in grief as he learns the news. meanwhile, first responders and arriving officers processed the scene. anything unusual about his body? or did he just look peaceful? his trousers were open h just a little bit. his collar was undone. his shirt was kinda pulled out. and he was reclined back in his car. and i felt like he it looked like he took a nap and didn t wake up. there was a little presumption that it may have been a heart attack or, you know, cardiac event, or something had happened. he was a large man. reporter: but since tom s death was what police call an unattended death , there had to be an investigation. detective mike thomas and lieutenant kyle berardi both worked the case for the ulster police department. they took note, of how linda, the wife, was reacting at the scene. her demeanor, was it exactly what you would expect from a wife making a discovery like this? 100%. 100%. there was nothing out of the ordinary with her reaction,
reporter: and after all the additional testing, the medical examiner finally had a cause of death, acute midazolam poisoning. investigators took everything they had to a special prosecutor and argued they were sure gilberto nunez had killed the man he called his best friend. i don t think that nunez was ever a friend to kolman. not for a minute do i believe that. he is a master manipulator. he lives to manipulate. i believe he drew tom in because he wanted to be closer to the wife and have access to the wife. reporter: nearly four years after tom s death, gilberto nunez was indicted for second-degree murder. how did that feel when you got that news? i cried.
reporter: the mystery s-u-v left around 5:30am. but tom s car never moved. what does that tell you? there had to be contact between the two to meet at this point, at that hour. so we knew now that someone had met with him prior to his death. and we now have to figure out who that is. reporter: easier said than done, of course. we just pulled up here. and lo and behold, there was a white suv here beside us. there is a white suv there. there is a white suv there. once you think about it, there s a lot of white suvs. they re everywhere. they re everywhere. reporter: but thanks to the video, investigators now thought they had an important lead to help narrow their search. whoever tom was interacting with in this white suv, he was expecting him. and he he knew him. reporter: time for investigators to start looking at tom s inner circle. picking apart his simple suburban life. linda kolman, i would imagine, would be someone that you would wanna look closely at.
d-a never gave up on tom s case. we re conducting these other parts of the investigation, we re developing video information. we re looking at the car, we re doing some pretty interesting things with regard to the vehicle. reporter: but the unidentified d-n-a was their biggest challenge. investigators gathered the brightest minds from the state crime lab to ask for advice. and one of them said, have you checked the autopsies that were done before? reporter: before tom kolman? before tom kolman. reporter: same day? same day. i looked at this person and said, kind of always thought that was a sterile environment. and she said, well, you should give that a check. so, we did. reporter: sure enough they got a match. turns out the d-n-a belonged to the deceased male who d been on the medical examiner s table before tom. so the d-n-a had nothing to do with the case, but it did mean that some evidence had been contaminated. reporter: what are you thinking when you hear
if thomas kolman had been sleeping reporter: the prosecutor suggested that gil, as a medical professional, figured out that tom s sleep apnea combined with the sedative could be a fatal combination. walk through your theory of what happened the morning of tom s death. the night before, i believe, gil and and tom had texted about meeting that morning. i think, at that point in time, gil wanted to meet up with tom because of the fact that he knew that he wasn t gettin linda. gil got out of his vehicle and entered tom s vehicle. at that point, maybe he brought him a coffee. i mean, it s early in the morning. here hey, bro. i brought you a coffee. we gotta talk. and a short time later, gil was driving away and tom was dead. reporter: but prosecutors faced a couple of obstacles. for one, the judge wouldn t let them use parts of gil s interview with the police because he had not been read his rights, so jurors never saw how gil initially denied to police he d ever heard