hate-filled manifesto of sorts posted by the suspect online before the rampage. now back to dateline. welcome back to dateline. i m craig melvin. as a poker player ernie scherer was a professional bluffer, a keeper of secrets. he d shown that he was practiced at deception away from the table as well. holding his cards close. but was he a killer? here again with our story is keith morrison. it was, to say the least, eye opening when detectives encountered adrian solomon and heard her account of the secret life of ernie scherer iii. i kind of thought, you know, he stole two years from me. not to mention the truly audacious extent of ernie s philandering. but this, after all, was not some tabloid smackdown. ernie s parents had been callous ly deliberately, brutally murdered.
rather responsibly, saving money he told her for those times when the cards weren t so lucky. it was almost like somebody having a sales job that they know sometimes they re going to get a lot of great sales and sometimes they re not. she fell for ernie over the next few days of magic time in vegas. and soon a long-distance relationship blossomed. they were on the phone every day. there were trips. she to vegas, he to meet her in places like aruba and mexico. and one day ernie told adrian he loved her. oh, it was very exciting. ernie traveled to adrian s home base in north carolina several times. got to know her family, her mother lynn. he was charming and was very comfortable with us and us with him. we talked about marriage. we were looking at engagement rings. they actually talked about children. if the first one was a girl, of course he would love her, but he really wanted a boy. so it was wonderful.
happened to someone i know. not her ernie, thankfully, but ernie s parents. ernest scherer jr. and his wife, charlene abendroth, murdered. found dead in their own house, which was coincidentally in an upscale country club right across the san francisco bay from adrian s hotel. and now, of course, the house was a crime scene where even the seasoned lead detective scott dudek was horrified by what he saw. it was probably the most gruesome brutal homicide scene i ve ever seen. it was march 14th, 2008, when the call came in. a country club employee had seen what looked like a body through the scherers window. detective kirsten tucker was one of the first at 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. and inside was like a war zone. blood everywhere. and the battered bodies of two people who had clearly fought
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,