the fire. according to forensic experts, she was dead before the fire started. the method? a particularly intimate form of killing. death by strangulation. strangling someone is a very personal killing. it s a very angry killing. it s not like shooting someone from a long way away, i don t imagine. you re touching the person and feeling their life s blood ebb from them. who could have been so angry with jennifer? paul had told detectives that he and jennifer had taken out restraining orders against those brothers, hisham and tony ghanma. men part of his inner circle who he had considered former friends. they re trying to get us. they are trying to harm me. who is that? hisham. the guy you have a restraining order against? several restraining against him. he hit me. he has a restraining order against me. and just one night before, after paul s birthday
verdict. i think a lot of people were shocked by the verdict because, i mean, if you sat through the weeks and weeks of trial, it just it s inconceivable how they could get to the result that they got to. but to the jurors, the issues about text messages and whether paul had jennifer s phone all afternoon wasn t as important as zumot on the stand. that s what made the difference. his tears, for example. sometimes i feel like i m too cynical. but it was a universally held opinion i think. the entire jury believed it was a manufactured moment. what was the problem with his testimony? there were two things that struck me. one was when he broke down on the stand. to me it didn t seem genuine. and the other portion of his testimony was when he had the opportunity to tell us where he was and what he was doing. he chose to basically lie to us
to support that claim, he introduced an expert witness who testified that texts from paul s phone and texts from jennifer s phone were hitting some of the same cell towers all afternoon. so her phone must have been right there with him in his car, which is why when she missed a meeting with her friend roy, the texts he got from her didn t make sense. they weren t a sensible response to the message he sent her. in fact, he got the same text twice. she didn t show up, and her phone was off. so as soon as i got that repeat text message, i was kind of worried because she wasn t responding to what i was saying. jennifer was nowhere to be found. jennifer was dead. now what prosecutor gillingham wanted the jury to think about is what happened or didn t happen much later after the fire. here was the scene, house burning, paul standing on the
jennifer s morning text messages again turned red hot angry. the subject seemed to be a debt she claimed he owed her. right around 10:30, 10:45 into 11:16 in the morning she s now referring back to those text messages and telling him, he better bring a check and don t come back or she s going to the san jose police department to file a charge by 3:00 that day. and that s the last text message anyone has with her, the last contact she has ever with anyone. and just before noon is when paul lost his temper and choked her to death, drove to a gas station, bought a can of gasoline. later, returned home and torched the house. and somewhere along the way, said the prosecutor, he erased it all of those angry text messages she sent him. every single one between the defendant and her, every single one is gone. months worth. and then paul used jennifer s cell phone to send fake texts to her friends so they believed she was still alive.
my landlord calls and says your house is on fire. i flew through the red lights and i m here. i m really frustrated and confused and exhausted and i want to know 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. [ crying ]