Tavara s first police interview. and did you actually receive an official reprimand for the poor quality of work you did in this case. i don t remember that. you don t remember getting a major disciplinary action because you kept evidence from this case in your office? in writing? no. gerald said her memory has been fuzzy since a 2010 horse riding accident, something that happened three years after the slip-ups on the birgfeld case. and then came the ultimate suspect, the guy who called paige from that motel 6. and in that storage unit, you had numerous guns, right? i did have. this former client, who allegedly discussed killing paige. did you tell ms. whalen that you had killed ms. birgfeld by putting her through a wood chipper? no, ma am. somebody said something did you do this to paige or did you murder paige. i said just out of context, had
I, they wouldn t find her because i d have used the wood chipper. and it was totally out of context. the client who admitted embezzling his company s money to pay paige. did you kill ms. birgfeld? no. are you responsible for her disappearance? absolutely not. and then the defense went after jose tavara, who admit head was so tight with coralluzzo, he would have done just about anything for his friend. including burning a car to help him if he needed that done? i wouldn t do that. you wouldn t do that? not that. that s the one thing you couldn t do. yeah. megan williams told the jury she was sure the killer was really coralluzzo. he was a pathological liar, and anything that came out of his mouth was a lie, and any story that he made up was made up. so many suspects, said the defense. and they put on a retired detective to accuse the police of tunnel vision. because if you re doing shoddy work in the beginning and you re not paying attention to all the de
Of separation, paige birgfeld s disappearance and murder impacted many here. if they didn t know paige personally, then they were in on the search or were a potential witness or knew somebody who was, or in the worst case, knew one of the possible suspects. so when the trial finally got under way, the town s attention was very much focused on this courtroom. we re on the record. 1432. but the trouble began before a single witness could be called. ron biegler was angry, wound up. the new district attorney, dan rubenstein was set to call paige s first husband. he was a key witness, but was afraid he might actually attack jones in the courtroom because biegler had actually threatened to kill him. and indicated that he wanted mr. jones to be found not guilty so that he could kill him and feed him his genitals. use of different word than that. proceedings ground to a
And i just hung up and i called 911. and they took me to a safe house. and did they catch him? what? no, they didn t know where to look. a few days later, somebody broke into lisa s mother s house in oklahoma. she called me later that day and said when she was leaving work, that she noticed this car was following her. and she said it was ralph, and she called the sheriff s department. and she is like he is here. he is following me. and they arrested him. my mom said she asked him what was he doing? and he said looking for your daughter. lester ralph jones was convicted of assault and kidnapping and served three years. but now he was out and remarried. and by the fall of 2007, a pile of circumstantial evidence connected him to paigeburg felt s disappearance. why didn t you go arrest him? my job is to gather the facts and present it to the dolphins and they make that
Coralluzzo himself, but they couldn t find him. so they asked tavara for help. do you know where george is? i said george is dead. drowned the year before while swimming in a river in new jersey. still, to satisfy the d.a., investigators had to make a case that coralluzzo was either guilty or innocent. but because dead men don t talk, it meant they had to slog through seven years of reports and interviews and statements. and it was two years after paige s body was discovered, while wading through that mountain of material, an investigator stumbled on an overlooked piece of evidence that would change the whole case. it was security camera video of coralluzzo s friends, including tavar at a market the night paige disappeared. coralluzzo wasn t in the video, mind you. but the time stamp backed up the story minute by minute that tavara had been telling the