yeah. they could be explained. they could be. but you put them all together, it doesn t work. he. and so ernest scherer iii was found guilty. two counts of first-degree murder. two consecutive life sentences. no parole. his sister, catherine, daughter of the victims, spoke publicly for the first time outside the courtroom. it s hard to have to talk about my parents and the loss. they re no longer with me at all. just here. do you feel justice was served? i don t know. it s hard. it s hard to admit that anybody could do something like that. and adrian solomon, the one-time teacher of the flying trapeze, the woman who thought she d learned a thing or two about reading people, still wonders why she just didn t see it. i don t trust my judgment, and i don t trust other people are telling the truth. and that s hard. will you ever get that back?
a man named ernest scherer iii. there was not that awkward silence that sometimes you have in the first date. ernie, that s what he called himself, was good-looking, college educated, a former eagle scout who d been raised in a mormon household. though his occupation was rather unusual. he was a professional poker player. kind of surprised me that someone with his background would be a professional poker player. of course you did something kind of odd for a while too. exactly. which is why i had no judgment about it whatsoever. i found it very interesting and yeah, he said he was making good money at it. ernie explained how he had mastered the poker skill of cleverly hiding any tells, any clues about the cards he was holding. he was good at reading people, which of course is very important in the poker world. he kept an apartment in southern california, he told her, but spent much of his time in las vegas. he gambled enough at the tables. he had high enough status tha
zone. blood everywhere. and the battered bodies of two people who had clearly fought 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 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
parents had been murdered. and when she went back to his hotel room, he d rigged it with bungee cords so if someone came to get him he had a plan to escape. he was going to break the window of the hotel room and he was going to basically rappel out the hotel room window. so did she quite understandably high-tail it out of there? no. she chose to stay. stayed the night. she did. meanwhile, lead detective dudek called in reinforcements. and before long some of the most boring of all police work paid off. a deputy borrowed from the local jail for the investigation pored through hours of video taken by a security camera at the scherers country club. and finally, there it was. a red chevrolet camaro approaching the scherer home at 8:27 p.m. on march 7th and exiting at 12:42 a.m. on march 8th, just when the murders were thought to have occurred. a red chevy camaro with a black top.
detectives picked up from the bloody floor of the murder scene a few feet away from the lifeless body of ernie s father, ernest scherer jr. it was a warranty card for a baseball bat. that s all it was. no big deal. except when police searched through that house, searched every square inch of it, one thing they did not find was a baseball bat. and they just thought it was odd. why would 60-something-year-old people have a warranty for a bat? and the warranty wasn t just for any old bat. it was for a nike baseball bat. right on the warranty card. they couldn t help but see that same distinctive nike swoosh, just like the ones they saw printed on the floor in blood by those size 12 nike impact sneakers. were they on to something here? so they kind of backtracked. they wondered, hey, was there any kind of nike store around where we had getting gas and a