he was a middle-class man, hard working, loved his family, would do anything for them. we couldn t find any enemies in the world that would wanna do anything against tom. you had a real mystery you had to solve here. oh, absolutely. investigators were interested in speaking to anyone close to tom, including his good friend who raced to the scene that morning. gilberto nunez was his full name and he was a prominent, local dentist, originally from the dominican republic. how long, i guess, have you known him? we be i mean, i ve known him for four years but we were starting a friendship around three years ago. okay. > investioh, yes,. ab howit s just not the norm. e had a very smooth, i want to say almost sexy way about him. his personality was sucking me in. investigators also fished for information about tom s wife. how s linda doing, i guess? have you talked to her since tuesday? yes. oh, yes,. yes? yes, i ve been there. i go to the house and stuff. okay. how s
over time, yeah. through school events, or? through that and then, our sons both did karate together. they were in the same karate class. tom and gil also hit it off and became close. talking sports and watching giants games. and like tom, gil was a hands-on dad. he went to all his son s karate classes, where he would see linda. so gil and i would sit next to each other and just talk. and this was, like, three times a week for an hour. what was it about gilberto that you liked? very friendly, very personable. a year went by before linda says she realized something was happening between them. every time he would leave, he would give me a kiss goodbye. on the lips? for him to give me a hug and a kiss on the cheek, you know, see ya next week.
so yeah, it was just a dirty, stupid game. the defense set out to dismantle the rest of the prosecution s case point by point. all that business about the cia they said was more like a joke, hardly criminal. and irrelevant to the charge of second degree murder. and there was ample evidence that gilberto cared too much about tom to ever hurt him. tom kolman and gilberto nunez were best friends. did spend time together. did make plans. did talk about going into a business together. there was no motive whatsoever for this alleged murder. they stressed that none of the physical evidence linked gilberto to the crime scene. no dna, no fingerprints. as for that internet search for the word midazolam , the defense pointed out anyone in the office could have done it and they believed it revealed very little. not a search for a question
point in time because we ve had to wait for toxicology reports to come back to to come up with a cause of death. but in the meantime, we re we re thinking i would say thinking the worst. until we can disprove that it s not a homicide, we ve got to treat it as such. crime scene techs worked on tom s car and took swabs for clues. while detectives set out to learn more about his movements on the day he died. linda told police the last time she saw tom was the night before, watching football. she assumed he left for the gym the following morning around 5:30. so investigators pulled security video of the parking lot to see what that could tell them. it was dark and grainy but revealed a lot. in the video itself we were able to observe a white suv arrive in the parking lot of planet fitness, and that was about 4:30 in the morning. ten minutes later we actually see thomas kolman s vehicle pull into the parking lot and park right next to this white suv.
samples from all the first responders to see if they could have accidentally left their dna at the scene. and they considered another possibility that the dna belonged to an accomplice. we were also trying to get samples from people we had we were also trying to get samples from people we had identified that were close to nunez. that s a little trickier because you just can t walk up and ask for the dna. we call it cast-off dna. and you would conduct a surveillance of those individuals and wait for them to discard an item that would most likely have their dna and then you collect that. what kind of items did you collect? i think there was a cigarette butt and maybe a can of soda. over many months, all the samples were processed, but it turned out to be a complete bust. it identified no one. it s not the first responders. it s not gilberto nunez. who is it? at that point, i was banging my head against the wall. linda was also growing frustrated. she was now a widow, a si