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. 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
that she refused to go to the hookah lounge after the party. walked all the way home on a broken heel texting all the way. jennifer good, stay away from me. i just got home. paul, i m staying away this time for good. what a way to end my birthday. for jennifer to walk home alone at night with a broken heel and upset, she had to have been i don t even know if i ve ever seen her that mad. but that was the night before. angry messages buzzing back and forth. then, as the cell phone revealed, the pair made love during the night before 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
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 video footage around 1:37 p.m. and then from there he headed to his anger management class about 18 miles away. on the way, he stopped at the restaurant depot seen here on camera around 3:30. 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.
now yesterday she walked home and she said, hey, somebody probably was stalking me. had the brothers killed her, too? police listened, and then had paul give them his clothes for forensic testing. questioned by police, his home destroyed, his girlfriend dead, paul zumot was very nearly in shock, said his friend. his mind was, are they sure jen for the gone and, oh, my god, she s never coming back? as the weeks went by, paul was in a kind of daze. the gist of our conversations for the first few weeks is that jennifer s not coming back. he was completely distraught about the fact that jennifer was in that fire. meanwhile, as those same weeks went by, investigators went quietly and steadily about their task, picking through the cinders of the fire and coming to the conclusion that none of it smelled right. literally. coming up was gasoline there? no question at all. it s in her hair. you can smell it, and you can smell it when you walk in just with your own nose. inves
furniture. he kicked in my car. somebody saw him at starbucks spit in my face on my way to work. but things clearly changed after that. remember, they were all lovey-dovey and paul was even talking marriage the night before the 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 in the last few months of her life. and, oh, boy.