like that could have happened to someone i know. reporter: not her ernie, thankfully, but ernie s parents, ernest and his wife charlene, murdered, found dead in their own house, which was coincidentally in an upscale country club right across the san francisco bay from adrienne s hotel. and now, of course, the house was a crime scene where even the seasoned lead detective was horrified by what he saw. it was probably the most gruesome, brutal homicide scene i had ever seen. reporter: march 14, 2008, the call came in, a country club employee had seen what looked like a body through the scherers window. kristen tucker was one of the first on the scene. as i approached the front door of the home, i could smell the odor of decay and blood from quite a distance away. reporter: and inside was like a war zone, blood everywhere and
there was a cash purchase at the nike outlet, one pair of size 12 nike impact tomahawk sneakers, a 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 is just finished. that s the ending of the book. reporter: in january 2011 the alameda county prosecutor told jurors that ernest scherer iii was a narcissistic sociopath who savagely murdered his parents in pure blood. he s sheer evil, he thinks he s smarter than everyone. reporter: heavily in debt and desperate for money, ernie s house of cards was collapsing before his eyes, said the prosecutor, so he killed his parents for the money. for his inheritance. even ernie s own family unanimously turned against him, including ernest scherer senior, ernest s grandfather who took
but who wore them? who would do such an awful thing? 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. reporter: 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 on his views and he wasn t afraid to let you know how he felt. reporter: guy houston, a former california state assemblyman knew ernest and his conservatism. he did make people angry, but it was all in a political it wasn t a personal basis. it was all political. reporter: 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.
we learned that he had 60-some-odd thousand dollars in credit card debt and he also in talking with different casinos had lost a significant amount of money to the tune of $80,000 or $90,000 in his play in the last year. reporter: oh, but 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 so sanguine about the security of a poker player s income. so he borrowed the money from his 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 were killed he had missed a
mortgage payment to his parents for the first time. so this is approaching some sort of crisis. that s what we felt, yes. reporter: so motive? well, maybe. investigators told ernie they wanted to talk, and he agreed to come down to the station, where he explained their suspicions were groundless. ernie had an alibi. there will be transactions showing my drive from las vegas to california. reporter: he had driven from las vegas that afternoon, stopped for gas and a bite to eat at mcdonald s in primm, nevada. there were credit card records to prove it. he arrived around 5:00 p.m., fell asleep on the couch, watched a movie on tv and went to bed. wife and son were away, he said. and bright and early the next morning he met his elderly grandfather for a bridge tournament, which his grandfather ernest senior confirmed.