- My mother was an incredibly beautiful soul.
What she had was charisma.
- She said, "I love you."
In my heart I knew those were her last words.
- Two sisters with a single purpose,
solve the mystery of their mother's death.
- We can't let this go. It's heartbreaking.
- She left for Hawaii, a new life with a new husband,
but the sunny paradise soon grew dark.
- Something is very wrong.
- It was horrible, being so helpless.
- What was behind their mom's strange death?
They set out together to discover the answer,
and they were about to get some help
from their mother herself.
- There was evidence she left for you to find?
- Yes. - A possible clue
hidden in an envelope marked "baby pictures,"
but tucked inside, a journal
that painted a different picture entirely.
- I pulled out that envelope and that was like, wow.
- Could their mom help them solve her own mystery?
- We can't quit. We are her voice.
- We made a promise.
We made a promise to our mom.
**
- Hello and welcome to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
Would you keep a vow to someone after that person dies?
What if keeping the vow came at a great personal cost?
Shirlene Van Gundy's daughters did just that.
Their mom secretly requested
that should anything bad happen to her, they investigate.
And suddenly, she was gone,
and the sisters knew what they had to do.
Here's Keith Morrison with...
- Here they were again,
two sisters on a holiday in paradise,
or so the other vacationers must have assumed
here in America's mid-Pacific Garden
in the lush resort near Honolulu.
But they would be wrong.
This journey has more to do with a personal hell
than any paradise.
That, and a long-ago promise to their mother.
- Could you have believed that you would be sitting here
in this hotel room talking about this subject,
in the year 2014?
- No. It's pretty crazy.
I-I could have never seen this coming.
- Perhaps it is pretty crazy,
but there is apparently no stopping them,
These tenacious sisters,
Tammie Cocard and Tiffany Young.
- There is no halfway when it comes to,
um, to a promise.
It's either all or nothing.
- Bizarre story? Oh, yes, it is.
At the center of it is a woman named Shirlene Van Gundy,
a beauty queen once back in Colorado.
- My mother was an incredibly beautiful soul.
She taught both my sister and I
that there was nothing that we couldn't do.
- Hi! I love you!
- My earliest memories of her
are her singing to me.
She loved to sing, and she played with me.
She was a-- She was a big kid.
- My mother was a free spirit in many ways
and didn't have a lot of rules.
I didn't have to do things like normal kids had to do,
like brush my teeth all the time.
- Mm-hmm. - But I liked it that way.
- And so it was often Tammie and not her mother,
who took on the responsible role with little sister Tiffany,
which was the other side of Shirlene's manic exuberance.
- She was unstable,
and she had a hard time taking care of herself,
much less anyone else.
- Mm-hmm. "Unstable."
Um, how--
- She would have the highs of highs
and the lows of lows. - Moods.
Very dark ones sometimes, said the girls.
- She didn't want to really admit
that there was an issue.
It was a hot button. - Yeah.
- And it wasn't something that you wanted to bring up
unless you were ready for the fight.
- When Shirlene left the girls' father,
Tammie refused to go with her.
- I said, "I'm not going. I can't leave.
"I can't leave my dad." - What did that feel like?
- Like my heart was being ripped in two.
- The girls lived apart for years after that,
until their father won custody of Tiffany too.
And then the girls watched and loved
and worried about their mother,
mostly from afar.
And then, late '80s,
Shirlene finally found real happiness
when she met and married a man named Ken Wakisaka.
- She was-- "I've never been
"with a man who really got me. He gets me."
She, in her whole life, I think, had never felt so--
quite thoroughly and utterly embraced
by someone who loved her just the way she was.
- And just because Shirlene had dreamed of living in Hawaii,
Ken got a job here
and moved her to this condominium complex
by a golf course on the Pacific.
- He was a very likable guy. - Sure.
- Very much a gentleman,
always opened the door for you.
- The sisters grew up, made lives of their own.
Tiffany moved to Arizona.
Tammie settled in Northern California,
and for a whole decade,
Shirlene seemed so happy with Ken.
- When did it change?
- It seemed to start to change in 1998.
- Shirlene told the girls that she and Ken were fighting.
Mid-1999, she called them, very upset,
and when they went to Hawaii to see what was wrong,
she said the strangest thing,
asked them to promise her something.
- And she said, "Promise me. If anything ever happens to me,
"you will investigate". And we said,
"Mom, what are you talking about,
"if anything happens to you?"
"Just promise me", she said.
- Shirlene left Ken soon after that,
moved to the mainland.
The girls thought the break was permanent,
were relieved, actually.
But seven months later... - She said, "I'm back in Hawaii,
"and I'm back living with Ken, and everything's fine.
"I don't want you to worry." - But worry they did.
- She would call me, and we would talk about things,
and then she would call me again an hour later,
and she wouldn't remember anything we talked about.
- It got so that Tammie sometimes didn't pick up
when her mother called.
But of course, she had no idea what was about to happen,
least of all on April night in 2000.
- My mom had started calling my house,
and I was letting it go to the voicemail,
and all the messages were pretty much the same,
that she loved me. - Mm-hmm.
- She found God. Everything was fine.
- Tammie waited until morning to call back.
It was April 5th.
- And Ken answered the phone.
And he said, "I don't know what's wrong with your mother.
"Here. You talk to her."
I said, "Hi, Mom. It's Tammie."
I said, "Are you okay?"
And she said, "I love you."
Her words were very drawn out and slurred,
like I'd never heard before.
- What was that like, that conversation?
For you at your end?
- Oh, I was in a panic.
- In a panic, Tammie called Tiffany to tell her.
And still frantic,
Tammie then called the Honolulu Police Department.
It was 6 a.m. there.
She got an ambulance dispatched to the condo.
- My sister is the hero. - Yeah, right.
- She's saving my mother's life right now.
And it's the ambulance. Like, they're gonna--
They're the professionals. They're going to--
- Sure. They'll fix it. - They're gonna fix it.
- But the paramedics didn't notice much to fix.
The report states...
The report continues...
Very unusual indeed,
But the EMTs did not take Shirlene to the hospital,
left her at home with Ken instead.
- How is it possible? How is it possible?
This was horrible.
It was horrible, being so helpless.
- Tiffany was so far away on the mainland in a panic,
trying to reach her mother, calling repeatedly.
Ken finally answered the phone.
- "Here, I'll put you on with her.
"You can talk to her." She said, "I love you," and--
and it was so hard for her to say it,
because the mere effort of moving her lips
took so much.
- Eight long hours passed.
And then at 2 p.m., Ken called 911.
They rushed her to the emergency room,
did what they could. Nothing worked.
Ken called Tammie from the hospital.
Tammie broke the news to Tiffany.
- It went from, you know, just being in this place
of such utter desperation, and helplessness, and despair
and-and uncertainty, like,
and knowing in my heart that she was-- she was gone.
- Though, still barely hanging on, on life support.
And that's when it began, with that first rush
to their respective airports for flights to Honolulu,
no idea how long that journey would be,
how hard that promise to keep.
- What is happening to Tammie and Tiffany's mom?
The sisters go on a quest for answers.
- A possible clue from their mother herself.
- She said, "If anything ever is to happen to me,
"I want you to ask for your baby pictures.
"Remember that, okay?
"Just remember that."
**
- Six anxiety-filled hours.
On the long plane ride to Hawaii,
all sisters Tammie and Tiffany knew
was that their mom was on life support.
They weren't sure why
or even exactly what happened to her,
but during those six hours,
they had plenty of time to reflect on what she said to them
nine months earlier.
- "Promise me you'll investigate.
"If anything happens to me, you'll find out what happened."
- They'd promised, of course.
So even before they got on the plane for Hawaii,
they called the police
to report that they already had their suspicions,
and those suspicions, even then, were all about
Shirlene's husband, Ken Wakisaka.
- I heard from Tiffany,
before I even went to Saint Francis West.
I was assigned the case by my lieutenant,
and he said, "Before you go, call this girl."
- Tiffany told Detective Nick Cambra
about her pre-flight conversation with the hospital.
- I asked the emergency room attendant.
I'll never forget this.
I said, "Where's Ken?"
And he said,
"He went home to feed the dogs."
I said, "So she's there by herself?"
Well, who does that?
- By the time Detective Cambra got to the hospital,
he'd been told what Tammie and Tiffany suspected,
that Shirlene had taken, or had been given,
an overdose of pills.
He also heard from medical personnel.
They thought Ken's behavior seemed strange,
though no one, including the ambulance driver,
could quite say why.
- He also related that the husband was acting suspicious.
- Did he say how?
- He said just the way he spoke in the way he acted.
- Suspicious? - Yes.
- When Detective Cambra heard that Ken left the hospital
while his wife was lying in a coma in the ICU,
he wondered, was Ken going home to cover up a crime scene?
And when Cambra checked to see if Ken had a record of any kind,
he discovered, yes, he did.
- I did pull police reports of Ken.
Ken had been arrested for abuse.
- It gave Cambra pause,
made him consider what he'd already heard from Tiffany.
- That her mom had said she would never commit suicide
and that she was afraid that Ken was trying to kill her
prior to this incident.
- Now in Hawaii, at their mother's bed in the ICU,
Tammie and Tiffany vowed to find out
exactly what happened to their mother.
- You know, most people would just leave it
to a police department to do the investigating.
- Mm-hmm. - Not you two?
- No. - First target?
Ken and Shirlene's condo.
Must be evidence there, they decided.
So they made up a story for Ken,
told him they needed a rest after their long flight.
Could they borrow a bed in the condo?
And sure enough, he gave them the keys
while he stayed at Shirlene's bedside in the hospital.
- When he was there, what did you guys do?
- We went to the house in Ko Olina.
- To do what? - To see what we could find.
- Just kind of look in cupboards and under beds
and in closets. For what kind of stuff?
- For things that we thought that might help us figure out
what happened that day.
- Because Shirlene sounded so out of it on the phone
and Ken mentioned pills to the EMTs,
Tammie wondered if her mother took pills.
In fact, the hospital was treating it as an overdose.
But the sisters did not believe she would do it deliberately,
so they went looking for those pill bottles.
- We had looked through the house
and couldn't find them,
and so we were out in the backyard just looking,
and sure enough. - In the backyard?
- Underneath a bush.
- As if they'd been hidden there or what?
- Yes.
- In their minds, only one person
could have hidden them, Ken.
Later, as Tiffany and Tammie were about to drive away
from the condo,
having thrown in the backseat a sealed envelope
Ken had left out for them, suddenly, Tiffany remembered
something else her mother told her.
- She says, "Tiff, um, I have to tell you something,
"and it's important".
And she said, "If anything ever is to happen to me,
"I want you to ask Ken for your baby pictures.
"Remember that, okay? Just remember that."
- And sure enough,
that appeared to be what Ken had just given them.
They tore open the envelope, and inside,
most definitely not baby pictures.
- There it was. - Mm-hmm.
- Evidence she left for you to find.
- Yes.
- What could be a revealing clue from their mom
**
- Sisters Tiffany and Tammie read, transfixed,
the contents of an envelope
prepared by their mother for them
and clearly marked "baby pictures,"
But that is not what was in the envelope.
Instead, they found notes written by Ken,
apparently an assignment for an anger management class.
- It was actually a journal about all the different ways
that he had abused her.
- "I have spit at Shirlene. I have yelled at Shirlene.
"I have pushed Shirlene."
There it was, in his own hand. - Mm-hmm.
- Evidence she left for you to find.
- Yes. - And suddenly,
the sisters truly believed
their mom was sending secret clues
that almost screamed "open in case of death."
Attempting to solve the mystery,
they found a willing ally in Detective Cambra.
One plan they came up with together?
Secretly recording a phone call with Ken.
Tammie made the call from the police department.
[ringing]
The strategy was for Tammie to act friendly, supportive.
Ken told Tammie he was deeply concerned for Shirlene.
But Ken also said he was suspicious
of Tammie and her sister.
Still, he spoke with Tammie at length about the day.
He said Shirlene told him she took pills
and seemed suicidal.
And then, after a pause,
he volunteered something that shocked them all.
But then he returned to the point he made before.
What a strange thing for him to say.
- Oh, he said a lot of strange things.
- Now the girls believed they had to move very fast
while Shirlene was on life support.
As long as she was alive, they decided,
they had the legal right to rummage through a garage
in a house in California Shirlene had kept,
looking for evidence to use against Ken.
So they flew to the mainland,
and that's where they were
when Ken gave consent to take Shirlene off life support,
and she died.
- I remember thinking,
I'm just bawling my head off again,
so I was mortified, and I was devastated again
that I wasn't there. - At Shirlene's funeral,
according to Detective Nick Cambra,
Ken's eulogy sounded like a well-prepared criminal defense.
- It started with that Shirlene initiated sex
the night before,
um, that she was happy that they were together.
And then he started-- He went on to the next day
and how he tried to prevent her from dying.
- Shirlene's daughters were horrified.
Now they were fully determined
to keep their promise to their mother.
They'd need to ensure that Ken was charged with her murder.
Next to look at the case, prosecutor Dan Oyasato,
who found Ken's remarks about strangulation
very disturbing and here's why.
- This was viewed as an overdose.
That's how this case went to the hospital.
That's what Tiffany and Tammie were thinking.
That's what the police department was thinking.
- And yet, as Oyasato began to dig deeper,
he found that Ken talked about strangulation more than once.
- He brought it up with the medical examiner's investigator,
and-and was-was basically telling them,
this is not a strangulation case.
- In fact, said the prosecutor,
Ken tried to persuade the examiner
not to do an autopsy.
But, of course, there was one.
The result took months, but sure enough,
cause of death, said the medical examiner,
brain damage due to ligature strangulation.
When an arrest warrant was issued,
Detective Cambra served it personally.
- How'd he react? - He said, "Nick, you know
"I didn't kill my wife. I didn't kill my wife."
- In 2002, two years after their mother's death,
Tammy and Tiffany came back to Hawaii,
this time to the courthouse
where Ken Wakisaka went on trial for murder.
- You took the life of another human being,
and that human being was our mother.
- This was a murder by strangulation.
It was domestic violence at its ultimate.
- In his opening statement,
prosecutor Dan Oyasato quoted from Ken's own statements
to accuse him of murder.
- "Can you tell if a person has been strangled
"during autopsy?"
These are the words of the defendant to an investigator
from the medical examiner's office.
- In court, the medical examiner repeated her opinion
that Shirlene was strangled,
said she found ligature marks on her neck.
And in court, the prosecutor played a tape
of that recorded phone call with Tammie in which,
sure enough, Ken brought up the idea himself.
- I really believe this was Ken's subconscious
talking out.
No one, not a soul,
was thinking this was a strangulation case.
- Until he opened his mouth and--
- Until he brings this up.
- That made everybody suspicious.
- Every witness who testified as to having some contact
with Ken spoke about his unusual behavior.
His focus was not on his wife.
It was on other things.
- But-- There is always a "but"--
Ken's defense attorney, Mal Gillin,
accused the police and prosecutors
of jumping to the wrong conclusions,
rushing to judgment against Ken.
That ligature mark
must have been made by the tube that lay on her neck
while she was on life support.
This wasn't a strangulation, he argued,
wasn't a murder at all.
As Ken had said all along, Shirlene took an overdose.
- Mrs. Wakisaka, because of her various mental disorders
or defects, committed suicide.
- The trial lasted two weeks.
The jury heard detectives, doctors,
Shirlene's daughters, of course.
Ken himself chose not to take the stand.
- How'd it seem to be going?
- It seemed to be going well.
- As if here, their promise would be kept.
But life, as everybody knows,
is full of surprises.
- The verdict would be swift,
but the real stunner was what came after.
- Nobody stood up and said, "I object"?
- It's amazing.
**
Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin.
How exactly did Shirlene Van Gundy die?
Her two daughters believe
that their mother's husband murdered her.
At trial, prosecutors said
that Ken Wakisaka strangled Shirlene,
while the defense countered that she overdosed.
Ken was about to learn his fate,
but a chance meeting
would turn this case upside down.
Back to Keith Morrison with "The Vow."
- Two tenacious daughters made a promise to their mother
and were hoping to keep it.
But now it was up to 12 other people, a jury.
- Were you in the court when the verdict was read?
- Yes. - Tell me about that.
- What a huge relief to hear those words.
"We, the jury find Ken Wakisaka guilty of murder
"in the second degree."
It was... It was amazing.
- Ken was, well, surprised would be an understatement.
- I didn't expect this at all.
- But these two? - I was a really happy girl.
You know, I'm like, the system worked.
You know, it worked.
- Ken, who still maintained his innocence,
was sentenced to life in prison.
And that would be it.
End of story.
Except, coincidence is such a strange
and powerful thing, isn't it?
- It's a curious story,
the way you encountered this case, huh?
- Yes. I was visiting another client
who had been charged with murder.
- Defense attorney John Edmunds
doesn't normally find new cases in prison,
but something seemed very credible about
this particular client referral.
- He turned to me and he said, "You know, my cellmate,
"who's out in the rec yard right now,
"doesn't belong here.
"There's something really odd about his case.
"Would you look at it and see what you think?"
- So Edmunds agreed to at least have a look
at the record, a thick file of transcripts,
hundreds of pages.
And late one night, he was sitting up in bed
beside his wife, reading every word said
at Ken's trial.
And suddenly there it was, eureka.
- And I get to the final argument,
and the prosecutor makes a direct comment
on Mr. Wakisaka's failure to take the witness stand.
- This is what Edmunds read.
It's in prosecutor Daniel Oyasato's final argument,
his own words.
- The Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination
is a constitutional right that can be rendered meaningless
if the prosecution gets to comment on it.
- And nobody stood up and said, "I object, You Honor"?
- It's amazing.
The trial lawyer said nothing.
The judge said nothing.
- Those five words, "If he doesn't tell us",
would be the basis for Edmunds' appeal.
- The most serious offense is commenting on the failure
to take the witness down.
But we're supposed to be professionals,
and we're not supposed to make those kinds of mistakes.
- Did you write your closing argument?
- I write an outline, I commit it to memory.
- So how did that line come out?
- Prosecutor Dan Oyasato
said it was a mere slip of the tongue.
- What I was trying to do with that statement
was actually transition from if he doesn't know,
then we need to look at her body.
We need to look at the rest of the evidence
to tell us the story.
- None of this seemed like such a big deal
to Shirlene's daughter.
- People file appeals all the time.
I understand that.
But I wasn't paying attention anymore,
'cause it was done.
- But it wasn't done.
In 2003, a year after the trial and three years
since Shirlene's death, Hawaii's Supreme Court
handed down its decision.
- I got the call from Dan Oyasato, the prosecutor,
and he said, "The verdict's been overturned".
- Overturned.
The guilty verdict the daughters so desperately wanted
pulled out from under them just like that.
- He goes, "It wasn't the evidence of the case,
"it was on the Fifth Amendment. It was prosecutorial misconduct.
"That's my fault."
- So he took responsibility for it right away?
- Oh, instantly. Instantly.
The pain-- the pain that he felt.
Because he-he worked so hard.
- It haunts me. I'll tell you right now.
It haunts me, you know, that-that-that I--
that I did this.
I have apologized, I don't know how many times,
to the girls because of my error.
- Still, said the sisters,
the ruling didn't mean Ken was innocent.
Far from it.
- Even though the verdict was overturned,
it was overturned on technicalities
and not on any evidentiary issues.
- And they found a small silver lining.
The Supreme Court said Ken could be retried.
- And so that left the door open for us
to bring it back to trial.
And we just needed to try again.
- And so they took it upon themselves
to pick up right where they left off.
After all, a promise is a promise.
- I just remember thinking, um, okay,
so we need to keep pushing.
- You can't quit, because there is no other option,
because you can make a difference.
- Ken got out on bail
but was still under indictment for murder.
And they all waited for the new trial.
And then, once again,
John Edmunds put on his reading glasses.
- And what I found again stunned me.
- Coming up, a possible new witness.
- I couldn't believe it. I still don't believe it.
**
- Ken Wakisaka, convicted of killing his wife,
Shirlene, was out on bail.
Guilty verdict overturned thanks to an error discovered
by Ken's new defense attorney, John Edmunds.
But Edmunds wasn't finished digging.
And pretty soon he found another error,
a big one that occurred even before the trial.
- There was a witness that the grand jury
had asked to be called whom the prosecution didn't call.
- The thing is, it's an ironclad rule.
If a grand jury asks to hear from a witness,
the prosecution must comply, didn't in this case.
It wasn't a minor witness either, said Edmunds,
but someone in a position to know a great deal
about what really happened to Shirlene.
- The Wakisakas had a-an upstairs room
that they rented out to a guy, and he had been there
and seen a lot of what went on that morning.
- Though the grand jury didn't hear from the roommate,
Detective Nick Cambra did.
Cambra asked him, what did Shirlene say
to Ken on the day she died?
The defense provided us with an excerpt
of Detective Cambra's interview with the witness.
Testimony that seemed very much in Ken's favor.
Testimony to the grand jury that indicted him never heard.
Defense Attorney Edmunds again went to court.
And again, he won.
- So tell me, from a practical point of view,
what did those victories mean for Ken?
- Well, from a practical point of view,
it meant that indictment got dismissed.
- Dismissed as if he'd never been charged in the first place.
Ken was no longer free on bail, he was simply free.
- And now we're back to a point as though the case
never was brought in the first place.
And-and that's frustrating.
- How do you get your head around it?
How do you process all of it?
How do you move forward every day?
- And how would they make the case against Ken
and persuade the state to start from scratch?
Ken's story had never changed, that Shirlene killed herself
accidentally or on purpose with an overdose of pills.
Of course, the state still had evidence
like that pill bottle the sisters
said they found stashed in the backyard of the condo,
as if Ken fed the pills to Shirlene and then tried
to hide the bottle from the police.
But defense attorney Edmunds could show Ken didn't try
to hide anything, that in fact,
he took paramedics to the medicine cabinet himself.
- They counted down tablets in a bottle of pills
to see how many were left and how many--
tried to figure how many she'd taken,
which is what she said she had done.
- And there was a potential new defense witness
who knew Shirlene well, didn't like her at all, in fact.
And she has her own strange theory
about what happened to Shirlene.
- You get to know the people who are living in your building.
- You have to. - Yeah.
- Marjorie Collier managed the condominium complex
where Shirlene and Kent lived.
Unlike the daughters,
Marjorie considered Shirlene the dominant,
even abusive force in the marriage.
- She used to tell me that Ken was the complete opposite of her,
that he was very quiet and he would never argue with her
or get into a fight with her, he'd leave the building.
He'd just go for a walk.
- How'd she feel about that?
- She didn't like it.
- Marjorie was on the scene April 5th, 2000,
after Tammie called 911,
urging EMTs to check on her mother.
- I went over to talk to the EMT and he said,
"Well, she's awake and she's coherent enough
"to tell us that she's not coming with us".
And I said, "Oh, okay".
- Remember, in the official EMT report,
it was Ken who said Shirlene didn't need
to go to the hospital, but Marjorie insisted
an EMT told her it was Shirlene
who refused to go.
- So your memory of that's pretty clear?
- I'm positive.
- When you heard that Ken was accused of strangling her?
- I was absolutely shocked.
I couldn't believe it.
I still don't believe it.
- But what does she believe about how Shirlene died?
Well, just her speculation, of course,
it was based on an incident that began,
she said, when Shirlene was making a fuss
in the condo office.
- And she was being very pushy, and I went to shut the door
just to get her to go home, because I wasn't even open yet,
and the door hit her arm
and she spilled her cup of coffee.
- Next thing Marjorie knew, a police officer
was threatening to arrest her.
- And I said, "For what?"
And he says, "For abuse".
I said, "Excuse me?"
And I looked at Shirlene, and from her thigh, mid-thigh,
all the way down to her feet was burned.
- You're kidding. - Severely burned.
More burned than you get laying out in the sun all day.
- Was it from that coffee?
- That's what she said it was.
But the police officer told me one cup of coffee won't burn
both those legs like that.
- Both legs are burned? - Yeah.
But she burned her own legs.
- In that case, Marjorie believed,
Shirlene was willing to hurt herself
just to frame Marjorie.
So when Shirlene died...
- What I thought, honestly,
was that it was another ploy.
And she had tried to make it look
as if he was trying to kill her,
and she went too far and accidentally killed herself.
- I think that that's Marjorie's perspective.
- Yeah.
- Do I think that she is correct in her-in her opinion?
No, absolutely not.
- To Shirlene daughters, there was still no doubt
about what really happened, and what to do about it.
- I think your mother had a word, didn't she,
that she liked.
What was that word?
- Tenacity.
- I just had to keep going.
And here's the thing about keeping going,
by doing something in the process,
I was honoring her.
- Tiffany filled a suitcase with documents
that some prosecutor might find useful,
hauled it back and forth to the prosecution meeting,
pushing for action for years.
- Well, I kept going to Hawaii for sure.
I'm like, "Pardon, hi, it's me again.
Uh, my mom, what's going with my mom's case?"
- By this time, Dan Oyasato no longer worked
at the Honolulu County Prosecutor's Office.
And the prosecutor who took over the case
seemed reluctant to go forward.
But that wasn't going to stop Shirlene's daughters.
Not for one minute.
- We had a guilty verdict.
We need to move forward.
We need to recharge. We need to reindict.
We need to go back to trial.
- But, it turned out a big surprise was coming,
this time from the prosecution.
- An unusual theory of how Shirlene died
presents a challenge for the sisters.
Could they still keep their vow?
- Coming up...
- How long are you prepared to keep going with this?
- As long as it takes. We made a promise.
**
- April 2014, Tiffany and Tammie returned to Hawaii,
where they marked a painful anniversary,
fourteen years since their mother, Shirlene, died.
- It's heartbreaking.
- Why do you say heartbreaking?
- We've spent all these years trying to get justice.
- We made the promise to my mother
that we would investigate.
Therefore, it has to be.
Therefore, you can't quit.
- The daughters thought they'd made good on their promise
to find justice for their mother if anything happened to her
when Shirlene's husband was convicted in 2002
of murder by strangulation.
But that verdict was overturned in 2003,
and then Ken's original indictment was thrown out
two years later.
- You thought maybe a few months it'd be back in court?
- Not a few months.
I thought within a few years.
- But the years just kept passing.
Ken moved on, though he still lived in the same condo.
But Tammie and Tiffany said they couldn't move on,
and they acknowledged it's been hard on them.
- I feel really bad for my family,
because it's not their mother,
they didn't make the promise I did.
It's because every time I'm not there,
someone else has to cover all the things
that I normally do.
- Tiffany especially made the trip to Hawaii repeatedly,
and Kids and husband knew they were on their own
whenever she rolled out the suitcase
stuffed with case papers.
Still, they pushed on.
- We will get a conviction.
And I will do everything I can possibly do
in order to make that happen.
- The case has dogged Detective Nick Cambra, too.
He's retired now,
but he counts the years and wonders.
- Do you perceive enthusiasm in the prosecutor's office
to-to go after this? - Not at all. Not at all.
- They would do so reluctantly?
- Yes. - But why?
If prosecutors won a conviction once,
why not just do it again?
- At this point, it's not my decision.
But what I can say is provided the evidence was not suppressed
and is still available,
there is more than ample evidence to prove his guilt.
- Anticipating a new trial, defense attorney Edmunds hired
renowned forensic pathologist Michael Baden.
- And asked him, "What is your opinion?
"Was there strangulation or not?"
He said, "absolutely not. This is just wrong."
- So the new prosecution hired its own experts
and, well, didn't go as planned.
- The new prosecutor on the case said that they had one
or two forensic pathologists who agreed with Dr. Baden.
- They agreed that Shirlene wasn't strangled.
- These are prosecution experts.
Did that surprise you?
- It did. - Yeah.
- I don't think that they provided all the information
that the expert needed in order to make that determination.
- The prosecution announced in court in 2010
it was abandoning the strangulation theory,
the very theory that got Ken convicted
in the first place.
- What did you think when they just dropped that theory?
- I was shocked.
Honestly, I-I was shocked.
- The prosecutor declined to talk to us
or share any information about the case.
But in an email to the daughters from January 2014,
he said his boss, the chief prosecuting attorney,
referred to here by his initials KMK,
"Gave the green light to go forward".
But go forward with what?
A whole new theory they called murder by omission.
- What's your understanding of what murder by omission is?
- My understanding is that it's a duty of a spouse
or a parent to get medical help for someone
who can't get help for themselves.
And if they die because of that,
then you've effectively committed murder.
- In the email, the prosecutor told the girls he just needed
one or more experts to give the opinion
that Wakisaka's failure to perform his duty
to provide timely medical care for Shirlene caused her death.
Despite abandoning the strangulation theory,
the prosecutor in his email now said he might
actually bring it back, along with murder by omission,
for a possible new trial.
- Do you really think they will?
- Have they?
- No, they have not.
They've done nothing.
- So what stage have you got to?
Believe it when you see it?
- Absolutely.
Prove me wrong.
Show me that you're going to do something.
Quit leading us on to believe that you're going
to move forward with a case that we've been hanging on to
for ten years.
- Defense attorney Edmunds said he would knock down
the prosecution's new omission theory by pointing out
that Ken did try to get help for Shirlene by calling 911.
So far, there has been no move to charge Ken,
and it's not clear when or if there will be.
By 2021, the Wakisaka case file had been assigned
to the Maui County Prosecutor's Office.
Ken has maintained his innocence all these years, even as
Shirlene's daughters' quest to prove him guilty goes on.
- He's very troubled by it.
- Is he living under a cloud now?
- He feels he is.
He'll never really be at peace.
Now more people recognize him on the street,
that's embarrassing.
- I miss her so much, Tammie.
- Me too.
- Call it a promise, a quest, an obsession.
Her daughters' journey isn't over.
- How long are you prepared to keep going with this?
- As long as it takes.
- I mean, you could be sitting here an old lady
and years and years from now, and nothing will have happened.
- We made a promise.
We made a promise to our mom.
- It is with such purpose and such passion
and such love that I do this.
It is an honor of my mother.
And I don't care if it's labeled obsession or crazy,
I'm doing this because I love her
and she deserves it.
- That's all for this edition of "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin.
Thank you for watching.