welcome back to dateline extra. i m craig melvin. on the surface paul zumot and jennifer schipsi. here again is keith morrison. in the days after the fire on addison avenue, after paul zumot was charged with murder and hauled off to jail, events in palo alto seemed to freeze somehow. in confusion and denial from paul s point of view and unrequited grief from the people who loved jennifer. it hurt. it hurt a lot. unrequited partly because for some reason, even though he d been arrested, paul wasn t entering a plea, which is what this was all about. candlelight vigils outside of paul s hookah lounge by jennifer s friends and family. we decided to stand in front of his establishment every night until he made his plea.
they were both passionate about their lives and passionate about each other. but one day, a terrible house fire left one of them dead and the other facing questions from investigators. here again is keith morrison. while the deadly fire was burning at his home on addison avenue, paul was at his hookah lounge just minutes away. someone called, told him about the fire. he rushed over but could only pace helplessly back and forth as firefighters did their job. soon after that, he sat down with the palo alto police to help sort out what happened, though, as you can see on the video recording, sat is probably not the best description. paul was full of nervous energy and frantic questions. at this point, nobody had told him that jennifer was in that fire. i m worried about my house. what about my girlfriend? what caused the fire, and i don t care about this.
at this point he supposedly didn t know if jennifer was inside or outside, whether she was alive or dead. but in the time that he was there, he made 38 calls and text messages, two of which went to jennifer, and neither occasion did he leave jennifer a message. he left messages for others and spoke with others, text messages, for instance, the same friend multiple times. but in that two-hour period, at no time does he leave that location to look for jennifer perhaps, to go to the other side of the blocked off street. you know, if he called her and texted her once, surely that s enough. i mean, she ll call him back. the cell phone records actually bear out that he s a person that would call or text her 200 to 300 times a day if he wasn t around her, wasn t able to get ahold of her. his silence especially at the crime scene was deafening. because there was no text
carrier to come in and say he looked at the evidence and what this guy said was the phone pinging off the same towers was not. it was just merged data from the cell phone. why is that important? because, says geragos, the prosecution s own timeline should have cleared paul zumot. investigators said jennifer was strangled several hours before the fire started, and it was lit no earlier than about 6:30 p.m. but early in the afternoon, after paul had left the area, geragos says, jennifer was still alive, sending real, not fake, text messages herself from her phone. by all accounts, she was alive at 1:17. okay. and at 1:17, paul was not at the house. so where was paul? trying to pick up paperwork at the palo alto police station and then at the hookah lounge where he appears on security camera
i flew through the red lights and came here. i m ally frustrated an confused and exhausted and i want to ow what happened. i care less about the house but jennifer s safety. i cannot think anything right now. i just cannot think anything. then in the middle of his conversation with detectives, paul s phone rang. it was jennifer s mother who told him she hadn t seen or heard from her daughter. you can see what happened. paul fell to pieces. yeah, i know. i know. i know. i can t find her. they re not telling me anything. to this point, he told detectives that he had been clinging to the hope that jennifer might be with her mother. anywhere but at home. but she wasn t with her mother. wasn t anywhere. and that s when the officer broke this news. i don t know how to tell you this, man, but there s a body in the house that s been burned. and we have no way of knowing who that is.