[music playing]
Imagine this.
A husband moves a mistress into a family home, but guess what?
His wife is there too.
She's upstairs.
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON VIDEO): She
has [bleep] moved into my house with me and my five kids.
The [bleep] should have stayed up in [bleep] Michigan.
She shouldn't have moved down here.
She shouldn't have moved into my house.
How could she have probably have thought
that was going to go well?
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: That's the voice of Ann Marie Anastasi
who decides to do something about her cheating
husband, Anthony, and his mistress, Jacqueline Riggs.
The police department receives a 911
call reporting that, my husband is not breathing.
And it's just that.
This mystery starts unraveling the minute 911 is called.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Who's done what?
I'm Michelle Trachtenberg, and this is "Meet, Marry, Murder."
[music playing]
In 2015, Maryland, and the Anastasis
look like a typical family.
CAROLYN CANVILLE: Ann Marie and Anthony Anastasi
had been married for 18 years.
They had five kids.
They lived in a rented home in this little town
called Lothian, Maryland.
It's about less than an hour from Washington D.C.
JASON KNIGHT: It's a nice house.
I mean, it's a nice probably four, five-bedroom home
on a sizable chunk of land in the southern part
of the county, which is pretty rural.
Nothing out of the ordinary, apparently.
But things are not quite as they seemed.
They had a rather unconventional marriage.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Unconventional?
You got that right.
Younger woman in the basement.
She isn't the nanny, she isn't a relative or a friend.
She's a lover.
So when did the twosome become a threesome?
It's a story which starts 700 miles away when Anthony
first meets Jackie Riggs.
The Anastasis lived in Saunt Ste Marie, Michigan,
on the upper Peninsula.
Anthony was a volunteer youth hockey coach.
During his coaching he met Miss Riggs.
CAROLYN CANVILLE: She's 25 years old.
Now Ann Marie's 43, and her husband is a few years younger.
And at some point along the way,
some sort of romantic relationship
developed that was extramarital to his relationship
with Ann Anastasi.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: What do we know about Jackie?
Everybody says she's a straight up woman--
loves kids.
But she's a woman Ann Anastasi never wanted to see again.
JASON KNIGHT: At some point in time
the Anastasis left Michigan and moved as a family
to Lothian, Maryland, in Anne Arundel County.
Mrs. Anastasi believed at the time
that that would be the end of Mr.
Anastasi's extramarital relationship with Miss Riggs.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Ann and Anthony came from Maryland
and want to go home.
Why?
Ann wants to put 700 miles between her and Jackie.
JASON KNIGHT: Subsequent to the Anastasis moving to Maryland,
Miss Riggs was moved by Mr. Anastasi from Michigan
down to Maryland, and moved into the Anastasi's basement.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Anthony decides
he wants to move Jacqueline into the house,
let's have her live with us and we can
all live happily ever after.
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON VIDEO): She
shouldn't have moved down here.
She shouldn't have moved into my house.
How could she possible have thought
that was going to go well?
Once she was there, she was--
maybe not quite a member of the family, but lived there.
And Mrs. Anastasi, actually from what we understand,
made dinner and Miss Riggs would join the entire family
for dinner in the evenings.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Does Jackie Riggs
know what she's getting into?
She's 25 and moving in with a family as a lover
to the dad and husband?
Crazy, right?
And it's no five-star hotel either.
JASON KNIGHT: The physical environment in which Miss Riggs
lived with the Anastasis did not objectively look very pleasant.
Concrete floors, no walls, you know, no real privacy
in the basement.
The basement was unfinished but it had
a bed and some of the other--
some furniture that you would put in a place to make it
look like a bedroom.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Anthony Anastasi has got it made.
A young lover downstairs, the Mrs looking after the kids--
guess what?
Ann Marie put up with it, but she hates it.
She clearly hoped that the relationship terminated when
they moved to Maryland, and was very
disappointed when Miss Riggs moved
back in with them subsequently.
But there was-- we never saw anything
where she put up some sort of resistance
and tried to prevent it.
Ann Marie may be disappointed--
that doesn't stop her joining Jackie
and Anthony for a literal three-way in the basement.
JASON KNIGHT: The little bit that I know about it was
that Mrs. Anastasi stated that at one point in time
Mr. Anastasi had convinced her to engage in sexual activity
with him and Miss Riggs, but Mrs. Anastasi said that only
ever happened the one time, she didn't like it,
and refused to participate in that ever again.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: And guess what?
Anthony focuses on the 25-year-old downstairs.
The mother of his kids, and his wife,
she's out of the sexual picture.
Now, suddenly, this threesome is becoming a twosome.
It's like three's a crowd and Ann Marie isn't invited.
Now, Anthony and Jacqueline are having sex more often
and Ann Marie is on the outs.
Pretty soon, before she knows it,
Ann Marie's husband is basically living with this younger woman
down in the basement.
MAN (ON RECORDING): I have to ask this question in.
Do you think that your husband and Jacqueline
were messing around?
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING):
Oh I know they were.
MAN (ON RECORDING): They were?
And how do you know they were?
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING):
Because he'd spend most--
Well, not most.
He spent a lot of nights down there with the doors locked.
Like a lot of them.
MAN (ON RECORDING): Did you ever confront them about it?
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING):
I was told that, basically, to mind my own business.
He's going to do what he wants to do, and if I don't like it
I can get the [bleep] out of the house.
And I'm not going to abandon my kids
and leave them in that kind of situation.
JASON KNIGHT: Mrs. Anastasi was questioned by the police
in some detail, essentially along the lines
of, you're a human, you cannot be OK with
the behavior in which your husband
was engaged with Miss Riggs.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: One day the cops are going
to need to prove Ann doesn't like
Anthony having sex with Jackie.
This phone secret recording is going to help their case.
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING):
Problem is, it's not only him.
There's also a 24-year-old girl who is dead at my basement.
She's a [bleep] who moved into my house
with me and my five kids.
[bleep] should have stayed up in [bleep] Michigan.
And Ann Marie is basically, my 18-year
marriage is basically over.
I've just lost him to this younger woman.
The information we developed subsequently
when we were listening to her phone calls
while she was incarcerated certainly
demonstrated that she was incredibly
devastated emotionally, and that's what drove
her to commit these crimes.
Ann Marie wants her husband to stop cheating in her own home.
Enough is enough.
She elected to just become the judge, jury, and executioner
on her own, and decided that Mr. Anastasi was going to die,
and Miss Riggs was going to die.
It's the planned.
It's the blueprint for murder.
Half of women killed are murdered by their partners.
Honestly, we should be careful who we get into bed with.
I'm Michelle Trachtenberg, and this is "Meet, Marry, Murder."
Men can be victims too, like Anthony
Anastasi, whose wife discovers he's been spending her cash.
She had this million-dollar trust fund.
They spend it all, and he's telling
her to go back to her family and get even more money.
And whenever they get more money he spends it on himself,
he buys himself flat screen TVs, and Harley-Davidson
motorcycles.
It's all about Anthony and what Anthony needs,
what Anthony wants.
JASON KNIGHT: She certainly seemed
to be someone who was suffering from some sort
of emotional abuse.
What makes this so difficult is that she elected
to not avail yourself of any resources whatsoever,
to not seek help.
She elected to just become the judge, jury, and executioner
on her own, and decided that Mr. Anastasi was going to die,
and Miss Riggs was going to die, and that
was the only resolution to this problem.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Maybe she's
happy to be judge and jury, but she isn't
happy to pull the trigger.
So Ann reaches out to her daughter.
MAN (ON RECORDING): We got some records,
and that night you and [bleep] talk to her for 582 seconds--
3:00 in the morning.
That's about 10 minutes.
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING):
That might have been a butt dial.
MAN (ON RECORDING): That's not a butt dial,
that's a long conversation.
BRIAN HARRIS: Ann Marie convinced
her daughter that Anthony was discarding
Ann Marie as a piece of trash.
She tells her 13-year-old daughter,
your father has to die.
Her mother talks her into this.
She gets involved in this murder plot.
She's a kid, and she's just trying to please her mother.
The teenage girl has her own reasons to be angry.
She overhears her father and Jackie talking about starting
their own family.
So now, his daughter faces seeing her dad having a baby
with a woman young enough to be her sister, all while living
in their house.
Mother and daughter agree Anthony
and Jacqueline should die, and they know
someone who could do the job.
Messages on Ann Marie's phone tell
us who agreed to be the hitman.
They examine Ann Marie's phone,
and they find these text messages between Ann Marie,
her 13-year-old daughter, Sarah, and Sarah's 18-year-old
boyfriend, Gabriel Struss.
In those text messages they're talking about a gun
and the murder of two people.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: But what's in it for Gabriel?
He has nothing against Anthony Anastasi and Jacqueline Riggs.
But this is a kid with a past--
not a good one.
JASON KNIGHT: Gabriel Struss was a young man who
had a very difficult childhood.
Now here's a guy who has no criminal record.
He's basically sort of raised himself on the streets
from the time he's seven.
JASON KNIGHT: He was adopted as a young man,
subsequently left his adoptive family to return
to his biological family.
He wound up at the time of the murder living
in very unfortunate conditions a few miles away
from the Anastasis.
And he's basically raised himself, period.
He really didn't have a great growing up life,
basically kind of a homeless guy,
and kind of a guy who could be led.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Ann Marie sees
Gabriel Struss as a sucker, hers to boss around.
CAROLYN CANVILLE: This young boy--
he's 18, but he's not terribly sophisticated, hasn't had
a great upbringing, doesn't--
he's kind of gullible.
JASON KNIGHT: Mr. Struss was uniquely
positioned to fall victim to Mrs. Anastasi's manipulations.
So now you have the story of this scorned wife who
has convinced her daughter to join her in this plot,
and, Oh, let's get your boyfriend
to do the dirty work for us.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: The messaging between these three,
don't think they're not going to be found.
Cell phones break secrets.
He was communicating over Kik--
it's one of those apps that if you use it it's supposed
to delete after you used.
Like so he was communicating with her over Kik and Snapchat,
the things that teenagers do.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: The texts are a dead giveaway,
a blueprint for murder.
CAROLYN CANVILLE: In those text messages,
they're talking about a gun and the murder of two people.
Mr. Struss told us that the night of the murder he
was picked up by Mrs. Anastasi in her car
and driven to the Anastasi home.
He got out of the car and hid in the yard for some amount
of time that he could not specify, because he claimed
to have actually gone to sleep out in the yard
while he was out there.
At some point in the middle of the night,
he received a message on his phone
calling him into the house.
Gabriel Struss goes into the Anastasi house that night,
and he's ready to kill.
He's following the order of his girlfriend's mother.
She knows that she has to make Jacqueline's death
look like a crime of passion, of rage.
It was a very, just brutal, gruesome scene in the basement.
This is "Meet, Marry, Murder," and I'm Michelle Trachtenberg.
We are in Lothian, Maryland, and an 18-year-old kid Gabriel
Struss is following his girlfriend's mother's
plan to kill Anthony Anastasi.
He creeps into the family home.
BRIAN HARRIS: On October 4, 2015,
Ann Marie hands Gabriel the handgun and a knife.
Why?
You see, Ann Marie's already thinking.
She knows that she has to make Jacqueline's death
look like a crime of passion, of rage.
CAROLYN CANVILLE: So he meets Ann Marie in the kitchen
of the home, she gives him a knife,
and then that night Gabriel goes down
the stairs to Jacqueline's bedroom where she's sleeping,
and he attacks.
JASON KNIGHT: Miss Riggs did not die
right away from one stab wound.
A common misperception is that-- from movies
and TV-- is that if you stab someone
once that they just die.
But the reality is that Miss Riggs was stabbed and woke up,
and fight or flight kicked in, and Miss Riggs started putting
up quite a fight, and Mr. Struss had to stab her multiple times
all over the chest, the head, the face, before he
was able to actually kill her.
And he stabs her 42 times.
He just keeps stabbing her, and stabbing her, and stabbing her.
And then when he's done she's not
moving-- she's clearly dead.
It was a very-- just brutal, gruesome scene in the basement
with the amount of times he had to stab
and the amount of force he had to use
to actually kill Miss Riggs.
She was fighting for her life and she did everything she
could to ward off Mr. Struss.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Ann Marie has figured everything out,
including her version of what's happened,
down to the last detail.
When the police come she wants them to think her husband
has first killed Jackie and then himself.
Once he had killed Miss Riggs, he went back upstairs.
He then was given the . .380 handgun by Mrs. Anastasi.
Gabriel Struss-- he's covered in the blood
of Jacqueline Riggs.
He heads up to the first floor to finish
the job he had started.
JASON KNIGHT: He then went upstairs and stood a couple
of feet away from Mr. Anastasi's bed
and fired the one round into Mr Anastasi's head.
He then left the home and went back
over to his home in the Annapolis area
for the rest of the night.
Miss Anastasi, from what we were able to gather,
went and took the .45 caliber handgun that Mr. Anastasi
had under his pillow at night out from under the pillow
and put that into his hand to make it
look as if he had shot himself.
And then, according to the statement that she gave
the police, she subsequently went
and crawled in bed in a different room
and slept until the morning.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Nobody finds out
what's happened in that big house on W Bay Front Rd.
CAROLYN CANVILLE: It all looks normal until around lunchtime
on October 5, 2015.
The police department receives a 911 call.
It's not a frantic call, but it's
a 911 call reporting that, my husband is not breathing.
And it's just that.
This mystery, if one can call it that,
starts unraveling the minute 9/11 is called.
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING):
I just spent the day taking the kids to the dentist
and then going grocery shopping.
I'm supposed to be leaving to take my husband to a doctor's
appointment right now.
This 911 call--
what a bizarre call.
The person is conversational, there's not a sense of panic,
there's no heavy breathing.
It's very matter of fact, hey, I came home and my husband's
not breathing.
He's laying on the bed.
So he's not responding at all, and he's got his gun
lying next to him in the bed.
911 DISPATCHER (ON RECORDING): Do you think he shot himself?
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING): I don't know.
I didn't turn the lights on in the room.
Yeah, I think he killed himself.
You know, just very nonchalant, matter of fact, conversational.
Not panic.
Where's that sheer panic?
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: She may not have realized at the time,
but from the very first moment she starts
talking to the 911 dispatcher, Ann
Marie is incriminating herself.
BRIAN HARRIS: When the suspect themselves call 911,
it's often in that first minute--
that first 2 minutes of that 911 call that either the motive
will be revealed, or the alibi.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Brian Harris knows murder.
He's investigated plenty as a homicide detective.
They'll repeat over and over again what their alibi is.
It's no different in this case.
What's the alibi?
Oh, I came home, was wondering where my husband was,
and he's laying in the bed and he's not breathing.
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING):
But he's not responding at all, and he's got his gun
lying next to him in the bed.
BRIAN HARRIS: So she clearly wants
to establish that all these series of events
that would take place in the home
happened when she wasn't there.
Now this emergency dispatcher is thinking, this is bizarre.
JASON KNIGHT: So a couple of patrol officers
from the Southern District of the Anne
Arundel County Police Department responded to the scene.
When they arrived at the Anastasi home,
Mrs. Anastasi came outside and reported that her husband
was dead inside.
The police rush to this home and they
see this, this charming house on the outside and they go inside
and there's this house that is just filthy and full
of clutter.
When the officers get there and they go upstairs
to the master bedroom, They find Mr. Anastasi lying on his back
in his bed suffering from a single gunshot
wound to the head with a pistol in his hand.
CAROLYN CANVILLE: And Ann Marie says, well,
you know, he was depressed.
I mean-- so he obviously killed himself.
So as a detective, if that's my scene I'm coming to,
if somebody's trying to say it's suicide
I'm going to look at that person's life.
Sure Anthony's been depressed.
Sure Anthony's had some dark things
going on in his life, kind of a bizarre lifestyle
to begin with.
But Anthony's own body would tell me a story.
CAROLYN CANVILLE: Anthony is lying face
up with a single bullet wound.
He's dead, there's a gun lying next to him.
You see, if there's suicide, you would have what's called
stippling or tattooing from a close gunshot wound--
contact wound.
Now, that bullet is hot, it's kind of like a branding iron.
You have this huge explosion.
Typically anywhere between 12 and 18 inches--
if I'm further away than that distance
when I pull the trigger, the entry wound
will be nice and clean.
If I'm closer than that, I would expect to see what's
called stippling or tattooing.
That big explosion that comes out of the barrel of a gun,
it has to go somewhere.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: The cops don't see what they expect.
If it's a suicide they should see
the stippling around the wound.
From the minute they get in things aren't adding up.
Now police aren't sure what they have on their hands.
Is this a suicide?
Is there anyone else living in the home?
No, my kids aren't here, but, Oh, we have
this woman who lives with us.
She lives in the basement, but come to think of it
I haven't heard from her today.
Suspicion grows.
BRIAN HARRIS: But again, it's very conversational.
And so what are the officers do?
They're sweeping that home going room
to room looking for other bodies,
perhaps maybe even suspect.
They take Ann Marie aside, they're going to take
her downtown and question her.
Meanwhile, officers are running down the stairs.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: She's casual and cool.
So the officers are just not prepared for what
they're about to see.
As they creep down the stairs hands on their weapons,
who knows what is down there?
What do they hear?
Heavy metal music?
[heavy metal music playing]
Then they open the door.
They go downstairs in the basement,
they find Miss Riggs laying on the ground.
And they open the bedroom door and it's like a scene
from "Helter Skelter."
BRIAN HARRIS: And it's a bloody, brutal scene that they find.
They find the body of yet another victim,
Jacqueline Riggs.
CAROLYN CANVILLE: There is blood everywhere,
and there is Jacqueline Riggs lying
dead on this blood soaked rug.
She's been stabbed 42 times.
40 plus stab wounds all across your body.
40 plus stab wounds, imagine that.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34,
35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Ann Marie is cooperating with the police.
She is calm but the scene in the basement
tells detectives of an out of control rage.
It is chaos down there.
And they ask themselves, where does Ann Marie
Anastasi fit into all of this?
Is she the killer?
JASON KNIGHT: Mrs. Anastasi presented herself
in her interviews to the police as the grieving widow who loved
her family, loved her husband, was willing to tolerate
his indiscretions.
MAN (ON RECORDING): The gun that was found next to your husband
was tested, OK?
And compared to the bullet that was found in his skull, OK?
There is no possible way that that weapon
fired that bullet that was in your husband's head.
We've got two blood-soaked bodies,
Anthony Anastasi and Jackie Riggs, lying
in the Anastasi family home.
The medical examiner arrives to remove them for the autopsy.
CAROLYN CANVILLE: Meanwhile police
are questioning Ann Marie.
They've got her downtown and they're asking more questions,
and Ann Marie keeps saying, my husband committed suicide.
I know he was depressed.
It was a suicide.
And they said, well, what about the other woman?
The what?
What about Jacqueline Riggs?
She's got 42 stab wounds.
What!
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Anne Marie
seems shocked and distressed by what she's hearing
from the detectives, but she gives
them a ready made explanation.
Mrs. Anastasi's initial statement to the police
was that she had heard Mr. Anastasi and Miss
Riggs engaged in a heated argument
in the basement of the home.
He then came upstairs to the master bedroom,
kicked her out of the bedroom and then shut the door,
and she never saw him alive again.
Ann Marie-- when the cops are talking
to her they want to know, what do you think happened?
Which is a great question, What do
you think happened Ann Marie?
She buys into it and she says, I think that Anthony killed
Jacqueline, that he went down, they have a relationship,
he kills her, and he can't live with himself for what he did,
and he's so remorseful that he shoots and kills himself.
Miss Anastasi presented herself in her interviews
to the police as the grieving widow who loved her family,
loved her husband, was willing to tolerate his indiscretions,
and was just devastated that this horrible event had
befallen her and her family.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Is she going to get away with this?
She's been living in a broken marriage with her husband
and his mistress-- plenty of motive.
But some of the evidence might support
her story of a murder-suicide.
She could walk.
Based on just what the officers found at the scene--
just by looking at it before they performed any sort
of crime scene investigation, and based on that statement, it
presented as a murder-suicide.
Might be a viable story.
But, you see, the evidence would show that that's
completely different.
As a detective, I often warn other detectives,
don't judge people on the way that they grieve.
However, when you look at the behavior of Ann Marie,
is it just bizarre behavior and she's in shock,
or is this well thought of responses to questions?
JASON KNIGHT: During the course of Mrs. Anastasi's
first interview with the police, they advised her
that they discovered Miss Riggs's body in the basement,
and that she had also been murdered.
Mrs. Anastasi hardly registered any response or emotion at all.
CAROLYN CANVILLE: Police discover that the gun lying
next to Anthony doesn't match the bullet
that came from his body.
There's no way that that bullet could have come from that gun.
JASON KNIGHT: Mr Anastasi had a .45 caliber semi-automatic
pistol in his hand.
Police could not find a .45 caliber
shell casing in the bedroom.
They subsequently were able to find a .380 caliber shell
casing in the bedroom that was subsequently analyzed
by the firearms examiner for the Anne Arundel County Police
Department, who gave a definitive conclusion
that you could not fire a .380 bullet
from the .45 caliber handgun.
Ann Marie didn't count on that.
Mr. Anastasi's autopsy came back
to reveal that the round in his head
was, in fact, a .380 caliber bullet.
Once you know Mr. Anastasi was killed by the .380 caliber
bullet, they knew that the .45 caliber
handgun that was in Mr. Anastasi's hand
was not the murder weapon.
MAN (ON RECORDING): The gun that was found next to your husband
was tested, OK?
And compared to the bullet that was found in his skull, OK?
There is no possible way that that weapon
fired that bullet that was in your husband's head.
It's a completely different weapon, so that means somebody
planted that weapon there.
This is murder-- has murder written all over it.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: The detectives make a breakthrough.
But does Ann Marie fold?
No.
She's unemotional, even a little detached.
What does she care?
She's got nothing to do with it.
INTERVIEWER (ON RECORDING): Two people
were murdered in your home--
brutally murdered, OK?
And you didn't know what happened.
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING): No.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: But the evidence is building.
The cops can prove this is murder, not murder-suicide.
It is not looking good for Ann Marie.
And any murder scene, one of the basic things you
would do if there's gunshots that are involved--
we would do what's called a GSR test, a gunshot residue test.
She consented to having her hands and her clothing
tested for the presence of gunshot residue,
so she voluntarily gave up her clothes.
MAN (ON RECORDING): There's a couple of things
I need to clear up real quick.
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING): Certainly.
MAN (ON RECORDING): The tests that they
took from your clothes and your hands--
well, they were all sent off.
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING):
How, they probably found lots of cat milk on there.
MAN (ON RECORDING): Well, we found a lot of gunshot residue
on you and on the clothes.
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING): Really?
MAN (ON RECORDING): Yeah.
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING): That's weird.
She's got a lot of explaining to do.
So now you have a gun that's not matching up,
you've got two people dead, you've
got gunshot residue on the wife, and what
do they have on their hands?
Now this is clearly not just a murder-suicide.
JASON KNIGHT: They also took her--
while she was at the police station on the first night,
and she agreed to undergo a polygraph examination.
MAN (ON RECORDING): You have a failed polygraph.
You've not just failed it, you flunked the hell out of it.
POLYGRAPH EXAMINER (ON RECORDING):
Have you been untruthful during this investigation?
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING): No.
POLYGRAPH EXAMINER (ON RECORDING):
Did you shoot your husband?
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING): No.
During the course of the polygraph examination
she did poorly on questions regarding what happened,
and the exact details whether she was involved,
if she knew what happened.
It's a tense time for Anne Arundel County detectives.
They know she did it, but do they
have enough to charge Ann Marie Anastasi
with a double homicide?
The combination of the failed polygraph,
Mrs. Anastasi's story not being completely logical,
and the subsequent evidence that the police developed regarding
the firearm, regarding the gunshot
residue, that all led to identifying
her as the prime suspect.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Ann Marie refuses to talk.
But when the cops track down 18-year-old Gabriel Struss,
he crumbles.
Gabriel, when he's confronted, a rock could
have taken his confession.
Gabriel right away, freely, starts
flowing with the story of what took place, takes
responsibility, lays it all out, and explains
exactly what happened.
When they go to Gabriel Struss he confesses right away,
I did it.
I'm involved.
Yes, I killed them, but I'm not the one who masterminded it.
It was her idea.
And then the story starts coming out.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Gabriel can't stop talking,
so investigators piece together Ann Marie's plan for murder
and how she intended to get away with it.
JASON KNIGHT: Mrs. Anastasi got up in the morning,
went through her family's normal routine,
got the children off to school, she subsequently had a doctor's
appointment, and then she went to a grocery store,
she came back to the home, and somewhere in the 12 or 1
o'clock hour called 911 want to report
that Mr Anastasia was dead.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Turns out as plans go,
this one isn't good.
ANN MARIE ANASTASI (ON RECORDING):
But he's not responding at all, and he's, got his gun
lying next to him in the bed.
911 DISPATCHER (ON RECORDING): Do you think he shot himself?
JASON KNIGHT: Her actions after both Mr. Anastasi and Miss
Riggs were dead were exactly that of someone who had a plan.
And that's one of the main things we relied on
in determining to charge her with first degree
premeditated murder.
Because, you know, obviously, she had this plan leading up
to Mr. Anastasi and Mrs. Riggs's death,
but then she clearly had thought through the entire crime,
not just how to commit it, but then she
had a plan for after it was committed for how
to try to get away with it.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Gabriel Struss get 60 years in prison.
He tells Jacqueline Riggs's family that he wishes he could
take back what he had done.
The prosecutors say he was just a puppet.
It was the angry wife who planned everything,
but Ann Marie won't accept blame for her part
in the killing of her husband and his lover.
Anne Marie takes this special plea,
this Alford deal, that allows her to avoid saying I did it.
She never has to admit it.
She doesn't take responsibility for it.
What it tells me has a fellow human being, as a homicide
detective, Ann Marie--
she never accepts responsibility,
never shows any remorse.
There's never an opportunity to see
any kind of human side human emotional side of Ann Marie.
What kind of a mother does this?
She's so angry at her husband, she's feeling so betrayed
because he's left her and her 18-year marriage is over
with because of this woman-- this younger
woman, where you are so mad you want them gone,
but you can't do it.
So you actually get your young daughter
involved in this murder plot, and get her boyfriend
involved in this murder plot.
How can a mother live with herself?
How can a mother do this and then
never accept responsibility for it, and never show any remorse?
The havoc she left behind, and she could still
never take full responsibility.
But she also receives a 60-year sentence,
as if she was the one that pulled the trigger,
as if she was the one who plunged the knife
42 times into Jacqueline Riggs.
Crazy story, right?
Remember, the person most likely to kill you could
be the person you married.
I'm Michelle Trachtenberg and I'll see you next time
on "Meet, Marry, Murder."
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