Pod Insights The Binge Crimes Cut, Color, Kill | 5. The Other Man About this episode Two suspects left Fabio dead, poolside. But eight years after the murder, the lookout is still at large. Finding him blows the case wide open.
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Transcript 0:02 Speaker 00 Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.
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1:09 Speaker 01 In the belly of the Van Nuys courthouse, there is a place called the lockup. It's directly underneath the courtroom, down a flight of stairs. It's a room lined with grim cells. This is the holding place for the people who find themselves on trial here in the San Fernando Valley. The inmates get dropped off by a prison van and led into one of the cells by a bailiff to wait.
1:30 Speaker 02 Monica.
1:31 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:33 Speaker 02 Are you OK?
1:35 Speaker 03 Are you?
1:37 Speaker 02 I am, so I am now.
1:40 Speaker 01 Today, those inmates are Monica Semantilli and Robert Baker.
1:45 Speaker 01 They're here at the courthouse for their arraignment hearing. They've been placed in separate cells, but they're close enough to talk.
1:51 Speaker 02 You know they're recording everything, right?
1:54 Speaker 03 OK.
1:56 Speaker 01 Robert Baker is absolutely right. Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman has made sure of it.
2:03 Speaker 04 I told the detectives I wanted to put recording devices into the cells at the Van Nuys courthouse. And while the bailiffs are going about their business, handling other inmates, these two have the opportunity to converse.
2:20 Speaker 01 This is the first time Monica and Baker have been able to talk since they were arrested and separated two weeks ago, when Monica had learned that the police had found his DNA all over the scene of her husband's murder. You might expect her to be devastated or screaming at Baker, or at the very least, to have some questions.
2:39 Speaker 02 Until you don't get out, this is right me.
2:41 Speaker 03 Yes, yes, I'm a whore.
2:43 Speaker 02 Okay, and I've been told not to, but fuck that.
2:47 Speaker 01 Monica seems pretty calm. She says she'll keep writing to Baker. In fact, she's brought a letter to the lockup, stashed in her bra. And within minutes, Baker is making grand declarations of love.
3:02 Speaker 02 It's different, love, babe, it's different. It's bigger, you know? It's bigger, babe, it's bigger.
3:11 Speaker 02 Well, I'm not a marriage type of guy, but for you, and under these circumstances...
3:18 Speaker 01 Robert Baker gets down on his knees on the dirty floor.
3:22 Speaker 03 Why are you doing it?
3:24 Speaker 02 I'm doing it because I'm looking up at yourself, I'm looking at you to say something.
3:32 Speaker 02 I'm doing it right now for you. I will be proud, very proud.
3:41 Speaker 02 So, is that a yes?
3:48 Speaker 03 I wish more than anything else.
3:53 Speaker 01 This isn't just a marriage proposal, it's a commitment to fight the charges against them.
3:59 Speaker 02 I will stick with this. I'm stick by you, no matter what kind of shit they're trying to throw at us. I'm here, I ain't going anywhere.
4:09 Speaker 01 The couple start to whisper, but the recorders still pick up some of their conversation.
4:16 Speaker 03 No deals.
4:18 Speaker 02 Uh-uh.
4:19 Speaker 01 No deals, says Monica.
4:21 Speaker 03 No, no.
4:22 Speaker 02 Uh-uh. I'm with you, okay? I'm with you, that's my baby.
4:28 Speaker 01 Monica starts telling Baker what she knows about the evidence against them.
4:32 Speaker 03 Encrypted text.
4:35 Speaker 02 Whose?
4:37 Speaker 03 Both, I think.
4:38 Speaker 02 One?
4:38 Speaker 03 Yeah.
4:43 Speaker 01 Right now.
4:45 Speaker 01 Encrypted texts, Monica says. It's circumstantial right now. But Baker is worried about the video evidence.
4:52 Speaker 05 They said there was a figure or figures in video, something they saw. They didn't say what or nothing, didn't say it was anybody or anything.
5:03 Speaker 05 They think it's me. Wow, what? Because they can't find the other person.
5:11 Speaker 01 They think that's me in the video, she says, because they can't find the other person.
5:20 Speaker 01 In the days after Fabio's murder, the police uncovered a surveillance video, the one with the joggers, as detectives called them. Two figures in hoodies with their faces covered, running towards Fabio's house, then driving away from the scene in Fabio's Porsche. Right now, the investigators believe that one of those joggers is Robert Baker. But the other one can't be Monica. She was out running errands while Fabio was killed. That means there's another person still out there who was involved in Fabio's murder. The police know it, and their romantic prison cell conversation has just proven that Monica and Baker know it too.
6:09 Speaker 01 From Sony Music Entertainment and Novel, this is Cut Color Kill. I'm Jonathan Hirsch. Episode five, The Other Man.
6:35 Speaker 01 Just a few short months before the murder that will shock Woodland Hills, Fabio and Monica Semantili are dancing in the kitchen to an old Italian love song. Monica is wearing a hoodie and slippers. Fabio is in a tracksuit and socks. His feet slide on the tiled floor as they waltz about. They're giggling and singing along to the music. One of their daughters is filming. Now, the wife that Fabio was holding so tenderly is accused of his murder.
7:10 Speaker 01 This video of them dancing is part of a stack of evidence that Deputy DA Beth Silverman has to sift through. Monica Semantili and Robert Baker have pled not guilty, which means this case will be going to trial. Digital investigators are trawling through Monica and Baker's phones and reviewing surveillance footage from the day of the murder.
7:31 Speaker 04 We were still looking for who this third suspect, this other male individual who went up to the crime scene with Baker was.
7:40 Speaker 01 In the meantime, Beth Silverman starts making calls. Before Monica was arrested, the investigators couldn't ask anyone about her in case word got back to her. But now, if the prosecutor is going to take the case to trial, she needs to understand what people in Fabio's life knew about him and Monica. That means talking to friends, colleagues, and above all, the Semantili family.
8:05 Speaker 06 He met Monica through work. She did makeup, in addition to also being a hair model at times as well.
8:12 Speaker 01 Luigi Semantili, Fabio's son, and the rest of his family in Canada believe Monica's guilty, so they're happy to talk to the prosecutor. Luigi accepted Monica as his stepmom, but he tells Beth Silverman that he was well aware of the role she played in his parents' divorce.
8:32 Speaker 06 I know that the marriage between my mom and my dad had largely been intervened with by Monica, and it seemed like in order for her to get her way, she wouldn't let anything stand in the way of that. I had seen the ruthlessness of emotion of getting involved with a man who was married and who had a son at home, and I'm not naive to think that my dad had no part in that. Of course, he did. But it takes two to tango.
9:02 Speaker 01 For Luigi, that ruthlessness he'd seen in Monica made it easier for him to believe she could be capable of murder.
9:09 Speaker 06 It wasn't such a jump to accept that she was involved and she had orchestrated the whole affair. But for others, it was too great a leap to take, and they couldn't accept it.
9:22 Speaker 06 For my sisters, their world was turned upside down far more than anyone else's. Not only had they lost their dad six months prior, but now they'd also lost their mom. And in some way, for them and for Monica's family, this denial was necessary in order to salvage their worldview. I was doing my best to be diplomatic and to say, okay, I suppose we'll see.
9:49 Speaker 01 Not everyone on Fabio's side of the family has been so diplomatic. I've heard Luigi is one of the only ones still on speaking terms with his sisters. I admire your compassion for them. It's the human thing to do, to understand and to not rush to judgment of them because of that. That's a really hard place to be in when you're grieving.
10:15 Speaker 06 I appreciate you saying that. I know that as a maxim, people will accept something insofar as it fits what they already believe. And for her family and for my sisters, it didn't fit at all.
10:29 Speaker 01 We reached out to Luigi's sisters and Monica's family. They either declined to comment or didn't respond. Deputy DA Silverman puts a photo of Fabio and Luigi together on the notice board in her office. As she digs into the case, she fills this notice board with more and more photos. Fabio beaming at the camera with his usual confidence. Fabio with the people that mattered most to him, his family.
10:55 Speaker 04 I always have photos of the victim. It's what keeps you going when you remember, you know, that there are people who are destroyed by senseless crimes like this.
11:09 Speaker 01 Over long conversations, the Semintillies have brought Fabio to life for the prosecutor.
11:15 Speaker 06 He acted out his affection towards his family. So he would often walk with his arm around me and stuff like that. And I would kind of shy away, being an unconfident 13, 14-year-old. And I would say, Dad, come on, you know, don't embarrass me. Now, if I could go back, I would say, you know, I'm not embarrassed. I love being with you. And I'm sorry I wasn't more confident to accept that display of affection as you had displayed it.
11:46 Speaker 01 Half of Fabio's family are standing by Monica. And those who believe she's guilty are counting on Silverman to get justice for Fabio.
11:55 Speaker 04 It's our job to sort of shepherd them through this really lengthy horrible process and try to leave them on the other side of it as whole and complete as you can. They put their trust in me, so I certainly don't want to let them down.
12:12 Speaker 01 The prosecutor will have to keep building her case without Fabio's daughters. Meanwhile, in prison, Monica and Robert Baker are building their own.
12:30 Speaker 00 Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.
13:04 Speaker 01 In a stark jail visitation stall, Monica Semantilli is looking at her 16-year-old daughter Bella through a thick pane of glass. Bella is here to visit her mom, and they're speaking across the glass through a phone line. She's just shown Monica a tattoo she wants to get. Now Monica has something to show her.
13:23 Speaker 07 That's good. You want to see mine? Sure. Okay.
13:26 Speaker 01 Monica turns and lifts her hair up to show Bella something on the back of her neck.
13:31 Speaker 07 I can't see anything.
13:35 Speaker 01 I can't see it. I can't see it at all. What does it say? It's a drawing in ballpoint pen.
13:41 Speaker 07 Couldn't see it? It says, "Ride or die."
13:45 Speaker 01 Ride or die. Bella's face falls.
13:49 Speaker 07 Okay.
13:52 Speaker 07 I'm kidding. It's just a pen. I wanted to joke around with you.
13:56 Speaker 01 Maybe it's the sight of her normally immaculately turned out mother with a crude prison tattoo. Maybe she doesn't know the significance of these words. But Deputy DA Silverman does. When she gets a hold of the footage of this jail visit, she recognizes the words "ride or die" instantly. She's seen it before, over and over, in letters Monica and Robert Baker have been sending to each other while they're in prison.
14:23 Speaker 04 Ride or die is the two of them, Baker and Semenatili, telling each other how they're each other's ride or die. They're gonna take what they've done to the grave and they're gonna spend the rest of their lives together.
14:38 Speaker 01 They write it in cursive letters, big hearts, and on cartoon pornographic drawings. In one letter, Monica even tells Baker that she's had a ring made for him with "ride or die" inscribed on it.
14:51 Speaker 04 She's playing with Isabella, right? Which I think is particularly cruel because Isabella doesn't know. Monica's like, "Oh, look at this tattoo I have in pen on the back of my neck."
15:03 Speaker 01 Part of why Beth Silverman finds this so cruel is because of what she knows about Monica's movements on the day Fabio was killed. The detectives have the whole thing plotted out.
15:15 Speaker 04 She had left just before the murder to go run some errands and then was caught on surveillance video from the Target coming out and being glued to her cellphone in the store for a period of time, but came out with a tiny little bag of purchases.
15:32 Speaker 01 All day long, while Monica is running those errands, she's sending messages.
15:38 Speaker 01 On the afternoon of the murder, Isabella is at school and has a job interview after class. At 1:40, Monica sends a message to her, saying, "Text me after the interview, and let me know when you're on your way. I'm making fettina and corn for dinner." Later that afternoon, Monica is out at the shops and her other daughter, Jessica, is still at home with Fabio. At 3:40, Monica texts Jessica, "Don't be late for babysitting." "I won't, lol," she replies. A few minutes later, Jessica heads out to her babysitting job, leaving Fabio alone. About six minutes after that, at 3:53 PM, Monica connects to the app set up to view
16:22 Speaker 01 her home security cameras. Twenty-five minutes later, the two suspects with their faces covered are caught on a street surveillance camera, running toward the Semantili house. Four minutes after that, while the suspects are still at the house, Monica gets a call from Isabella, who has finished her job interview. Monica sends Isabella on a detour to pick up some glasses from the eye doctor on her way home. At 4:52, Monica leaves the store she's in and starts driving home, just as the suspects back at the house make their getaway, Fabio's Porsche. One minute after the killers flee, Isabella Semantili arrives home to find her father's body.
17:03 Speaker 04 It was just such a very coincidental timeline that she had set up, where she just happened to come home, I don't know, four minutes behind her daughter.
17:14 Speaker 01 To the prosecutor, this doesn't look like a coincidence. It looks carefully choreographed. Because on January 23rd, while Monica was texting her daughters and running errands, she was also using an encrypted app called Viber. Although the investigators can't read the messages, they can see when they were sent and to who. And between 6:00 AM and 5:14 PM, just after Fabio was killed, Monica exchanged 95 messages with Robert Baker.
17:45 Speaker 04 She has manipulated her youngest daughter so that she will find her father's body, right? So she's not the one to find her husband's body first to sort of distance herself from the crime. She's used her youngest daughter to do that. And now she's joking with her daughter on what's an inside secret between her and her lover, who have conspired to murder her daughter's father. To me, that was just a perfect example of who Monica Semenatili is and how she treated and thought about her daughter.
18:24 Speaker 01 Hey, babe.
18:25 Speaker 04 Oh, my God. I can't believe I'm talking to you.
18:30 Speaker 01 Beth Silverman has been keeping close tabs on Monica and Baker in prison. They've been going to increasingly desperate measures to stay in contact.
18:38 Speaker 07 I'm buying other people's minutes so I can use them. So it's like a different name every time I call in.
18:42 Speaker 04 Using other inmates to send mail to each other through fake names, using other people's booking numbers to place calls through third parties on the outside so they could actually get on the phone.
18:55 Speaker 01 The next time we call, I need to give you a way we can communicate stuff that we don't want no one to know about us. Silverman knows they're conspiring, but she won't know exactly what their defense strategy is until the trial. There are endless delays in requests to revisit evidence. Monica's defense team also keeps requesting to speak with Robert Baker. In the meantime, Fabio's family are stuck in limbo. Over in Canada, with the holidays approaching, Luigi is trying to grieve with the case still hanging over him.
19:29 Speaker 06 The first Christmas without my dad was a particularly painful event, and it reminded me of something that he told me years ago.
19:37 Speaker 06 I remember asking him when his father died, what was that like to deal with? And I specifically remember him saying, "It was hard at first to deal with his death and deal with the funeral and the whirlwind of people, but the hardest part came when the people stopped coming because you realized life has to go on in this new way without this person in your life, and you just have to accept it."
20:03 Speaker 06 And that's what that first Christmas in 2017 felt like. It was that realization of this is really it. It's this kind of dull agony that never quite goes away. Details about the case, details about the affair, details about the murder, came in trickles, once a month, once every two months, a few times a week. It was like a faucet that you could never quite close. I remember going to a wedding of a good friend of mine and moments before leaving the hotel room, as I had been dressed and ready to celebrate with my friends, getting an email or a call with some question, some new information.
20:44 Speaker 06 And when that happened, it thrust me back into the grief.
20:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, you're not watching this like it's some movie. It's not some form of entertainment for you. You're not like waiting on every turn of a story. This is your real life.
20:58 Speaker 06 Absolutely. I'm not watching a true crime story where these details are a matter of entertainment or a plot twist. This is part of my life in the sense of grief. And I can't speak for others, but I had a hard time living my life, being constantly reminded of my grief. And the worst thing, the murder of my dad, had already happened.
21:25 Speaker 01 Luigi doesn't want the constant drip, drip of details. Others might, but he chooses to preserve his peace. He's waiting for the trial. That trial, and with it, the promise of closure, keeps getting postponed. It drags on for months and years. Eventually, a date is set for summer 2020. But when LA is hit by the COVID pandemic, everything is held up indefinitely. In 2023, more than six years after his father's death, Luigi Semantili gets a call. It's Deputy DA Silverman.
21:57 Speaker 06 She said she's got some news and knew something big had happened.
22:03 Speaker 06 She told me Baker is changing his plea. I should fly out to make a statement and to be there for when it happened.
22:09 Speaker 01 In that moment, as he starts preparing to fly to California, Luigi only has one thought in mind.
22:17 Speaker 06 One down, one to go.
22:21 Speaker 01 On July 7th, a Friday, 2023, Robert Baker stands before a judge in the downtown courthouse. Luigi is in the courtroom, and there are lots of Fabio's friends, like his old Wella friends, Carol, Alicia, and Melanie.
22:36 Speaker 00 Here I am in this courtroom, just looking at this individual person here who murdered our friend. It's just weird. Knowing all the things that you know about Robert Baker, you know, convicted sex offender and in the porn industry, and just not a savory human being. You look at what this woman has spent 20 years of her life creating, you know, two beautiful daughters. And then you're like, you threw that away for him? I guess you get caught up in a manipulation. You get caught up in like lust and greed and like, wow, it's just mind blowing. How does that happen?
23:18 Speaker 01 Robert Baker announces to the court that he's pleading no contest to the charges against him.
23:23 Speaker 06 The judge explicitly said, are you aware that pleading no contest is the same as pleading guilty? And he affirmed, and then that was it. The person who went and killed my dad was going to face justice and spend the rest of his life behind bars.
23:40 Speaker 01 The judge sentences Robert Baker to life without the possibility of parole. What you need to understand here is that Robert Baker isn't taking a plea deal. There is no offer on the table. He's waving his right to a trial, and the judge can still impose the maximum sentence. With the charges Baker is admitting to, first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, a life sentence is basically a given. It's really, really unusual in a murder trial for someone to do this.
24:09 Speaker 00 Anybody else in their right mind would have taken a shot at going to trial and convincing at least one person that either Monica led you to do this or come up with some other excuse for why his DNA was in the house and in Fabio's car.
24:25 Speaker 01 If Baker pled not guilty and went to trial, the worst case scenario for him would be the sentence he's just received. So Deputy DA Silverman knows there must be a reason he's doing this.
24:35 Speaker 04 The only reasonable conclusion from his plea was that he was going to take the blame and try and get Monica off.
24:42 Speaker 01 Robert Baker has written a letter to Monica and given it to her defense team. It says, "In January 2017, when this all happened, the intent was to actually deliver a gift for your birthday." Baker writes that he wanted to surprise Monica by leaving a present somewhere only she would find it. So he snuck into the house and placed a gift under Monica's pillow. Then, when he went out to the patio, he ran into Fabio. "It went bad from there," he writes. "All I remember is going down numb. I knew I'd been hit hard by something. I sort of blanked out with fear, panic, and my last thought was I'm going to be killed. I grabbed whatever I could to defend myself and let instinct take over."
25:27 Speaker 01 Baker tries to make it sound like he killed Fabio in self-defense, then staged the scene to look like a home invasion gone wrong. And, most importantly, Monica had nothing to do with it. A date for Monica's trial is set for early 2025. And now prosecutor Silverman knows what she's up against. But the case is about to be shaken up again. Because a new detective has been going back through the digital evidence ahead of the trial, she's found something.
26:01 Speaker 04 She noticed that Baker had sent a Facebook message soon after the murder to somebody we didn't know, who wasn't coming up as a somebody who was regularly communicating with Baker, nor was he in communication with Monica when we tried to link phone numbers together.
26:25 Speaker 01 After years of searching for the missing jogger from the surveillance video, the cops have a new lead.
26:37 Speaker 02 North American Dad, 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, "Dang, that's a good offer." The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him "boss." He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.
27:08 Speaker 00 Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.
27:41 Speaker 01 It's October 2024, and Deputy District Attorney Heather Steggall is on a plane flying from LA to Washington State. Heather works on the same floor as Beth Silverman, so she's heard about the Monica Semintelli case. She was talking to me about it in the hallway, and it was fascinating. The minute she asked me, "Would you want to do this with me and do the trial?" I said, "Yes, yes, yes, I want to do it." Deputy DA Steggall starts reading through the case files so the two prosecutors can strategize. She can see there's a strong circumstantial case against Monica here, but nothing is ever totally certain. Is it enough? We don't have a confession in terms of "I did it." It's a female defendant. Juries tend to feel sympathetic for female defendants.
28:26 Speaker 01 I don't know why, but I've had it happen before, too. Then there's the question still hanging over the case. The missing suspect, the other jogger caught on the surveillance cameras, running towards Fabio's house. Whenever we're prosecutors and we do a trial, we hate when there's something left unanswered. We knew that was going to be- An issue because people want to know, we want to know. The family wants to know, who is that second person?
28:52 Speaker 01 That person has remained a mystery for years. But in 2019, a new detective, Mitzi Roberts, joined the case. She's been trawling back through the digital evidence and she found a Facebook message from Robert Baker.
29:05 Speaker 04 In this message, Baker directed him to download WhatsApp, which is an encrypted application for them to communicate.
29:13 Speaker 01 The name of the man Baker messaged is Christopher Austin. At the time of the murder, he was living in Alaska. But he'd grown up in the same neighborhood as Robert Baker and his dad was a friend of Baker's. The investigators start digging and pass on what they find to the prosecutors. He seemed to be staying on and off with Rob Baker, doing odds and end jobs. He was driving him. He was kind of like his errand boy, almost. This makes sense to the prosecutors. A lackey is exactly the kind of profile they're looking for. Most of these crimes, just from experience, a lot of times they have lookouts because you're going somewhere where you're not supposed to be. Someone could come home, someone could call the police. So we assume that the second person jogged up the hill with Rob Baker.
29:57 Speaker 01 We assumed it was a lookout. The investigators pull flight records and subpoena financial records. On the 12th of January, Robert Baker made a payment to someone in Alaska. Then on the 22nd of January, 2017, the day before the murder, Christopher Austin took an Alaskan Airlines flight to LA.
30:23 Speaker 01 They knew that he was in the area. He was friends with Rob. He'd gone to Los Angeles. They had tracked him to Los Angeles, but it wasn't quite enough to put him at the scene of the crime and involved in the crime. The detectives already know that on January 23rd, the day of the murder, Robert Baker rented a car to get to the scene of the crime. Turns out that 45 minutes after Fabio was murdered, Christopher Austin got a traffic ticket in that same rental car.
30:49 Speaker 04 At that point, all the pieces started falling into place.
30:52 Speaker 01 Deputy DA Steggall and a team of a dozen or so detectives fly to Washington State to arrest Christopher Austin. If he's willing to talk, this could crack Monica's case wide open.
31:09 Speaker 01 It's been more than seven years since the murder. Austin has moved to Washington State. He seems to have made a fresh start there.
31:16 Speaker 04 He had a small child. He was married. He'd been working as a probation officer. He didn't have any problems in the job. He was, for lack of better words, well-respected in his career.
31:27 Speaker 01 Christopher Austin is about to get a big surprise. On the morning of October 2, Deputy DA Steggall and another dozen investigators arrive at the local police station in Vancouver, Washington.
31:39 Speaker 04 We're in a big conference room. There's a giant screen. And what they had is they had cameras looking at Christopher Austin's house.
31:46 Speaker 01 More detectives are surrounding Austin's house, waiting for him to leave.
31:50 Speaker 04 They had a team out there, ready to follow him and arrest him as he's driving to work. They've got another team waiting as soon as he's arrested to go in and speak with his wife simultaneously. All of it's very strategic because it has to happen at the same time where Christopher isn't able to necessarily call his wife, get story straight. So they've got to have a lot of different people in place for this arrest. Pulling him over, like, they don't know if there's a gun in the car, what he's going to do, who this guy really is.
32:19 Speaker 01 Deputy DA Steggall watches through the camera feed as the door to the house opens. Right on time, Christopher Austin is setting off to work. But he's not alone.
32:30 Speaker 04 He left with his daughter. That was not planned. These detectives do not want to stop him with his daughter in the car. So then we're in the room thinking, what's going on? Are we going to arrest him or not? This is not a good time. We're all on a little bit of pins and needles all. Where's he going if he's with his daughter? We're not going to do anything. We're going to let him go on his errands and he might just go home. And then the plan's going to have to be revamped.
32:54 Speaker 01 Detectives tail Austin as he drives his daughter to daycare. Once he drops her off, it's safe to move in. Heather Steggall gets word from the team in the field.
33:06 Speaker 04 We've got him. We're bringing him into the station. And that's when we know it's go time.
33:16 Speaker 02 The seat that you're over there.
33:19 Speaker 01 Christopher Austin is placed in a cell and then taken into an interview room by two LAPD detectives.
33:25 Speaker 02 This is my partner.
33:27 Speaker 01 Over in the conference room, Deputy DA Steggall is watching the whole thing play out on a live video feed. Everything has been building to this moment.
33:36 Speaker 02 The minute he says, "I want a lawyer, I don't want to talk to you," the detectives have to stop. That's his right. He didn't do that. He just started talking. So may I say something? I truly do understand that you guys are here to do a job. We are. I really do. It's my understanding that you're here for a reason. He knows exactly why he's there, and it seemed like this weight had been on him for years and years and years.
34:11 Speaker 01 Austin's body language is defeated. He tells the detectives he's been waiting for them to find him.
34:17 Speaker 02 I'm listening and I'm taking notes. They're asking him about the killing of Fabio.
34:23 Speaker 01 It was supposed to go in rough mud, take a couple things. Didn't happen that way.
34:32 Speaker 02 So how did it happen? And he just says, "And then I, I covered his eyes and then I stabbed him."
34:40 Speaker 01 It was one, two, three, and go. He was stabbed.
34:45 Speaker 02 Wait, what? I was like, did, did he just say he stabbed him? How many times did you stab him?
34:53 Speaker 01 Austin holds up one finger.
34:56 Speaker 02 Was that once? Where?
34:59 Speaker 01 Austin gestures to the side of his neck. It seems like he can hardly speak.
35:04 Speaker 02 That was not on my radar. I was not expecting him to say that. We always assumed going into that interview that there was one stabber and that was Robert Baker. We thought the second person was more of a lookout.
35:18 Speaker 01 People are looking around being like, is anyone hearing what I'm hearing? Like, what? So now we've got two people actually involved in the physical stabbing murder of Fabio Semantilli.
35:32 Speaker 01 But even more than that, Austin says there's a reason that he and Baker knew when Fabio would be alone. How did he know when to go?
35:41 Speaker 05 Is he talking to her? She said he's in the house.
35:46 Speaker 05 Right before this murder happened, Monica called Baker and said, now, now's the time, let's go.
35:55 Speaker 01 She's the ringleader, she's directing it. Everything went through her.
36:01 Speaker 01 Next time on the finale of Cut, Color, Kill. Monica's trial finally arrives and two confessed killers take the witness stand.
36:13 Speaker 05 Baker says she wants him gone, she wants him dead. I murdered him because I wanted her.
36:42 Speaker 00 Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.
37:11 Speaker 01 This is Cut, Color, Kill, an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Novel, hosted by me, Jonathan Hirsch. Caroline Thornham is our senior producer. Catherine Godfrey is our editor. Mohamed Ahmed is our assistant producer. Mark Pittman is our engineer. Additional engineering by Daniel Kempson. For Novel, our executive producer is Max O'Brien. For Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and me, Jonathan Hirsch. Production management from Sheree Houston, Joe Savage, and Charlotte Wolf. Fact checking by Fendel Fulton. Research by Myron Kaplan. Story development by Nell Gray Andrews. Novel's director of development is Selena Metta. Special thanks to Carolyn
37:54 Speaker 01 Cher Levin at Miller-Korsak Raymond. And a big thanks to the whole Sony Music Entertainment team.
38:32 Speaker 00 Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.
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