with the proviso that if they were under the age of 18, then Pam was the one that would receive the money and appropriately apply it to the children's lives.

And then we find out that when Pam learned of Gary's death, she was actually almost 30 days in arrear on her premium payment.

So we had this one anomaly, Ron Young. And it was, where's Ron Young? Where's Ron Young? Aspen PD had the arrest warrant so he could be arrested anywhere within US jurisdiction. And just nothing was coming of it. He was like a puff of smoke.

We walk over to this box, and there's some microcassettes sitting in there. And it's like, does anybody have a microcassette recorder? And what was on there is, to this day, I keep calling it the treasure trove of evidence. It was astounding what was there.

Ron Young. Crowley, he calls us and says they got him. So they start talking to Ron Young. And Ron says, sure, you can search my apartment. And yeah, you can search the storage locker I have.

We walk over to this box and there's some microcassettes sitting in there. And it's like, does anybody have a microcassette recorder? And so we pop one of the tapes in, we hit play.

We immediately turn the tapes off. We box those up immediately, and those go to the lab to be professionally transferred.

You start following Ron telling Pam, this is how you hide taking the money from your accounts and sending it as cash to me. And he gives her a detailed process to follow.

What he had on his computer was astounding. Pam was paying him on a monthly basis, and he had his own amortization table of the money Pam was paying him with the interest that was due, and it totaled something like $440,000.

He gets extradited to Aspen to face the fraud charges. And it's there that the fraud charges get dismissed. After the charges are dismissed in Aspen, we don't have enough to charge him with a homicide yet. So he is free, but he's on parole from the federal prison.

We're going to do a simultaneous arrest. We've already put surveillance teams in Aspen, surveillance teams in Yorba Linda. We hit Ron and we arrest him. We go to hit Pam and we do a records check on her and we find out she flew out of the country to destinations unknown. She was gone.

We have the arrest warrants. We've already put surveillance teams in Yorba Linda. We've coordinated with local law enforcement. We hit Ron and we arrest him. We extradite him back to Tucson. When it comes to arresting Pam, they have a rude awakening. Pam Phillips, we have every reason to believe, is still living at her house in Aspen.

We go to hit Pam, and we do a records check on her, and we find out she flew out of the country. She was gone.

So we have to put out a notice with Interpol. So now the United States Marshals Service and the FBI become involved.

I'm sitting at my desk. And I get a call, there's a gentleman who'd like to talk to you. He thinks he knows where Pam is. So everybody's poised to go arrest Pam in Lugano, Switzerland.

But when the Swiss police went to arrest her, yeah, she wasn't there.

Pam's comment to the U.S. Marshals was, if Gamber's in the airport, I'm not getting off the plane. They walked her out of the jetway, turned her over to me. They had to walk her all the way out to a patrol car.

Where I find fault with this is that they A, didn't submit Gary Triano as a reference sample. Now whose DNA do you think is probably all over that scene? How do you buy screws at a hardware store? You don't buy screws that have never been touched by another human being. So finding some lone DNA profile and a blast debris doesn't impress me.

When he arrived on scene, you could see the victim vehicle. It blew the car doors open, tore the roof off the car.

I'm the killer. I got my gym bag, which fits in the country club scenario. Open the door, put it down, close the door. I walk away.

Was it to send the message, don't ever mess with us?

Everybody thought car bombing has to be a mob hit. Very spectacular. We're sending a message. Don't ever mess with us.

So suddenly now he's at a zero income, but his expenses and his lifestyle, you know, continued.

Everybody thought car bombing has to be a mob hit. Very spectacular. We're sending a message.