welcome back to dateline extra with burning suspicion. a prosecutor believed that paul zum zumot evidence that pointed elsewhere. 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 unrequit tal grief from the people who loved jennifer. it hurt. it hurt a lot. reporter: unrequitted because paul wasn t entering a plea, which this is was all about. candlelight vigils outside of paul s hookah lounge. we decided to stand in front of his establishment every night until he made his plea. reporter: eventually, no
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. reporter: why is that important? because, says geragos, the prosecution s own timeline should have cleared paul zumot. 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. reporter: 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 video footage around 1:37 p.m. and then from
our story, burning suspicion. once again, keith morris. defense attorney mark geragos had done what he could to poke holes in the prosecution s murder case against paul dume not, arguing that the prosecution had no solid scientific proof or clear evidence zumot was anywhere near jennifer when she was strangled and the house was set on fire. and anyway, he asked, if paul attacked jennifer, wouldn t she have put up some kind of a fight? why were there no defensive marks or scratches on paul zumot s body? did the prosecution even have a case? paul zumot wasn t going to take any chances. in fact, he was determined to tell the jury his side of the story. so geragos assigned a female colleague to question paul. it must have been a strategy, whispered courtroom observers. a way to show the jury that paul could in fact interact well with a woman.
fire. and now here he was not more than a year later on trial for her murder, listening to the prosecutor take the jury inside the last days of paul s relationship with jennifer. how did gillingham do that? jennifer s cell phone. detectives discovered and this was rather curious, that most of her text message history had been deleted. but law enforcement has changed a lot. it s had to to keep up with high tech. the palo alto cops managed to find a phone expert all the way across the country in new hampshire who had a very deep look into that cell phone and was able to pull up thousands, literally thousands of deleted text messages between jennifer and paul and the last few months of her life. and, oh boy. from jennifer, you re nothing but a selfish squcam artist lia. furious. that didn t read like any old
schipsi did not die in the fire. 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. reporter: who could have been so angry with jennifer? paul had told detectives that they had taken out restraining orders against hisham and tony ghanma, men who he 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? ze h he hit me. he has a restraining order against me. reporter: and just one night