Chapter 1: What happened to the couple in Lake Tahoe?
I'm Craig Melvin. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. I've always been a glass half full kind of guy. And now I'm talking to some people who look at the world that way too. Some really fascinating folks who share their defining moments, their triumphs, their challenges. Their stories are funny and quite candid. So I hope you'll join me each week. And who knows?
You might just come away with your own glass half full.
Search Glass Half Full with Craig Melvin from today on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.
What they did to your family, you're lucky to make it out alive.
Streaming on Peacock.
These men are going to come after me. Taking them out is my only chance.
Put a bullet in her head.
From the co-creator of Ozark. Looks like a family was running drugs. Execution style killing is rare for the Keys. And it leads on who they might have been running for.
The cartel killed my family. I'm going to kill them. All of them.
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Chapter 2: How did the investigation unfold after the shooting?
The news is on and I heard murder in Lake Tahoe.
There was blood on all the mirrors, on all the vanities, on the bathtub. This was a very personal, targeted attack.
It wasn't shocking to me that they had a list of enemies.
She was in 22 lawsuits. Good Lord. Who would gain from this? Well, clearly the two daughters.
Samantha was a big part of their life.
We always joke around that we're like a triple. Reading all about it, I was like, whoa.
It was middle of summer, and I watched a male run up the street wearing full sweats with a hood on. He was hiding in the house for about three hours.
I see these people who look like they have it all, but you never know what your fate is going to be.
A charismatic couple living a life of luxury. Turns out they were also rich in enemies. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.
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Chapter 3: What evidence was found at the crime scene?
The 911 call was recorded at 9.26 p.m.
911 was the address of the emergency. Hello, 911.
All the dispatchers could hear was moaning in the background or they could hear someone gasping for air. But there was no words. What was that? Who was that? The 911 operator just couldn't tell. But it didn't sound good. So they dispatched the fire department. Gary Nelson was a captain and paramedic.
All we know is there's a possible medical or some type of situation happening, but we don't know what it is. We pull in front of the house you see behind me with lights on. Here, the home of a retired couple named Gary Spohr and Wendy Wood. The front door was unlocked. The first responders walked upstairs to the living area. The dogs are moving back and forth. They're just wound up.
So we yell fire department. We get no response. And there's a gentleman laying on the couch. It looked like he was sleeping. His arms were crossed. His legs were crossed. His feet were up on the table or ottoman. And the TV was on like he was watching the news. And we come over behind him not to startle him. And we're like, tap him on the shoulder and go, sir. And yell it loudly.
Fire department, sir. No response. And that time we look over and my partner looks at him and goes, I don't think he's breathing. At that point, we check a pulse. We don't get a pulse. We look across at another section of the couch and we notice there's blood. And there on the floor behind the couch, shell casings and blood. We noticed a blood trail leading around the back of the couch.
And the dogs that were very agitated, they kept coming between us and back into a master bedroom. They'd go back and forth and back and forth. So we're like, okay, this doesn't seem right. We work into the master bedroom. In the master bedroom, we turn on the lights in there. Nothing obvious. So we go around the corner and we turn on the light in the master bathroom.
And that's where we find a female patient. It was Wendy, Gary's wife, covered in blood. as were the mirrors, the vanity, the bathtub. An iPhone speckled in blood was by the sink. Wendy had held on to it long enough to call 911. She was alive, but barely. She would only give one-word answers. She would say yes, no, and she was, I believe, the paramedic when he asked her name.
She was able to give her name, and that was it. He was asking, were you assaulted? Were you shot? You know, does she have... You know, obviously bleeding from the head, obviously bleeding from the arms. They called in a helicopter, flew her to a trauma center in Reno, 50 miles away, did all they could to keep her breathing.
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Chapter 4: Who were the main suspects in the case?
Yeah.
All day's off, all sleep is off, and we go pretty much all in on it until we're finished. Investigators at the scene filled him in when he arrived. We had a male that had been shot in the head, and we had another victim, the wife, the female that was found, also shot.
We still didn't know the status, if she was going to make it through the surgery or if we were going to have a double homicide at the time. And then Detective Meyer tried to work out what must have happened.
It appeared that after her husband was shot and killed where he was sleeping, that she was most likely woken up during the shots and had put her arms up in a kind of a defensive kind of posture, and then tried to get herself into safety. No surprise, the search of the house and property turned up no suspect. Long gone, of course, but whoever it was clearly had one purpose in mind.
There was no sign of forced entry. There was no sign that a fight or anything had ensued. It looked eerily normal, minus obviously the... Yeah. The personal destruction to Gary and Wendy. Now, who in this paradise on Earth would want to do a thing like that? You knew the whole damn crime. And yet you knew nothing. Exactly. Strange. We had absolutely no idea who this individual could be.
So she must have had a reputation around town. And not a very good one.
We're like a throuple because he always complains that he has two wives.
I've got to be challenging because we don't have much time, I have to tell you. The fear spread at the speed of news, neighbor to neighbor, around the wealth-encrusted shores of Lake Tahoe. Murder, execution style. That Wendy survived, the neighbors heard, was something of a miracle. Though, as the doctors told investigators, continued survival was no sure thing.
Did you think maybe she can tell us what happened? We were praying she would. We had all of the nurses waiting to give us a phone call the moment she woke up. And we were praying, but not hopeful. We knew the severity of her injuries, the likelihood that she would be able to, was probably not very high.
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Chapter 5: What role did Wendy play in the investigation?
You must have thought, hey, this will get our guy. Pure excitement. Especially when they spotted one with the perfect angle. Kind of up above the garage, pointing towards their vehicles and kind of their driveway area. So, if the shooter came in that way, they might be able to see him or her. They started watching the video from that morning and nothing happened for hours.
Things picked up when daughter Erin arrived with her two boys at 2.24 p.m. That's Wendy in the driveway as Erin backed in. A bit later, Gary pulled in, looked like an outie, blue. There was a pause for almost an hour, and then Gary headed out, followed by the rest of the family, down to the lake by the look of it. But then, then something very peculiar showed up on that surveillance tape.
It was middle of summer, so it was obviously warm up there, even for Tahoe. And I watched a male run up the street wearing full sweats with a hood on, a mask on, and a backpack. I would think you'd think looking at that video, oh, there's our shooter. I was very hopeful that it was. especially when the masked man turned into the driveway.
I knew that at that point, that was going to be our shooter. Did you happen to think at that moment, all right, this is not going to be so hard after all? I did for a little bit until you saw how close he got and then saw we couldn't see his face. He covered every aspect of his skin, of his face. But surely there were more cameras around the neighborhood. They went hunting.
We were out here canvassing the full area for several days. We were looking up and down the roads from the Spores residence all the way up to what we call the Y up here up in Tahoe City. Did it show you anything more about where the shooter came from or where he went after? It did. Thankfully, we were able to find several cameras along the pathway.
It was enough to start piecing together some kind of timeline anyway, which the detectives laid out for the prosecutor, Christopher Katran. The first sighting of the apparent shooter was at 5.02 p.m., almost a half a mile from Gary and Wendy's house, walking along the main road towards them. By then, Gary, Wendy, Aaron, and the kids were out on the boat. Last person left the house at 3.56 p.m.
They walk out the driveway and down the street, and you can see out in the lake.
We're fairly close to the lake here.
Then, 5.06 p.m., a neighbor's security camera recorded the probable shooter walking along the lake. On the other side of the roadway, there's a bike path, which is used for bikes and pedestrians and things like that.
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Chapter 6: How did the family dynamics affect the investigation?
She had a mind and will of her own. And that she did. Less than two weeks after she was left for dead, the detectives got a call. She was awake and talking. It was a genuine excitement throughout the entire unit that we might finally have that huge break we're looking for. Yeah. But she was struggling coming in and out of consciousness.
She made a quick statement of it was Rick, the water guy, and she passed back out again. The nurses had told us that she had said it was Rick. Well, that was something, because Rick the water guy was certainly a person of interest. Wendy and Rick had had a lot of easement issues because Rick would access his water access from her property.
Rick owned a water well that sat on Wendy and Gary's property and Wendy had issues with that. Things escalated. And then Gary sent Rick an email to let him know that Wendy had a permit to use a gun and would if needed. So did Rick use a gun on them? We were able to look at him and compare him to the camera. And we knew at that point he was definitely not our shooter.
And then, weeks later, more good news. Wendy has made a surprisingly miraculous recovery.
Amazing. The detectives hear that she's made this miraculous recovery, and of course now they want to get a statement from her.
Of course, yeah. Eyewitness to the murder comes back from the dead to tell the story.
Can't have it any better than that, I would think.
Wendy struggled, but remembered that she and Gary had gone to the lake with Erin and their grandkids. And at the end of the boating trip, she recalled covering up the boat.
That's the last thing she remembers of that day was putting the tarp on. And then the next thing she remembers is waking up in the hospital.
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Chapter 7: What was the outcome of the trial?
He slept in the living room, so she said. So no sexual relations or anything like that? No.
No. Uh, no.
Not ever. Ever. And when she woke up in the morning, Dan was gone. Did he tell you that the night before he was going to be leaving early?
No.
She assumed Dan had left for work, she said, and so she decided she would extend her stay for a little R&R.
I was getting ready to go and then kind of wanted to stay because I'd just never been in a suite before.
She said she checked out the following day and on her drive home, a friend called to let her know what had happened to Aaron's parents. And so Samantha said she reached out to Aaron and offered to help any way she could.
But I mean, I've known her long enough, like how she handles things too.
How does she handle things?
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Chapter 8: What led to the final verdict in the case?
Correct. Was he ever out of your sight?
Yes. Samantha said she dropped off Dan in the afternoon near the shops in Tahoe City, about four miles away from Gary and Wendy's house. and she waited for hours until Dan returned.
He just said to wait, he had to pick up his package, and I said, okay.
She believed, she said, that he was there to pick up cocaine.
So the digital evidence doesn't support what you're saying, unfortunately.
Her phone put her much closer to the crime scene.
Did you see him with a gun? I did not.
Samantha said she didn't believe Dan had anything to do with the shooting, to which the detective replied...
I don't buy that story whatsoever. You are in a lot of trouble. This does not make sense.
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