[phone ringing]
[operator speaking]
[woman sobbing]
[operator speaking]
[woman speaking]
[operator speaking]
[woman speaking]
[operator speaking]
[woman sobbing]
MELSON: Roberta was a fun person.
She was always laughing.
Just amazing how things can go so wrong.
[Roberta speaking]
[man speaking]
[Roberta speaking]
HARMON: Roberta is one of those evil people out there.
Maybe at one point, she had goodness in her heart.
But her heart turned to stone.
She's a cold-hearted [bleep].
[theme music playing]
[light music playing]
NARRATOR: It's wedding day for 47-year-old Roberta Bogart
and 42-year-old Ken Samard.
MELSON: When Ken and Roberta got married,
I was very happy for them.
Roberta had been married before she met Ken
and divorced.
Ken was married twice before,
but Ken believed in true love -- after his divorce,
he went through times where he thought,
you know, there's nobody out there for me.
And, uh -- and then he met Roberta.
Ken was excited to get married again.
And Roberta was, too.
She was always singing or just happy.
She smiled a lot.
LARSEN: So this is my dad and Roberta's wedding in Vegas.
It's a little funny at the beginning, because
the preacher is asking, are you ready?
And my dad says, "Well, yeah."
No big deal. Come on. Let's get this going.
-And you? Great. -Yes.
LARSEN: At the time that they got married,
I was 15.
We didn't know that they were going to get married.
I just remember them coming home,
and they were married, and that was that.
MELSON: Danielle and Matthew couldn't go to
the wedding, mostly because it was in Las Vegas.
They were still young.
LARSEN: I felt a little left out.
However, I think it was just,
neither of them wanted a really big wedding.
Neither one of them were really
the type that wanted to show off.
NARRATOR: Ken and Roberta live in Albany, Oregon.
They met at work four years earlier.
He was a millwright at the paper mill,
and she was a secretary, and they had mutual friends.
So they would say to Ken, "Well,
you need to maybe ask Roberta out for a date."
He really liked her, and he fell in love quick.
NARRATOR: Ken's three children, Danielle, Matthew, and Bradley
are quick to welcome Roberta to the family.
LARSEN: Roberta was friendly.
She always had a smile on her face.
She liked her football and wine.
SAMARD: My first impression was, wow.
Uh, that's not who I expected him to pick.
He was always a little maybe rough around the edges.
A little firm, a little, um, maybe opinionated
or, um, just set in her ways.
But I noticed a dramatic difference
when they got together, for my dad's wellbeing,
just his overall happiness.
Ken and Roberta were fairly well suited as a couple.
They were just a little bit, uh, a little bit alike.
MELSON: They had a lot of fun together.
They'd laugh. Ken was a cook.
He loved to cook, you know,
so they worked together in the kitchen.
They would go camping or just get a hotel room at the coast.
He was head over heels for her.
I believe he proposed in August.
Then they were married on September 2nd.
So it was pretty fast.
The look on my dad's face just seems so genuine.
LARSEN: Roberta seems happy, genuinely happy.
So I think it just -- for me, it just goes back to the whole
mixed feelings of everything, because they seemed so happy.
But then how could this happen?
[cheers and applause]
I graduated in June of 2003 from Sweet Home High School.
LARSEN: And it was a great day.
My dad was very excited that I was graduating.
[loud cheering]
Dad was always big on education.
And that was one of his main things that he drilled
into us is you have to go to school.
[indistinct conversations]
My graduation party was at my house in Sweet Home, where
I lived with my mom at the time and my stepdad.
What'd you say?
LARSEN: It was a little awkward, and I think it was awkward
for Roberta, too, being at my mom's house, and my mom's there.
Dad and Roberta got me a card.
I remember it saying something about how proud he was of me
and excited for the next chapter and just confident
that I would do well.
I felt so good that day, because I felt like
my dad was so proud of me.
This was a big moment.
MAN: Yeah.
That was one of the biggest gifts my dad's ever given me.
LARSEN: The necklace is still an important gift to me.
I've got many gifts from my dad, but not things that
were that heartfelt and meaningful to me.
Roberta as a stepmom was more different than I would expect.
She wasn't, you know, real warming,
like as warming as my dad.
Roberta never came and picked us up or, you know,
just us kids or did things with us without my dad.
I feel like Roberta, she was maybe
always a little bit distant from the family.
I mean, she would go to the family functions and stuff,
but she wasn't per se, uh,
really involved.
LARSEN: We never really got close to her.
I don't remember ever having any, you know, serious
talks, like, as a teenager with --
about boys or anything like that.
MELSON: Roberta, when she was around
Ken's ex with the kids,
she didn't really interact and just kind of kept
kind of silent.
Some people at the mill where Roberta and Ken worked
thought that she was kind of hard to get along with,
and they were kind of scared of Roberta.
They said she was mean.
SAMARD: I would watch my dad watch Roberta.
You could just tell by the way he looked at her that he really
loved her, she really filled his cup up.
He gave her his 100 percent trust,
hands down, because he loved her.
But love is blind.
I think dad was excited
for us all to, you know, graduate and move on,
start a new chapter of our lives,
to really get out in the world
and be responsible adults.
SAMARD: When we were starting to become young adults and leave
the nest, that allowed him more
opportunity to be able to go and enjoy things that he would
enjoy doing with Roberta.
KING: Ken and Roberta
and I would mostly go wine tasting together.
That was sort of our common interest that we all had.
Sometimes we would share
the expense, and sometimes they would pay.
LARSEN: I think the wine tasting could get a little spendy.
They had a wine fridge at the house.
Going to the seafood and wine festivals
and the wine tasting at the different wineries and stuff
was expensive.
And I would say at least once
a month, they would be doing something.
MELSON: Roberta was pretty extravagant.
But whenever the kids would ask to borrow some money,
if they couldn't get a hold of their dad,
they got a hold of Roberta, and Roberta would always say no.
NARRATOR: And there's now another phase of joy
for Ken and Roberta -- being grandparents.
In short order, Danielle had two sons,
and her brother, Bradley, had a son and a daughter.
Ken was ecstatic, because he was gonna
be a grandpa, and they called him Papa,
So he was Papa Ken.
SAMARD: My dad did like to spoil the grandchildren.
He would always get really nice gifts, um, and get down on
their level and interact with them to make them feel seen
and heard.
I always appreciated that.
Roberta never really seemed to
be that grandmotherly type of person.
When my boys were babies,
she didn't want to hold the babies,
which I thought was a little weird.
SAMARD: My dad really enjoyed spending time with his kids.
And I feel like sometimes, that
would maybe create friction in his relationship.
MELSON: She was jealous of the relationship that Ken had
with his kids.
He would go over to their house to fix stuff or just --
just play with the grandkids.
He was gone for, you know, 4 or 5 hours.
I think when he came back with stories of how much fun he had,
she was a little jealous over that.
NARRATOR: In 2009,
both Ken and Roberta are laid off at the paper mill.
[alarm clock beeping]
[rapid beeping]
When Ken lost his job,
he was sad, because Ken was a workaholic.
He loved to work and loved to make money,
and he didn't know what he was gonna do.
So he collected unemployment for a while,
and then he started his own roofing company.
He was determined to make
what money he could.
I got the feeling that financially
that they may have been struggling.
My dad would be a little bit more frustrated.
You would never really know why.
Maybe it was financial.
MELSON: There was money coming in, but not a lot.
They just put a tighter grip on things.
NARRATOR: In 2012, Ken and Roberta buy
their dream home in Millersburg, Oregon.
I just remember dad bringing us over one day
and telling us that they had bought
this new house in Millersburg, and he was really
excited about it.
-[Ken speaking] -[dog barking]
[Roberta speaking]
I remember going and seeing it, and it was beautiful.
It was -- we loved it.
It was out away from, you know, people
and the main roads, and it had the barn.
It was pretty -- they loved it.
They seemed really happy.
-[Ken speaking] -[dog barking]
SAMARD: I feel like my dad was
content with Roberta handling the finances.
Roberta had a little bit of background in it.
And so she was the one that always overseen the finances
for the house and the mortgage payment,
the estate, and all of the bills.
MELSON: Roberta had changed the mail
that was coming to the house.
She had got a P.O. box in town and had all the mail go there.
So Ken didn't see any mail.
Ken always joked about, "Roberta has given me
an allowance, and that's all I get."
And he would laugh,
and then she would say, "Well, you know,
"if you need more money,
I could probably give it to you."
And he'd say, "No, I'm good."
And I felt like he had complete
trust in her, and he never questioned that.
He believed in her.
He stood behind her, and he loved her.
There were a couple of incidents that we had heard
about, you know, some extravagant gifts
that she bought for some of her close friends.
MELSON: Roberta loved her friends,
and their birthdays or anniversary,
she loved going all out, and she loved
making these little, like, gift baskets.
They were pretty extravagant.
I think she wanted her friends to know
that she still could afford stuff.
[man speaking]
Oh, I like that.
They're nice. I don't have very many...
[man speaking]
-EMMA: Uh-huh. -[man speaking]
[man speaking]
I never wondered how they could afford anything.
My dad always seemed to be very responsible
with money and worked his entire life.
And so I just assumed he was okay.
[man speaking]
[Roberta speaking]
[man speaking]
[Roberta speaking]
[laughter]
MELSON: He never let on about their finances.
He would say sometimes like, "Oh, well, I don't know.
We'll have to wait and see when we can afford it."
You know, just little things like that.
[indistinct exclamation]
MELSON: But everybody thought everything was...
good.
Just amazing how things can go so wrong.
Ken and Roberta were on a roofing job in Corvallis,
and the family got a call that he had fallen off the roof.
He had shattered both of his heels, and he was
going into surgery to have fake replacement heels put in.
It kind of put a damper on him physically
being able to work.
I do think dad felt like it was
his responsibility to provide and to bring in the money.
When he was injured,
I'm sure that bothered him quite a bit,
because he did feel responsible.
NARRATOR: Ken retrains as a heating,
ventilation, and air conditioning engineer.
MELSON: He decided to get a different
kind of job that wasn't so demanding
so he didn't have to stand on his feet a long time.
This kind of fit right in his wheelhouse that, you know,
he could learn how to do this and make good money
and support his family.
SAMARD: Roberta did seem supportive of my dad
going back to school, but at the same time,
it seemed like maybe it was really surface.
Maybe there was something more there.
MELSON: After Ken graduated, he got --
had a job right away at Sunbelt.
He really liked it.
He brought things home to fix that people were just,
like, discarding, little HVAC systems that people
didn't want, he would bring them home
and fix them in his garage.
And he was excited to go to work every day.
[phone ringing]
OPERATOR: Ma'am, are you there? Go ahead.
[Roberta sobbing]
[sobbing continues]
[operator speaking]
[Roberta speaking]
[operator speaking]
[Roberta speaking]
-[operator speaking] -[sobbing continues]
[Roberta speaking]
[operator speaking]
[Roberta speaking]
[operator speaking]
[Roberta speaking]
[operator speaking]
-[Roberta speaking] -[operator speaking]
[Roberta sobbing]
HARMON: I was at home.
I got a phone call or a text in the early hours of
the morning that there was
an incident in one of our small cities, Millersburg.
[siren wailing]
I live probably 10 minutes away.
So it didn't take me very long to get to the scene.
On my way there,
the information I initially got was Roberta Samard had
called 911 indicating that she had shot her husband, Ken.
I turn on the radio so I can hear
the radio transmissions that are going on from the deputies.
[operator speaking]
[Roberta speaking]
[operator speaking]
-[Roberta speaking] -[operator speaking]
[Roberta sobbing]
[operator speaking]
[Roberta speaking]
[operator speaking]
-[Roberta speaking] -[operator speaking]
NARRATOR: The first officers arrive at Ken
and Roberta's house at around 6:30 AM.
[beeping noise]
[officer speaking]
HARMON: They contacted Roberta on the front porch
and basically detained her,
put her in handcuffs, and put her in the back of the car.
Before I got there, I knew that Ken was dead.
No life-saving efforts were gonna be performed on him.
When I arrive on the scene,
patrol has responded, they've secured the scene.
Ken is laying on the deck.
There was only one wound,
almost in the crook of the neck,
where the -- where the chin meets the neck.
Also, on that back deck, there was a coffee cup,
there was a lunchbox.
We didn't think there was a struggle on the back porch.
There was nothing inside the house
that appeared to be broken.
The house was pretty pristine.
I still want to give people the benefit of the doubt,
and maybe this is a tragic accident.
LARSEN: It was a Monday.
I was driving to my job at
the time, and my Aunt Kim kept calling.
So I answered the phone.
She told me that they had found my dad...
that morning, and he had been killed.
I just remember breaking down crying and thinking...
it -- it can't be it.
There's a mistake. It's gotta be somebody else.
Not my dad.
[phone ringing]
SAMARD: My phone rang, and it was my sister.
And, uh, she's like, "You better sit down for this."
And I was like, "Okay, well, what's going on?"
She's like, uh, "Dad -- dad -- dad just got shot."
I didn't really know what to say or what to even think.
It was pretty surreal.
I kept asking like, "Well, where is Roberta?
Like, what's happening with Roberta?"
And nobody really knew what was
going on or nobody could contact her.
I was in complete disbelief.
We had patrol transfer her back to our sheriff's office.
I think initially, she was kind of
surprised that she wasn't just being let go.
[Roberta sobbing]
[detective speaking]
[Roberta speaking]
[detective speaking]
ROBERTA: No.
She tells us that she plans on killing herself.
What I'm thinking is, she's telling me this story is,
oh, wow, this is the stuff the movies are made right here.
Ken Leaves, goes out to his truck.
She believes he's gone for the day.
She retrieves the gun.
She's walking around kinda aimlessly with this gun,
trying to drum up the courage to kill herself.
Ken returns to that back door on the deck.
Ken sees the gun.
[Roberta speaking]
[suspenseful music playing]
[suspenseful music climbing]
HARMON: The bullet strikes Ken,
causing Ken to fall down and die.
HARMON: What's going through my mind is start playing
scenarios of how could this have went down
or looking at trying to figure out,
Roberta, why do you want to kill yourself?
What has gone wrong in your life?
She really isn't specific on why she wants
to kill herself other than she's been sad.
There's no impending divorce.
Is -- Ken's not having an affair.
Is it just a simple fact that she's giving us
a line of crap, and she was never suicidal to begin with?
During this whole interview,
now, mind you, Ken is still laying on the back deck,
and at no time did she ask about Ken,
what was gonna happen to Ken,
which was just a huge flag saying something's crazy here.
This is just not -- not right.
HARMON: During this interview, Roberta was telling us
that she shot her husband.
She may act like she's crying,
but there are no actual tears
coming out of this woman's eyes.
That's not normal.
That is not a normal behavior.
So huge flag, huge flag for us.
Okay, you're having financial problems.
Tell me about those.
She brings up these financial fights
and then kind of downplays them
and then tries to move on from that.
[detective speaking]
HARMON: She also talked about how the gun had
a stiff trigger pull.
So it was -- it was pretty hard to pull the trigger.
The prosecutor's office became involved in this case in
November of 2015,
November 16th of the date of the crime.
Talking about the trigger pull,
that was a very important statement for our case.
When we have somebody who is saying that this was accidental,
[gunshot blasts]
for that to be true,
this has to be a gun with a light trigger pull,
one that could possibly go off on its own,
which, of course, it wasn't.
She said, "I intentionally pulled that trigger."
It's starting to look like that wound to Ken
was more of an intentional thing than an accidental thing.
We asked her if she would be willing
to help us and do a re-enactment.
It helps us get a better understanding of --
of what may have occurred and may let us see things
that we haven't pictured yet in our mind.
Roberta was surprisingly willing to go back and do
this re-enactment with the detectives at the scene.
And I found that to be bizarre.
How could you go back to the very place where,
earlier that day, you accidentally killed
the person who you loved most?
But she was willing to do that.
[detective speaking]
DETECTIVE: Okay...
[Roberta speaking]
She placed one detective where she said Ken was.
And then placed herself where she said she was
and walked through the act of raising the gun.
She raises it up, and he takes a step back.
OLENICK: That piece of her statement,
where she says he's walking backwards,
in other words, creating distance between her
and him doesn't make any sense at all
in combination with her claim that she's raising
the gun to herself and then accidentally shoots him.
[gunshot blasts]
In order for that to be true,
there's got to be some kind of struggle over the firearm.
[gunshot blasts]
Roberta says "There must have been a struggle, because of what
I was planning to do with the gun and what happened."
But she won't commit to saying that there was a struggle.
Her story is crumbling faster than a dry cookie on a plate.
HARMON: In my mind, I'm like, there's no way
this is an accident.
You killed him, you killed him for a reason.
And now we just need to figure out what's the motive.
Why the hell did this happen?
It was surprising in talking to the family that they didn't
indicate anything about Ken and Roberta
not getting along.
It appeared that they had the -- what you would
refer to as a perfect of marriage as possible.
But then one of the family members mentioned a couple of
years prior that they had actually
seen it published in the newspaper that there was
a foreclosure notice for Ken and Roberta's house.
My little brother kept seeing it in the paper,
that Ken and Roberta's house was up for foreclosure.
And my brother called Ken on a couple occasions
and said, "I can loan
"you the money to just pay the house off,
because it's not that much."
And Ken would say, "No, it's okay.
Roberta's got it all under control."
HARMON: We talked to the representative of
the company that purchased the house.
The house had ended up going into foreclosure,
and it had actually been sold prior to Ken's murder.
Roberta had contacted these people and asked
for time to move out, like 30 days.
The day they were supposed to be out was
November 16, 2015, the day Ken was killed.
When you walked into that house on November 16th,
there was nothing boxed up.
OLENICK: During the search of the Samard house,
detectives found the foreclosure paperwork at
the bottom of a laundry hamper,
which was very striking to us.
They had lost the house.
He didn't know it, and she did.
When we're getting this information, we're like,
okay, that's it.
We're starting to get to the bottom of this puzzle.
NARRATOR: In Ken's study, investigators recover
a self-help workbook.
Inside, Ken recorded his thoughts
about his relationship with Roberta.
"She's always right.
"Why is it that if I ask for a clarification,
"I'm being difficult or mean?
"You would think that someone with all the answers would be
a little more respectful of others."
"My wife has power over me.
She has control of our money at home."
I'm not sure why he felt this way or would allow it.
It's kind of heartbreaking
to know that that's how he felt,
that she had power over him and controlled everything.
OLENICK: Roberta basically held the purse strings.
She had control of their bank accounts, their passwords.
The workbook kind of helped us show that Ken is not as
happy as everyone thinks, and he might be
thinking about leaving her.
One of the other little pieces of
information we found was a little note.
It was written by Ken to Roberta.
OLENICK: Ken had left a note for Roberta
discussing the Mastercard being maxed out and that
they need to talk about where they were at.
From the context of the note,
it seemed that he was surprised about that.
And so that may have figured into a possible motive.
And when she was arrested, I think she was
a little astonished that we didn't believe her story.
She was astonished she was going to jail.
NARRATOR: While Roberta awaits trial in jail,
prosecutors build the case for murder.
OLENICK: When the medical examiner performs the autopsy,
we learned that this was, in fact, a contact wound,
that Roberta pulled the trigger of this gun
while the muzzle was pressed against Ken Samard's throat.
HARMON: They did some analysis of Ken's wounds,
and if she's coming up to shoot herself,
she's shorter than Ken.
That angle of that entrance wound is
gonna be more vertical than horizontal.
But what was actually found in
that wound was it was more horizontal.
The trajectory, the wound path, showed that it wasn't
just a coming up, and the gun accidentally went off.
That was the key to the case.
Once we knew that, it was clear to us
that this was an intentional act and therefore murder.
The trial was in April of 2017.
Uh, it was two weeks long.
The case that we put forward was
built on what the physical evidence showed us.
The jury deliberated between four and five hours,
and at the end of that,
they convicted Roberta Samard of murder unanimously.
NARRATOR: The evidence gathered during
the investigation points to Roberta's possible motive.
If there was a motive, it was
tied into her mismanagement of the finances.
We know that Roberta had the control of all of
the finances, that she would have been the one with
the means to spend their money, to the extent that any spending
put them in the position that they ended up in,
it would have been due to her.
Ken didn't know the house had been sold.
Roberta hid this.
OLENICK: It would appear that he was figuring out
that they were in a bad situation financially.
She may have known about his frustrations,
may have known that he was thinking about leaving.
Those factors may have led her to commit murder.
HARMON: Ken might be thinking about leaving her.
Here you've lost your house, you've lost everything,
and now you're gonna lose your husband?
I think he was leaving for work.
There was a conversation -- I think she already had
the gun on her, and I think that conversation
probably escalated.
It led to her killing Ken.
[gunshot blasts]
I think if you take all of the physical evidence,
all of the inconsistencies in Roberta's statements,
it just goes to show you that she intentionally killed him.
Her story of him accidentally getting shot was
just a B.S. story that she had made up.
LARSEN: My dad was a very loving, giving person.
If there were more people like my dad in the world,
the world would be a better place, that's for sure.
KING: What I miss most about Ken is his laugh and his smile.
And if you were having a bad day,
he could always make it better.
SAMARD: I don't feel like that there is able to be justice.
There's nothing you could do to somebody else that's gonna
make Ken be able to be there again
for his grandchildren or make his grandchildren
be able to enjoy him.
We remember Ken as probably the best grandpa ever,
and I was so appreciative of that.
I was so excited
to have that for them, to be able to experience that.