Two young women are found murdered. Paint on garage windows would prove an unlikely clue. For episode information and photos, please visit: anatomyofmurder.com/x2/ Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc
Chapter 1: What happened to Christine and Jenna?
Christine was savagely beaten in the head and stabbed eight times. Jenna was beaten in the head and stabbed 43 times. And after he murdered them, the defendant concealed their bodies by wrapping them up and piling junk on top of them like trash.
Chapter 2: Who are the key contributors to this case?
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
One of the characters that plays a pivotal role in today's story is one that appears far too often in homicide cases across the country, narcotics.
Chapter 3: What role did narcotics play in this story?
The buying and selling of illegal narcotics is a dangerous and ruthless criminal enterprise that accounts for a huge portion of this country's violent crimes, including murder.
It also leaves a terrifying number of victims in its wake. Men, women, very often young, whose struggles with addiction can lead them to some very dark places with some very bad people.
Jenna Pellegrini was born in New Hampshire, the only daughter of high school sweethearts Amy and Michael Pellegrini, who joins us here today.
We were both young. Amy was 19, I was 21. So we had moved in with my parents. And of course they were thrilled because that brought Jenna along with. My dad in particular was ecstatic. Neither one of my parents had girls, so I have two brothers. So it was three boys. They got their first taste of a girl and it was pretty exciting.
And so much of Jenna's childhood was spent with her grandparents and on the water off the coast of New Hampshire.
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Chapter 4: How did Jenna's life change over the years?
My parents were, you know, avid sailors. And of course, when she was born and living with my parents, you know, we were able to get her out right from the beginning. She pretty much grew up right from the beginning, sailing the coast of New Hampshire and Maine.
Along with sailing on her granddad's boat, the Jenna Marie, named in her honor, Jenna was also a successful student and a reliable infielder on her high school softball team.
She was very smart. She had a lot of friends through high school where she spent a lot of time with them. A good amount of it was probably on the ball fields. That was her big passion. I mean, she was into sports.
And like a lot of teenagers, Jenna was also fiercely independent.
She had her own ways, so as soon as she graduated, she was out the door. She wanted to be on her own.
By the time she was in her 20s, Jenna had a boyfriend, a job doing hair, and by 2017, two children of her own. But she was also a night owl.
From my standpoint, you know, I saw her as... And I know this may start to sound familiar to some of our listeners who may know someone or has loved someone that has struggled with addiction.
At some point, Jenna began to experiment with various narcotics. And that experimentation eventually led to regular use, an all too common problem that her own dad admits he can relate to.
I had some issues myself that, you know, not real proud of, to be honest with you, but didn't spend as much time as I could have or should have.
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Chapter 5: What led to the discovery of the bodies?
I said I was on my way up. Shortly after that, I finally got a call from the victim advocate's office regarding Jenna, but they did not say that it was Jenna, but it was kind of obvious during that conversation that one of the girls was her.
It was up to Jenna's parents to break the devastating news to her young children.
It still kills me to this day. You know, when we told them, Blake's eyes were kind of wide open, and then he started to bawl.
When Michael arrived in Farmington, investigators were still piecing together what might have happened.
The info they could give us was that she was likely sleeping. They found the mattress that she was on with bloodstains, and she was stabbed 43 times.
Detectives were also trying to establish the relationship between Jenna and the other murdered woman, Christine Sullivan, as well as with Christine's boyfriend, Dean Smoronk, who was both the owner of the house and the man that called 911.
We had no idea who these people were, why she was there. We had no idea who Christine was.
But you know who did know who Christine and Dean were? The local cops. According to police records, the couple had a history of distributing cocaine and methamphetamines.
In fact, they had been arrested just a year before in South Carolina for their role in a drug trafficking operation that spanned the entire East Coast.
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Chapter 6: Who were the suspects in the double murder?
two women brutally murdered in a house in Farmington, New Hampshire. The most obvious suspect, one of the women's soon-to-be ex-boyfriend, who also happened to be a narcotics dealer.
But security video footage from inside the home have presented investigators with a new suspect, a man seen entering and leaving the crime scene the evening before the murders took place. And when Dean viewed the tape, he told police, oh yeah, I know that guy.
The man in the video was identified as 34-year-old Tim Varel, a close friend and associate of Dean Smorunk's.
He was kind of a small-time dealer where he would purchase small amounts of whatever, meth or cocaine. I'm not positive of everything, but. from Dean and he would sell it.
So Tim Verrill worked with both Dean and Christine in their business and so it would not have been out of the ordinary for Verrill to be a visitor to that house.
But as investigators gathered information about Verrill, one of the first things they learned was that he didn't really fit the profile of this kind of violence.
Tim didn't really have a record as being that kind of person. No arrests or nothing. So it was kind of odd in that sense. Like, why, you know, why would he do this?
Not only that, but no one familiar with Christine can think of any reason why Varel could have done harm to either one of these two victims.
When we first found out, I would imagine everybody kind of does this. I did kind of do a little research to see, you know, who the hell is this guy? But I didn't really find much on him. But I also did the same thing with Dean, only to find out that that's the asshole that you guys need to be arresting. He turned out to be, you know, a huge problem.
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Chapter 7: What evidence linked Tim Varel to the crime?
Obviously, the prosecution has to go with the facts. And the only facts they had was that Dean is on camera down in Florida, so he didn't do it. And Tim was there up until the morning that it happened, so he must have.
Here again is more of the prosecutor's opening statement at trial, in which he walked the jury through the known facts of the case, clearly implicating the defendant, Tim Burrell, in the double homicide.
At about 2 a.m. on January 27th, the defendant arrived back at 979 Meteorboro Road. Not long after arriving, the defendant began taking scattered steps to hide different areas of the house from view. First, the defendant blocked the view of one of the security cameras in the house. You'll see that the defendant went back and forth between the house and the garage multiple times.
Crime scene investigators would later find that all of the ground level windows in that garage had been covered in green spray paint.
The green spray paint is an interesting and kind of haunting element to the story here. Because to me, it indicates clear premeditation. He was trying to black out the windows of the garage because he knew he was about to commit a crime.
The last video captured by the 979 Medeboro Road surveillance system on January 27th shows only the defendant. At about 6.57 a.m., the defendant quickly walked to the door and locked it. He was wearing a white trucker-style hat, a flannel shirt, and carrying his shoes in his hand. There are no more videos from the 27th.
The prosecution contended that Farrell then disabled the security system and then locked the front door.
At some point after locking that door, the defendant struck. The murders were disorganized and hyper. They weren't cold and calculated. They were emotional and they were passionate. The defendant struck Christine multiple times in the head with a blunt instrument. These were extremely forceful blows, which caused bleeding in her brain.
One of the blows was so powerful that it caused extensive fracturing around a large part of Christine's skull. You'll hear that Christine was alive for these blows.
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Chapter 8: What was the outcome of Tim Varel's trial?
Christine tried to defend herself. She suffered broken and cut fingers in an attempt to ward off this vicious attack. but she wasn't successful.
His description of Jenna's murder is equally graphic, but perhaps even more disturbing when you consider that she may well have been asleep in bed.
He stabbed Jenna 43 times in the neck, chest, and back. There was no evidence that she tried to defend herself. She was likely sleeping or unconscious at the time. After murdering these women, the evidence will show the defendant tried to clean up the scene. His efforts were as disorganized and hyper as the killings themselves.
He hid the bodies by wrapping them in bedding, drop cloths, and a frayed tarp. He then discarded the bodies under the porch, piling junk on top of them as if they were trash.
So the evidence found at the scene, we have the fingerprints found on the trash bags containing bloody sheets, the press stone found at the scene in his car, and even trace amounts of Christine's blood found on a white baseball cap belonging to Pharrell. It all supported this theory of these cold-blooded murders.
Beryl maintained his innocence throughout, and his lawyers were prepared to present an alternative perpetrator defense, a theory the prosecution was ready to confront head-on.
I imagine when I'm done speaking with you in a few minutes, the defense is going to come up here, and they're going to tell you that somebody else murdered Christine and Jenna. They're going to create a boogeyman, and they might even give that boogeyman a name.
And that name, of course, would be Dean Smorunk, someone Varel's defense team would claim had a clear motive himself to kill Christine.
And the potential evidence that could prove it would turn the trial upside down.
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