[theme music playing]
MAN: There's this thing inside of me, it's like...
the appetite.
It's like a wolf that's...
filling... the hunger.
♪
[siren wailing]
MAN: Eustaquio was found shot multiple times
in his Fallbrook home.
His mother-in-law, Cynthia Katherine Cdebaca,
charged with the crime.
We are still currently investigating
what the motive might be.
SAHNI: She's letting the sheriff's deputies believe
that she can't remember her name.
She can't remember her date of birth, her age.
These are things that are not uncommon to
see sometimes when someone has a significant stroke,
however, it seems unlikely against other aspects
of her day-to-day functioning that we know about.
What I think Cdebaca is showing us
in this moment is that she hasn't fully
decided how much responsibility
she wants to take for the crime.
MORGAN: It's bizarre.
Her wailing is a little bizarre.
This looks feigned to me.
She's pretending that she doesn't know anything about
the crime and the scene, and the wail
is a weak imitation of, I think, what she imagines an immediate
expression of sorrow would be.
MUNDY: She goes from pretending to be confused to
pretending to lament his loss very quickly,
and I wouldn't expect to see that.
I wouldn't expect her even necessarily to
understand the news she was being given
if she was anywhere near as
confused or disoriented as she presented herself.
SAHNI: Now, suddenly, she's gone from not knowing her name
to a level of anger,
a level of bitterness, and doesn't sound like a whole lot
of remorse.
Cdebaca feels comfortable pivoting and taking
responsibility and credit for
killing her son-in-law, because the detectives have now
befriended her.
There's some relishment of her actions, and now she's got
an audience that she can describe that to.
For a psychopath,
having an audience that they are commanding, the audience is
looking to them, what are they going to say next?
Even if it's shocking the audience, being in control
can be a very satisfying thing for someone with psychopathy.
[Cynthia sobbing loudly]
She sounds monstrous as she's describing this man's
last words and her desire to continue killing him.
There's a tone of disgust in it, like that
he would plead for his life to her,
and the way she imitates it, she is angry at him.
MORGAN: With psychopaths,
they are often angered and infuriated when people
don't treat them the way they expect
to be treated -- for her,
this is the final offense he can do.
He's humiliating her, and so she's going
to kill him and eliminate the problem.
SAHNI: Was it an overreaction? Yes.
The number of bullets that he suffered was overkill.
Cdebaca's behaviors are ruthless.
She doesn't feel bad about it.
MORGAN: Her expression of emotion seems
to come out of nowhere.
It's sort of like the switch went on,
the switch went off, and this is really common after people
have had a stroke.
What's consistent here, though, when we talk about psychopathy,
is that she's happy he's dead.
MUNDY: The hard part to, like, morally wrap your head around is
that she would make that decision
for so many other people.
They have to live with knowing grandma killed dad.
That's a real just lack of empathy or ability
to empathize with her ostensibly loved ones.
My dad at times, you know, he could be hard, but
he's ultimately fair.
Alpha personalities, you know,
conflict with a lot of other personality types, and she put
on a good facade for years now and, like,
you know, so this is a shock to us,
but it seems like she's been planning this for a while.
On the surface, I wondered how much of
her decision making was impaired by the stroke,
but clearly, there are premeditated steps to this,
and she took the time to pick up the casings.
She took the time to clean up after herself.
Cdebaca is definitely not a confused,
disorganized, unintelligent person.
This was an organized, systematic,
methodically executed crime.
MUNDY: She took his life, and she went to Denny's
and a casino on her birthday --
That's really concerning.
That's a little more suggestive of just that
indifference of human life,
indifference towards her own grandchildren,
her daughter.
MORGAN: That's what we see in psychopathy.
They've taken the law into their own hands, and they've
settled the fantasy in their head
or settled the score, and she feels, I think,
entitled to celebrate.
That lack of remorse is what we see in psychopathy.
[sobbing loudly]
[sobbing continues]
MORGAN: In her behavior, we do see an element of narcissism.
She has to match the fantasy in her head
about how this problem would have to be resolved.
So calling the police was out of the question.
It wouldn't result in his death -- in psychopathy,
people don't believe in adhering to the social rules.
They behave by their own rules,
and they can take matters into their own hands.
SAHNI: She alludes to the idea
that she had a troubled childhood.
There absolutely could have been some of her
early experiences and negative feelings about her own family
and maybe a domineering parent projected onto her son-in-law
that maybe she felt that her
grandchildren experienced their father in a more
domineering and rigid way than he may actually have been.
The overkill that you see in that crime may very well
have been her tapping into rage
that she had about some of her early life experiences.
[loud sobbing]
[both sobbing loudly]
I think it is telling that her daughter was upset.
It suggests to me that her daughter
was in a full relationship with the victim.
She wasn't begging her mother,
please get rid of someone for me
and had emotionally detached from him.
You really see a very good illustration of
how fused she is in her own head,
that what is her reality must be her daughter's reality.
The story she had going in her head is that she was
doing the right thing for her daughter and her daughter would
be relieved.
And it's not really until this moment that you see that
the light bulb goes off in her head
that she's created a real mess with her daughter.
When people are psychologically fused with their children,
there's no room in their reality for
their experiences and the experiences of
their children.
Cdebaca gave herself a birthday gift, and she didn't
consider the consequences that it would have on her daughter,
her grandchildren, the very people that
she claimed she was protecting.
She did what she wanted to do.
There's a callousness, a coldness,
a cruelness about what she's done,
and she's singularly focused.
Cdebaca's personality and behaviors
are consistent with psychopathic behavior.
Cdebaca justifies her behaviors in this narrative
or view that she excised a cancer from the family.
But she is now the one who is the cancer in
the family, and this is something that family may never
recover from.
MAN: Prosecutors called it cold blooded and planned.
This is a case in which
the defendant admitted to planning and premeditating
her murder.
MAN: Cdebaca was in a wheelchair.
She's 65 years old.
She bobbed her head and smiled
as the jury walked into the courtroom.
WOMAN: The jury in the above-entitled cause
find the defendant,
Cynthia Cdebaca, guilty of the crime of murder.