Cut, Color, Kill | 6. Betrayal

Fabio's family is divided as the killers take the stand. A secret is revealed. Want the full story? Binge every episode of Cut, Color, Kill ad-free now by subscribing to The Binge+. You’ll unlock over 60 true crime series instantly, get early access to drops on the first of every month, and hear exclusive bonus episodes. Search for the channel on Apple Podcasts or head to GetTheBinge.com. For behind-the-scenes details, join our free newsletter at Patreon.com/TheBinge. Cut, Color, Kill is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Novel. Follow @sonypodcasts and discover more at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices at podcastchoices.com/adchoices. The Binge — feed your true crime obsession. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up, rich people? It's me, Haley, AKA Mrs. Dow Jones, and this is Financial Tea, the show where money talk is finally fun. Each week, I'm going to be breaking down the money stories and wealth building secrets you actually need to know. The trends, the headlines, the drama, in a way that's smart, fun, and honestly, low-key addictive. Subscribe to Financial Tea wherever you get your podcasts. Stay rich.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:08Speaker 02

  So you told us kind of what you did, but we'd like to put the whole picture together from Chris's perspective.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  In an interrogation room in Vancouver, Washington, Christopher Austin is sitting opposite two detectives with his head in his hands. He's just confessed to stabbing Fabio Semantili.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  His world had just been turned upside down. He knew that going forward, he was forever changed.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Deputy DA Heather Stegall is in another room in the police station, watching the interview on a screen.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  He'd been living this other life now, trying to put this murder behind him. His concern was he had a small daughter and a wife. He repeatedly, repeatedly said, can I see them? Can I talk to them? Can I talk to my wife? Can I see her? That was high priority in him.

• 1:58Speaker 04

  Do you see me? Have you seen my cross again?

• 2:02Speaker 02

  You mean as a guy walking freely out the door right now? Or long-term?

• 2:08Speaker 04

  Just in general.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  I'll be honest with you, I don't see you walking out of the door today.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  The detectives tell him he's not going to be leaving the police station today. He's under arrest, and the DA will most likely charge him.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Can I meet the DA today?

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Uh, we'll ask.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  And that's when he started asking to talk to the DA. The detectives came back and told me that he wants to talk to you. I said, okay, sounds good. Let's do this. I was ready to go.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Steggall strides down the hall and into the interrogation room. She's polished, in a smart suit and black stilettos.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Austin is leaning forward in his chair, looking defeated.

• 2:52Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm the DA. Do you want to talk to me?

• 2:55Speaker 01

  The prosecutor shakes his hand and takes a seat. She makes it clear that he can ask for an attorney if he wants one.

• 3:03Speaker 05

  So do you want to talk to me now with I'm an attorney? Is that accurate?

• 3:07Speaker 04

  That is accurate. I asked to speak to you.

• 3:09Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  He seemed like he wanted to get it all off his chest and just tell everything that he could about his involvement in it.

• 3:17Speaker 04

  I mean, what can you do as a DA for me to see my girls? At the end of the day, I only care about seeing my girls. What do you need from me so I can go see my girls?

• 3:34Speaker 05

  We just want the truth because we know we've got one other person to try and next Monica.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Monica Samantilli is going to trial in January. She's being charged with conspiring with Robert Baker to murder her husband Fabio. Deputy DA Steggall and her fellow prosecutor Beth Silverman already have a lot of circumstantial evidence against Monica. The lies she told to the detectives and all the sneaking around with Robert Baker, their secret whisperings in the lockup. But they need it to be ironclad. If Christopher Austin is willing to testify that Monica was the mastermind coordinating Fabio's death, that would be some of the clearest evidence yet.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Just solidifying that link. Any extra evidence that she's the lead of the conspiracy, every piece was a great new piece of evidence.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  But the defense also has a star witness of their own. Robert Baker is going to testify that he's murdered Fabio without Monica's knowledge. She had nothing to do with it.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  We've got two people taking the stand saying, I killed Fabio. Two killers, a Baker and an Austin, and they're both going to testify.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  So now it comes down to which killer are you going to believe?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  From Sony Music Entertainment and Novel, this is Cut, Color, Kill. I'm Jonathan Hirsch, episode six, Betrayal.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  It's January 2025, eight years since Fabio Semantilli was murdered in his home in Woodland Hills. Eight years of his loved ones waiting for justice. And in a wood-paneled courtroom in downtown Los Angeles, Monica Semantilli's trial is beginning. Cameras are rolling. Journalists from outlets including ABC, NBC, CBS are covering the case, and Court TV is streaming live courtroom coverage. This case has captured the attention of people around the world, not least because of the family drama playing out here in the courtroom.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  We've got families sitting on two sides of the courtroom, not speaking to each other, who used to be, you know, having lunches and barbecues and parties together. They did not acknowledge each other.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Prosecutors Beth Silverman and Heather Stagel have a huge task ahead of them. This trial will last 10 weeks, and there are hundreds of witnesses prepped and a huge amount of evidence to cover. I can't take you through every single detail of the evidence, and some of it, like the secret police recordings, you've already heard. But I do want you to hear this one piece of testimony that I think really cuts to the heart of what's at stake here in this courtroom. Anna Crescentini is called as a witness on day 28 of the trial. She's Monica's older sister by two and a half years, an eighth grade science and math teacher, and she's flown all the way from Canada to testify. Anna says she spoke to Monica on the phone only a couple of hours before Fabio was killed, and she seemed completely herself. And in the aftermath, she says her sister was devastated by grief.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  We found my sister on the couch,

• 7:01Speaker 00

  hugging a gray sweater that belonged to Fabio and rocking. Tears pouring down her face.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  She had toilet paper and Kleenex all around her. And when we tried to talk to her, she wasn't even making eye contact with us.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  For the defense, the point of all this is to try and humanize Monica, to show that her shock and grief at Fabio's death was genuine, because she wasn't involved in planning it. By the time prosecutor Steggall stands up to cross-examine Anna, she's feeling frustrated.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  On and on and on, what a great person she is. And that she was grieving, and I witnessed her grieving so bad.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Steggall wants to put to the test how well Anna really knew her sister.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  You love her, you trust her?

• 7:52Speaker 00

  I love her, I trust her, one of my closest friends, yes.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Did you talk about everything?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  I did.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Okay, obviously, you know, you didn't know about the affair this entire time, correct?

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  I started with the affair, all the text messages, the sneaking out, the leaving her kids, the lies.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  One time after Fabio's death, Anna says Monica flew from Canada to LA because she wanted time alone to grieve with her daughters.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  Did you know that when she landed, she immediately went out with Baker, but didn't go home to grieve with her girls?

• 8:25Speaker 00

  I did not know.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Another time, when the family was in Canada for Fabio's cremation, Anna says Monica was so emotionally drained, she had to take her home to their mom's house.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Did you know that those three days, February 3rd, 4th, and 6th, that she was sending sexually explicit photos of herself naked to her boyfriend?

• 8:52Speaker 00

  No, obviously, I did not know.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  The prosecutor hands over a stack of photographs. They are printouts of photos that Monica sent to Robert Baker. Steggall asks Anna to look at them.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  I mean, not my proudest moment, but the point being, you don't know your sister.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  I don't fault her for taking the stand for her sister. I mean, that's what family does. And it was not meant to embarrass Anna or do anything like that. It was just she was digging in so hard about how she knew her sister and her sister would never do this. So I'm going through all the examples of what you didn't know about your sister, and the list was endless.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  At the end of the cross-examination, Stekel asks Anna whether, knowing all of this, she still trusts Monica to tell the truth.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  I believe my sister. I know she was lying because she was hiding an affair. Do I trust her? Yes.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Anna accepts her sister lied about an affair, but she's absolutely clear on this point.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Of course she's gonna lie. She wants to cover the affair. Doesn't mean that she had anything to do with this murder.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  That's what I wanted you to hear. Anna's testimony in the courtroom exposes one of the main fault lines of this entire trial. The question of how well we really know the people we love. The narrative the prosecution is building is that Monica is a liar and a manipulator. They can lay out the exact timeline of the deception because Monica documented so much of it herself in the hundreds of photos and videos she sent to Robert Baker, taken from iCloud and Dropbox accounts, in the text messages, lying about her whereabouts from before and after the murder. But Anna's view of her sister's marriage is more complicated.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  It is possible to love someone and cheat on them at the same time.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  When Monica's defense attorneys stand in front of the jury, they keep coming back to the same point. Yes, Monica had an affair. She lied and deceived her family and friends. She made choices that hurt people. None of that makes her guilty of murder. The financial motive doesn't make sense, they argue, because Monica wasn't the sole beneficiary of Fabio's $1.6 million life insurance payout. It was split between her and his children, too. Their point being, Fabio was worth more to Monica alive than dead.

• 11:15Speaker 06

  Kill him.

• 11:17Speaker 06

  Why kill him? She had everything she wanted, moral or not. She had a loving husband, making a good living, living the good life, two beautiful kids, and whatever Mr. Baker offered, in bed or otherwise, she had that too.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  The charge is not whether Monica had an affair. It's whether she intentionally entered into an agreement to kill her husband. And that, the defense say, depends on the testimony of one person.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Thank you. Do people call Christopher Austin?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  After more than five weeks of laying out the circumstantial evidence against Monica, on March 4th, the prosecution finally called one of the killers to the witness stand. And Christopher Austin is about to tell the jury something that for nearly eight years before his arrest, nobody knew. Something that will throw everything we thought we knew about this murder plot up in the air.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Christopher Austin is sitting in the witness stand. He's wearing a blue shirt and glasses and he looks subdued. In January, he accepted a deal from the prosecution. He pled guilty to second degree murder. He was sentenced to 16 years to life in prison on the condition that he cooperates with the prosecution and testifies truthfully in Monica's trial.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  We told him that if we found anything out, that he had told us that was not truthful, that all bets were off and we would prosecute him anyway.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Deputy DA Steigl says she and her colleague Beth Silverman talked to the Semintili family about the deal they were offering to Austin. Luigi has mixed feelings, knowing that one of the men who killed his father has agreed to testify.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  I felt the sense of relief that one of his assailants was going to be going to prison. I also felt a sense of pity and there was even a little tiny sense of feeling grateful that this person was cooperating to the extent that he was and was going to testify against Monica.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  If there's anything other than negative feelings toward Austin,

• 13:36Speaker 01

  kind of speaks to how badly I wanted there to be justice in the greater trial. Stegall takes her place at the front of the courtroom, ready to examine Austin. She's focused on the task at hand, but she knows her witness also comes with significant baggage.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  You're putting a man who says, "I murdered somebody in cold blood," which is not a common thing that people will walk around saying, and you're asking the jury to now believe everything that he says.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Have you known Robert Baker a long time?

• 14:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  And is Rob older than you then?

• 14:12Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  How much older?

• 14:15Speaker 04

  Same age as my dad. I'm not a math guy. Thirty-plus years older than me.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Austin tells the jury how he got to know Baker as a friend of his father's in North Carolina. Beth Silverman watches her trial partner fire questions at Austin and weighs up how he's coming across to the jury.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  He seemed very humble. He came across as not particularly bright, but somebody who trusts people who are older than him, like Baker, especially given that Baker was one of his father's close friends growing up.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  In July of 2016, the two of them met up in Las Vegas. On that trip, Austin says he heard a conversation between Baker and another friend. They were talking about the woman Baker was seeing.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  He started asking me, he's like, "How much did I weigh?"

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Who?

• 15:07Speaker 04

  Baker. I remember hearing, "He could probably do it." I was like, "Do what?" He said, "I'll tell you later."

• 15:15Speaker 01

  It sounds like Baker was already sizing Austin up, seeing if he was strong enough to kill someone. Eventually, Austin says, Baker stopped being cryptic, got more direct. He told Austin his girlfriend wanted her husband out of the way.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Baker said she wants him gone. She wants him dead.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Monica Semantili. Austin says the first time he remembers meeting Monica was when Baker paid for him to fly to LA from Vegas later that July. The three of them played racquetball together at LA Fitness. Afterwards, they all went back to the Semantili home in Woodland Hills. Fabio was away.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  She took me out to the patio and Baker was there.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Austin says when they left the house, Baker turned to him.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  Said it's a nice house, right? And then I was like, yeah, he's like, remember that layout? I was like, layout? I said, okay.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  He said, remember that layout?

• 16:11Speaker 04

  I remember him saying that.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Austin says there were more calls with Baker over the following months, where they talked about killing Fabio.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Did you ever speak directly with the defendant at any time, directly with her about killing her husband?

• 16:26Speaker 04

  No.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  So was your communication with and through Baker?

• 16:30Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  You might be thinking that this makes Austin's testimony seem pretty weak. After all, the defense could argue it's just hearsay. He didn't actually ever hear Monica conspiring to murder Fabio. But prosecutor Beth Silverman isn't phased by this at all. In fact, she thinks it actually makes him look more credible as a witness.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  If he was somebody who was trying to buy himself a deal to get out of what had happened, number one, he would have said he was the lookout. He never would have admitted to being an actual stabber. And number two, he would have also exaggerated in terms of the conversations he had had with Monica and made her more involved in what was told to him about the plan and the conspiracy to kill her husband.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  From December onward, Austin says things got more serious. Baker tried to arrange a date for the murder. Austin says he made excuses because he didn't want to go through with it. But his friend was insistent.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  On January 12th, Baker bought Christopher Austin a plane ticket to Los Angeles. Austin says Baker promised him $30,000 to $50,000 for the murder, money that was to come from Monica.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  He would always say she's loaded. So once she gets this insurance money, we're gonna be good.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  On the 22nd of January, the day before Fabio was killed, Austin flew out to California. They had to move quickly, he said, because Baker had information from Monica that Fabio would be out of town again soon. Austin says Baker picked him up from the airport, gave him a burner phone. They waited at Baker's apartment all day. Then they went to Walmart so Baker could buy a knife. Then Christopher Austin tells the jury something new, something it took the investigators on this case eight years to discover.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  As the night fell, he let me know. He said, she's gonna send him to the store. So we can catch him then.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  I want to be really clear. Austin is talking about the evening of the 22nd of January 2017, the day before Fabio was killed. At 5:11 PM on the 22nd of January, Fabio searched "fa near me" and sent Monica the address of a restaurant. Monica then Googled the restaurant. It was, of course, a Vietnamese place. She then texted her daughter Bella to ask if she wanted some fried rice. During the same 30-minute window when Monica was texting with Fabio about this restaurant, she exchanged 17 messages on the encrypted messaging app Viber with Robert Baker. By the end of the day, she and Baker had messaged each other 180 times.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Austin says that Monica told Baker where Fabio would be that night.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Before we left the apartment, he got a text message from his girlfriend at the time. She was gonna send him to the store. So we went directly there.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  So him and Baker got in the car, went over to this strip mall and waited for Fabio to get there. He walked through this breezeway by these pillars and he was told what kind of car Fabio was driving. He saw the car. He saw Fabio coming out carrying a bag of what was probably food. He started walking towards Fabio and then he said, I chickened out. I just, I couldn't do it.

• 20:06Speaker 04

  I was like, I'm not doing this. I can't do this. And I went back to the car. He's like, what happened? I told him, I couldn't get him. Can't do it.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Austin says Baker texted Monica when they left the strip mall to update her about the failed attempt.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  The plan's off, it didn't happen, and Austin was a witness to that.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  The text messages, the restaurant address, it all corroborates the story. Christopher Austin has just given them evidence that Monica didn't just try to have Fabio killed once. She did it twice.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  This wasn't a fluke that happened the day of the murder. This was as premeditated, deliberate, and willful as you get.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Before Austin was arrested, nobody had a clue that anything remarkable had happened the night before Fabio's death, let alone an attempted murder.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  All of us in the room just kind of froze for a second. We're like, the night? What are you talking about? We had no idea this was planned or had even happened. I mean, we like to think that we had every corner of this case nailed down, and for the most part, all the blanks filled in, but we did not know that.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  The original plan was for Fabio to be killed in the car park of the strip mall, alone, in a seemingly random attack by a stranger, not at home, in a location that could easily be linked to Monica. After the failed murder attempt on the 22nd, Christopher Austin was only in town for two more days, and Fabio was about to leave town. The window of opportunity was closing. And so, the next day, on the 23rd of January, everything happened in a rush. Around noon, surveillance footage captured Monica and Robert Baker both arriving at LA Fitness 10 minutes apart. Later that afternoon, Monica and Baker were both seen in the parking lot of a Target in Woodland Hills.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Around 3:29, surveillance footage captured a grainy figure getting into Monica's truck. The prosecutors say that was Baker, meeting up with Monica to coordinate their plan. When Baker got back to his apartment, Austin says he got a text.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  He kind of jolted. He said, yo, he's home alone. Said she's gonna go to the store. We have a small window. Because, uh, somebody might come to the house while she's gone.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  According to Austin, this is it. The moment Monica gave Baker the green light to murder Fabio.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  It was rushed. Like Baker got the call from Monica, like, now, go. We gotta go. We gotta go. Get in the car. Let's go. She wanted him killed. That plan didn't work. They're still in town. The next day, it's gonna happen. It just really puts the nail in the coffin on the level of Monica's involvement and the premeditation and her never-ending desire to get Fabio out of the way.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  The prosecution have made their case, but the defense still have their own star witness. Another confessed killer with his own version of what went down in January 2017. Robert Baker takes the stand. He's wearing a button-down shirt and a suit jacket for the occasion. In 2023, when Baker pled no contest, he wrote a letter to Monica's defense team, confessing to the murder. In the letter, Baker wrote that he went to the Seminole House to deliver a gift to Monica, where he ran into Fabio by mistake. "He killed Fabio in self-defense," he said. But now, his story has totally changed. He tells the jury, this was a planned attack.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  I murdered him because I wanted her.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  I wanted to have easier access. I wanted her to be around me and with me. More, like, all the time.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  He couldn't keep his story straight from years ago, let alone from moment to moment? When its deputy DA Beth Silverman's turned to cross-examine Baker, she is ready to go to town on all his inconsistencies.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  You agreed last week that everything you wrote in the letter was a lie.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  Not everything, but...

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Which part was true?

• 24:19Speaker 04

  I gotta look at the letter.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Approximately how many lies would you say you told in that letter? Give me an estimate.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  I don't have, I'm not giving an estimate because I don't know.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  10? 50?

• 24:29Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  How about 360? He was on the stand, I think, for like, three days or four days, and he couldn't remember what he had said. The day before, and so the lies just kept changing and becoming more and more outrageous.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  At one point, Silverman starts asking Baker about the security camera systems at the Salmon Tilly house. When police arrived at the scene after Fabio's murder, they found the DVR was missing.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Did you stop to take the DVR?

• 24:56Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  So where was that?

• 25:01Speaker 06

  That was in the garage.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Okay, and who showed you where that was?

• 25:06Speaker 06

  Just follow the wires.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Okay, so there were wires that led you there?

• 25:11Speaker 06

  Can't miss it.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Baker is playing dumb, acting like he just happened upon the DVR, but the prosecutor knows he's lying.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  You hadn't had a prior conversation with Monica about the DVR, had you?

• 25:25Speaker 06

  I hadn't had a conversation with her about it.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Never?

• 25:30Speaker 06

  I noticed she was getting a new system. She said it was getting upgraded. He said that he wanted to get it done.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  The "he" is Fabio. When detectives asked Monica about the security system after Fabio was killed, she told them she didn't know anything about it. Fabio had it installed. Fabio knew all about it. She didn't even know how to access it. So the investigators tracked down the guy who put the cameras in the summer of 2016. The guy said it was Monica, not Fabio, who was there.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  When the digital forensics team went through all the files, they found another damning piece of evidence. Monica had received an email with the IP address, the password, and the instruction manual for the security system. And on the 28th of June, shortly before Austin first heard Baker talk about the plot to kill Fabio, Monica forwarded the email to, you guessed it, Robert Baker.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Beth Silverman knows that all of these shifting stories, tying himself up in knots, is not helping Baker's case with the jury.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  This was a person who just came across as completely incredible because he wasn't smart enough to find his way out of a paper bag. You know, she was really the brains behind the operation.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  When Leonard Levine, Monica's defense attorney, makes the closing statement, he tries to make it all about this battle between the two killers on the witness stand. Other than Christopher Austin's testimony, he argues, the prosecution doesn't really have a case.

• 27:05Speaker 06

  All they had was circumstantial evidence, meaning she was having an affair.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  And Christopher Austin isn't to be trusted because he got a plea deal.

• 27:17Speaker 06

  They can offer Mr. Austin his life back in exchange for his testimony.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Levine strides down the full length of the courtroom and points his finger at the jury. He says he's not asking them to find that Monica was a good wife. He's not even asking them to find that she was a good person. But he does hope they'll decide one thing.

• 27:40Speaker 06

  Monica, you're not a murderer, and they have not proven you guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  But when the prosecutors make their final statements, they take a different approach.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Every detail in this case matters. Every single detail matters. There's never one piece of evidence.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  "This isn't a case with a single smoking gun," they say. "This isn't just one killer's word against another. This is about looking at the pieces of the puzzle and seeing how they fit together."

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Deputy DA Beth Silverman speaks for two and a half days, until her voice gets hoarse. She takes the jury back through the entire case, back through all the ways Monica deceived and manipulated her friends and family. The lies she told to the police, like not knowing anything about the DVR system, or the things she said to Baker in the cop car after the two of them were arrested.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  The first thing the defendant is telling Baker is, "No deals. None. I'm denying everything, except our affair." Well, what else is there if it's only an affair?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Silverman reminds the jury that in 60 hours of conversation between Monica and Baker in the courthouse lockup, she never even once asked her lover to explain why his DNA was all over the crime scene.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  Never confront him with the fact that he's the actual killer. Instead, what you hear is the two of them acting together to explain it away.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  When Heather Stegall makes the final rebuttal statement for the prosecution, she asks the jury to use their common sense. What is the only possible explanation for all of this evidence? As her statement comes to an end, it's not the surveillance, or the digital forensics, or Monica's behavior she reminds the court of. Instead, she chooses the words of one of Fabio's family members to make a final impression on the jury: his son, Luigi Semantilli.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Luigi trusted the defendant, and he gave her the benefit of the doubt, much like you started here with the presumption of innocence. But as Luigi said, once you go back and start recollecting, it becomes very clear. The puzzle pieces fit together very easily. My co-counsel and I have presented you those pieces, and the puzzle is complete. Thank you.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  I hardly watched any of the trial. I just couldn't stand to. Back at home in Canada, Luigi Semantilli hasn't been following all the drama in the courtroom. I don't need any more bad news right now. I don't want to be strung along with, what does this mean? Could this be bad? I don't want to hear it. I really just want to get to the verdict and get the final word, because that's really the final word that matters. After 10 weeks, dozens of witnesses, and thousands of pieces of evidence, that day finally comes. The moment Luigi has been waiting over eight years for. The jury is about to deliver their verdict. This is it. It's going to go down. It's time.

• 30:58Speaker 01

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• 31:21Speaker 00

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• 31:28Speaker 03

  I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and I hope you'll join us for season five of Dateline: Missing in America. In each episode of Dateline's award-winning series, we will focus on one missing person's case and hear from the families, the friends, and the investigators all desperate to find them. Maybe you could help solve a mystery. Search Dateline: Missing in America to

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  listen completely free or subscribe to Dateline Premium to unlock new episodes early.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  On April 11th, 2025, in the LA County Court in downtown Los Angeles, the prosecution and defense teams are assembled to hear the verdict in Monica Semantili's trial. There are TV cameras rolling and journalists with pens poised over their notepads. The media have been following every word of this trial. Luigi Semantili is at home in Niagara Falls. Today, even he is watching online.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Constantly refreshing the livestream, watching the livestream, waiting for them to announce that they had come to their verdict, staring at that seal of California that's above the judge's desk for what felt like forever. Finally, the judge takes his seat. Monica is sat with her defense attorney, Leonard Levine. She's wearing a gray blazer. Her expression is neutral, but you can see the tension in her brow. The judge opens the envelope containing the verdicts. He peers down at the papers over his half-moon glasses, then hands it back to one of the court clerks, who begins to read. "We, the jury, find the defendant Monica

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Semantili guilty of the crime of murder and violation of Penal Code 187A."

• 33:18Speaker 01

  The clerk runs through the charges. First-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, plus the additional special circumstances that make the crime even more serious, lying in wait, and financial gain. Guilty on all counts.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Back in Canada, Luigi is overcome.

• 33:43Speaker 04

  Just endless tears streaming down my face. That it was over. It was done. After over eight years, that it was finally finished. Was like closing the book on the hardest chapter of my life. And to get the verdict that I wanted

• 34:06Speaker 04

  was just an unbelievable feeling. An unbelievable rush of emotion.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  I called my three best friends. I called my mom, of course. I called my aunt.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  And my Aunt Morella and I on the phone, we were just, we were hysterical. And we kept saying, "It's done. It's done. It's done."

• 34:32Speaker 01

  In June, Luigi returns to Los Angeles for Monica's sentencing. He and some of his family are giving victim impact statements. It's a final opportunity to stand face to face with the woman who murdered the man they all adored. And let the world know how her actions have affected them.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  You had it all, Monica, and you threw it away. There's a darkness living inside of you that no mortal can understand, your evil treason. When Fabio's sisters, Loretta and Morella, stand before the court, the emotion in the room is palpable. You didn't just kill Fabio, you humiliated him. You betrayed him in the most despicable way. Then you held my grieving mother and you pretended to mourn Fabio when you were the killer. When it's Luigi's turn to speak, he wants to say something different.

• 35:24Speaker 04

  I always thought that when this moment came, I'd have a holster full of the nastiest, most... vengeful and vitriolic words I could possibly muster to do my part in speaking truth to power and righteousness to evil. But that's not what I'm going to do here today. I knew I didn't want to go up there and pour my anger out. Because I didn't want to hold on to it anymore. And being that I studied philosophy, one of the books I remember studying and enjoying a lot was The Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche. And there's a great chapter in there on the bite of the adder, where he's bitten by the snake, and he says, "You can't give me your poison."

• 36:07Speaker 04

  And he forces the snake to lick the poison out of his wound. I have no poison to give back to the adder. Because I've come to believe that you become what you behold. And if I hold on to cruel, hateful, and vindictive thoughts, then I too will become a cruel, hateful, and vindictive person. And I refuse to be made worse from this experience. I didn't want the poison of this situation to infect me and infect my life. I wanted to let go of the anger. I wanted to let go of the grief. And now, this moment was the beginning of the rest of my life.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Monica Semantili is sentenced to life without parole. But there are two members of the Semantili family who see this verdict very differently: Luigi's sisters, Bella and Jessica. For years, they've stood by their mother, refusing to believe that she was responsible for their father's murder. They spoke at the sentencing hearing too, describing their pain at losing not just one parent, but now two. Their happy memories of times spent with their mom and their dad, and their desire to not be defined by this devastating chapter of their lives.

• 37:23Speaker 04

  After we got the verdict, I reached out and I said, "I just wanted to say that I'm sorry for your loss." And since then, we've still been talking more.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  than we have been in many years. But I imagine it's going to take time to navigate the new normal in our relationship.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Everyone leaves the courtroom after the sentencing hearing. Fabio's side of the family go out for lunch. They sit around a table at a restaurant. The two prosecutors come too.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  One of the cousins said something about like it would have killed us had, you know, the verdict not come back that way. And I said, no, it really wouldn't have because you know what the truth is. You know what the evidence is and you guys all still have each other. And I think they all have some recognition that from here on it's their responsibility to live as wonderful and big a life as they each can because they're living not just now for themselves and their families, but for Fabio.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  As of this recording, Monica Semantili is appealing her conviction. She still maintains her innocence. We reached out to her attorney who did not respond. But Luigi and the rest of the Semantili family are trying to move on. It really feels like after the sentencing, everyone started to allow themselves to heal. It's not as dark as it was. We're starting to reminisce in new ways, in lighter ways, instead of the gravity of the situation infecting every conversation and every utterance of him. I've listened to a lot of people talk about Fabio Semantili while I've been making the show. And across the board, there has been such an outpouring of love for this guy, whether

• 39:07Speaker 01

  it's family and friends, colleagues, or just people who crossed paths with him in the beauty industry at some point, someone he might have mentored, someone he inspired. There are hundreds we could have spoken to. Fabio was the kind of guy that left an impression on people and people really wanted to share that. He had a rare quality about him. Lots of people describe it the same way. It was how he made them feel.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  Talent is one thing, right? Talent, yes, you can be talented and you can do great hair, but a lot of people can do that. How you make people feel and how they remember you, it's a, it's a warm feeling in your heart, and I think that's what his legacy is. He made everybody feel as if they were important and then they contributed something because that's all people want, just be seen, you know? I hope that everybody has a chance to encounter somebody like Fabio in their lives. His ray of light just radiated and affected so many people.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  He always believed that people may not remember what you say, but they'll remember how you made them feel. He was in the business of making people feel good, and people remembered that.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  In a story with so much darkness and cruelty, it would be easy to feel that the lesson here is about deception, betrayal. But for me, what stands out above all is the love that Fabio inspired in so many people. And maybe that's because Fabio himself was so clear about what he wanted his legacy to be. You kind of sit in the backyard and I say to myself, you know, what do I want to be remembered for? In June of 2015, Fabio was interviewed by American Salon Magazine. He was asked what had mattered most to him over his life. We know Fabio was wildly successful. He won awards. He went from rags to riches as the son of immigrants.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  But as he sits back in his chair and pauses before he speaks, I think you can see on his face that this is what truly matters. I always say to myself, I want to be remembered for the relationships I've built. I want to be remembered for how maybe I've made people feel in a positive light. And if it was negative for any reason, it's because I was honest. I hope that's what I'm remembered for.

• 41:48Speaker 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 Cherie Houston, Joe Savage, and Charlotte Wolfe. Fact checking by Fendel Fulton. Research by Myron Kaplan. Story development by Nell Gray Andrews. Novel's director of development is Selena Meta. Special thanks to Carolyn Schur Levin at Miller-Korsnik

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Raymond. And a big thanks to the whole Sony Music Entertainment team.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Haunted Library. Join me, Colin Morgan, as I read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  A story of science and ambition, loneliness and longing, and what it truly means to be human. Listen to The Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts, or find us on YouTube.