she worked evenings at the restaurant, so the boys slept over with darren. and at 6:00 in the morning she would show up, pick them up, take them off for breakfast, get them ready for school and daycare. but larry discovered on the night before she was murdered, sandra stayed over at ryan s house, her boyfriend. he dropped her off at her place at 6:00 a. m. and then the neighbors told larry they saw her leave in her car soon after that, apparently heading to pick up the boys. and neighbors confirmed they saw sandra s car return a short while later, but without the children. larry learned through his contacts that sandra had a 10:00 appointment that morning to get her nails done at a salon about 45 minutes away. she never made the appointment. so this is how we narrowed down the time of death, before about 9:00 where she would have had to leave to make her appointment. the cops didn t tell him, but larry learned from his own sources that boyfriend ryan had an alibi when husband dar
spoke to him in 2009. this was three years after sandra was murdered. i saw in the back of her neck some ligature marks. we didn t find the cord itself, but we have an idea what could have been used. what? thin thin cord like a fishing line. sandra s shirt and bra were askew, her lip was split as if she had punched in the face. ryan, the boyfriend he s the one on the right of the screen told investigators he discovered sandra s body around 9:00 p. m., but the cops could see she had been dead for a while by then. probably eight to ten hours. which would have put the time of death about what? in the morning. could you get any more exact? no. given that the estranged husband, darren, used to live with sandra, and ryan was now dating her, their fingerprints could certainly be explained. nothing suspicious there. but ryan finding the body? well,
the 25th. who failed a polygraph. who was jealous of ryan. who never called sandy to find out why she didn t pick up the boys. ponce delivered his final report to chief perry and prosecutor neseri and a handful of investigators. we all believed it was proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the case was not going to get any better than what we had. and prosecutor aseri finally agreed to present the case to a grand jury. and in october 2012 the grand jury indicted darren for sandra s murder. so was larry s quest for justice finally over? oh, no. not by a long shot. coming up this case is the textbook example of why you do not insert politics into people s lives. a new prosecutor, a new delay. kauai is a murderer s paradise. if you want to kill something, you ve got probably about 80%, 90% chance of getting away with it.
why is that important? because sandra was murdered that very morning, the morning of the 25th. about the time when she would have been picking up her sons. you would expect darren to have wrote down in there that sandra never showed up to pick up the boys, that he had to take off from work. but he didn t. nor did he call her to find out why she was a no-show. ponce theorized that sandra actually did go to darren s house to get the boys but there was an argument of some sort and she left without them. darren, still angry, followed her home, parking his truck on a street behind sandra s cul-de-sac. his path, you know, basically leads to the cul-de-sac, and her house is just three houses down right when you come to the end of this walkway. very, very close. easy access.
out flyers, gruff and stoic, except when the pain was just too much. just that three years it s still rough. larry took us to sandra s grave. told us how he promised to bring her killer to justice. she won t be forgotten as long as i m alive. we had no idea then where this meeting would lead us, that our journey would last a decade, a case that would expose evil lurking in this garden paradise, and bring larry to the edge of his own mortality. many on kauai new sandra, even watched her as a teenager dancing in a local marketing video. like many here, she was multi-racial, growing up in a household that was half japanese, half portuguese, all hawaiian. and a devout catholic