his parents will, which investigators found in a desk drawer. and the will indicated that their fairly significant estate would be divided equally between their two children, catherine and ernest, and that they would receive their inheritance at the age of 30. did you determine how old ernest was? i did. ernest scherer iii would turn 30 in july. and his parents were killed in march. ernie s father had a couple million invested in real estate, though at the time of his death the value of the estate was certainly shrinking right along with housing prices. still, was it even remotely possible ernie would kill his parents to cash in on an inheritance? the detectives had a look at ernie s financial situation. and you know how some professional poker players claim they win a lot? maybe not. at least not in ernie s case.
and why? in our area we just didn t have a husband and wife in their 60s in a multimillion-dollar neighborhood killed for no reason. investigators poked around the scherers background looking really for enemies with motive. and it turned out they had some. or at least ernest did. ernie was a very passionate person in his views and he wasn t afraid to let you know how he felt. guy houston, a former california state assemblyman, knew ernest scherer for his extreme fiscal conservatism in his work with the republican party and on the local school board. he did make people angry but it was all on a political, it wasn t a personal basis. it was all political. besides, what happened to them was too ugly even for politics. and as for charlene i don t know anybody who didn t like her. here was her friend from the mormon church. her confidence, her command,
for their lives. the bodies had suffered extensive, extensive injuries. it wasn t just the odor that told investigators the bodies had been here a while. there was a week s worth of newspapers that had been uncollected. they narrowed the time of death had to be some time between friday evening, march 7th, the last time anyone saw them, and saturday morning march 8th. method of death? hard to be sure. no murder weapon lying around but they d been hit repeatedly by some sort of blunt instrument and sliced by what must have been a very big knife or sword. what happened here? was it a home invasion robbery? possible, judging from the mess. and ernest scherer was a wealthy real estate investor who was known to carry cash around. detective mike norton. in the victims bedroom, the drawers had been pulled out, a lot of clothes had been thrown on the floor. a decorative sword was
one pair of size 12 nike impact tomahawk sneakers, a ripken youth baseball bat, and junior match soccer gloves. i m thinking even the most skeptical jury in the world has to realize, put it all together, the book has just finished, that s the ending of the book. in january 2011 the alameda county prosecutor told jurors ernest scherer iii was a narcissistic sociopath who savagely murdered his parents in cold blood. he is sheer evil. he thinks he s smarter than everybody. heavily in debt and desperate for minute, ernie s house of cards was collapsing before his very eyes, said the prosecutor, and so he killed his parents for the money, for his inheritance. even ernie s own family unanimously turned against him, including ernest scherer sr., ernie s grandfather, who took the stand on his 95th birthday
we learned that he had 60-some-odd-thousand dollars in credit card debt and he also, in talking with different casinos, he had lost a significant amount of money in the tune of $80,000 or $90,000 in his play in the last year. although that was not the worst of it. not even close. by march of 2008 when the murders happened, real estate in california was huffing and puffing on its race to the bottom. and six months before that ernie the son wanted to buy a house in the city of brea in southern california but couldn t get a loan. banks not quite so sanguine anymore about the security of a poker player s income. so he borrowed the money from ernest the father, $616,000. but then real estate started tanking, so father ernest asked son ernie to go to a bank, refinance, pay back his loan. and ernie couldn t. he was frantic trying to refinance his home. and at the time that they