with a husband and two small children. and for a whole decade shirlene seemed so happy with ken. when did it change? it seemed to start to change around 1998. shirlene told the girls that she and ken were fighting. mid-1999, she called them, very upset, and when they went to hawaii to see what was wrong, she said the strangest thing. asked them to promise her something. she said, promise me. if anything ever happens to me, you ll investigate. and we said, mom, what are you talking about, if anything happens to you? just promise me, she said. shirlene left ken soon after that. moved to the mainland. the girls thought the break was permanent. were relieved actually. but seven months later she said, i m back in hawaii and i m back living with ken and everything s fine. i don t want you to worry. but worry they did. she would call me and we would talk about things. and then she would call me again an hour later and she wouldn t remember anything that we talked abo
moved to arizona. tammie settled in northern california with a husband and two small children. and for a whole decade shirlene seemed so happy with ken. when did it change? it seemed to start to change around 1998. shirlene told the girls that she and ken were fighting. mid-1999, she called them, very upset, and when they went to hawaii to see what was wrong, she said the strangest thing. asked them to promise her something. she said, promise me. if anything ever happens to me, you ll investigate. and we said, mom, what are you talking about, if anything happens to you? just promise me, she said. shirlene left ken soon after that. moved to the mainland. the girls thought the break was permanent. were relieved actually. but seven months later she said, i m back in hawaii and i m back living with ken and everything s fine. i don t
this subject, in the year 2014? no. it s pretty crazy. i could have never seen this coming. perhaps it is, pretty crazy. but there is apparently no stopping them, these tenacious sisters, tammy cocard and tiffany young. there is no halfway when it comes to to a promise. it s either all or nothing. bizarre story? oh yes, it is. at the center of it is a woman named shirlene van gundy. a beauty queen once, back in colorado. a girl who loved to dance and wear high heels. she was popular and unpredictable and kind of exciting. long before she became the effervescent mother of tammy and tiffany. my mother was an incredibly beautiful beautiful soul. she taught both my sister and i that there was nothing that we we couldn t do. hi. i love you. my earliest memories of her are her singing to me. she loved to sing. and she played with me. she was she was a big kid.
on to the next day and how he tried to prevent her from dying. shirlene s daughters were horrified. now, they were fully determined to keep their promise to their mother, they d need to ensure that ken was charged with her murder. next to look at the case, prosecutor dan oyasato, who found ken s remarks about strangulation very disturbing. and here s why. this was viewed as an overdose. that s how this case went to the hospital. that s what tiffany and tammie were thinking. that s what the police department was thinking. and yet, as oyasato began to dig deeper, he found that ken talked about strangulation more than once. he brought it up with the medical examiner s investigator and was basically telling them, this is not a strangulation case. in fact, said the prosecutor, ken tried to persuade the examiner not to do an autopsy. but, of course, there was one.
how do you get your head around it? how do you process all of it? how do you move forward every day? and how would they make the case against ken and persuade the state to start from scratch? ken s story had never changed, that shirlene killed herself, accidentally or on purpose, with an overdose of pills. of course, the state still had evidence, like that pill bottle the sisters said they found stashed in the back yard of the condo, as if ken fed the pills to shirlene, then tried to hide the bottle from the police. but defense attorney edmunds could show ken didn t try to hide anything, that, in fact, he took paramedics to the medicine cabinet himself. they counted down tablets in a bottle of pills to see how many were left, and how many tried to figure out how many she d taken. which is what she said she had done. and there was a potential new defense witness who knew shirlene well, didn t like her at all, in fact. and she has her own strange theory on what happened to shir