- She was a celebrity realtor to the stars...
- She sold apartments to Steven Spielberg,
Bruce Willis, Bette Midler.
[dramatic music]
- Found dead in her luxury penthouse.
- She was a fun-loving person.
It's still kind of shocking and surreal.
- She says that a male wearing all black
enters the apartment.
- It's catnip for the New York press.
- Cases like this become a complete vacuum
and suck up all the attention.
- How could something so vicious
happen in Manhattan's high society?
- When I looked back at the video,
I could see the taxicab pull up and drop her off.
- Linda had a lot of enemies.
Could anybody be angry enough to want to murder her?
Well, the line forms on the left.
* *
- For the NYPD, the night before Halloween
is always a night to expect the unexpected.
And October 30, 2007, was no exception.
Detectives get a call to a suspicious death
at a 5th Avenue penthouse in Manhattan's Upper East Side,
a neighborhood known for its world-renowned museums
and luxury shops, not for foul play.
Yet it's here that a member of New York's elite,
62-year-old Linda Stein, is found in a pool of blood.
This is one of our most vexing cases.
Many A-listers and all of New York wanted answers.
* *
The mystery begins with a 911 call
from a distraught daughter.
* *
- October 30th is the night before Halloween--
it would be crazy anywhere in a metropolitan setting--
when we got the call that there was a suspicious DOA
in the 19th Precinct.
* *
The 19th Precinct is the Upper East Side,
and it really is one of the richest
zip codes in America.
* *
So anything that happens, it's a news case.
[sirens wailing]
- When, I pull up--
the folks in the media,
they monitor the police frequency--
there's already a sizable crowd of news stations
outside the building.
- Detectives thread their way past news cameras
and take the semiprivate elevator
to the 18th-floor penthouse.
- The apartment was nice, well maintained.
There wasn't really any kind of upset
in the apartment or mess.
Nothing was in disarray or anything like that.
- When we enter the apartment,
the victim is laying on the floor.
* *
Had a hoodie pulled over her head.
* *
- I observed the female facedown,
and there was a puddle of blood around her head.
* *
- There was no obvious weapon laying around,
but there was holes in the back of the hoodie
that the victim was wearing.
* *
- I got up close and looked in there.
I says, "This is bad."
You could see blood, brain matter
underneath the actual hole itself.
- She looked like she was badly beaten.
It was just obvious that this was a homicide.
* *
- We also found that the front door was locked,
the back door was unlocked.
- Since there doesn't appear to be a break-in,
detectives theorize that Linda might have known her killer
and let them into her home.
They dust the apartment and swab for DNA.
- Medical examiner came.
The body was eventually removed to the morgue.
At that point, I have to interview the building staff,
interview neighbors.
Entire building has to be canvassed top to bottom.
* *
- And the first person detectives speak to is Mandy,
the victim's daughter who called 911.
That's when they start to realize
exactly who Linda Stein was.
- We did find out through Mandy
that Elton John is her godfather.
That's when I realized Linda Stein was a big deal.
* *
- Linda Stein was the daughter of a kosher caterer
from the Bronx, and she met Seymour Stein
on a blind date,
Seymour Stein who owned Sire Records.
Sire Records signed Madonna and Talking Heads,
and he was one of the big moguls
of the rock and roll industry, and she married him,
and suddenly she knew every rock and roll star
in the business.
* *
She was only five feet tall, but when she spoke,
this big, booming voice came out of this woman,
and if she was angry, that voice,
you could hear it down the block,
and she also had a vocabulary like a sailor.
[upbeat dance music]
- Linda Stein was a force of nature.
[laughs]
We met first in New York at Studio 54.
She used to come there, and I worked there.
* *
- One night, she went to see the Ramones
at CBGB, and she went to Seymour,
and she said, "This is, you know,
gonna be the biggest thing," and they signed,
and she managed the Ramones.
* *
She had two beautiful daughters,
Samantha and Mandy.
Can you imagine being brought up in a household
where the Ramones are in and out and so is Madonna
and all these people
and your father is this mogul
who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars?
[dramatic music]
Those two girls, I'll never forget,
their bedroom, they had so much graffiti
on their bedroom walls.
You could go there if you were a Ramone
or if you were whoever-- you could go there
and draw on the girls' bedroom walls,
and that's how they grew up, you know,
in a bedroom full of graffiti from superstars.
* *
- I spoke with Mandy Stein, the eldest daughter
of the victim, and she was extremely emotional.
She did start off by saying, "I don't live here.
"This is my mother's house.
I'm only staying here for a week or so."
She was only gonna stay to Thanksgiving,
and then she was gonna go back to LA,
where she works as a TV producer.
* *
We got our person here that found the body,
so she was going to be our primary suspect.
* *
We interview her.
Where were you? What time did you come home?
Well, she says she was on her way to Greenpoint, Brooklyn,
to meet with friends.
Mandy did call for her mom in the afternoon.
- She called her mother, wanting to tell her mother
that she wasn't gonna come home.
- Natavia picked up the phone.
She went on to describe that Natavia's a personal aide
that her mother had hired a few months back.
Natavia told her Linda was out running
or she wasn't available at that moment.
- She didn't get to speak to her at all.
* *
[elevator bell dings]
Mandy comes home around 10:30,
goes up the elevator.
- The front elevator
opens up right to the vestibule,
and there's a door there.
- She noticed that the door is locked.
* *
- Ms. Stein, she never locks it.
Mandy found this to be strange.
She started going through the drawer
of, like, a desk that's in the vestibule
'cause she knew her mother always kept a spare key.
She opened up the door.
- She went up to the bedroom,
didn't find her mother there.
And she finally went to the living room,
and that's when she saw her mother on the floor.
* *
- As it turns out, tracking all this stuff down,
Mandy was where she was.
She did come home when she said she came home.
So Mandy was cleared as a suspect fairly quickly.
- But Mandy does give detectives another lead.
Linda moved in a high-stakes world
with big money on the line.
- We learned that Linda Stein was a real estate agent
and she did a lot of sales to prominent people--
singers, stars.
- In the late 1970s,
Linda and Seymour's marriage ended in an amicable divorce.
After her divorce, Linda parlayed
her rock star connections and reinvented herself
as a realtor to the stars.
- In selling real estate, Linda became
very, very well known in a lot of different
social circles in the city.
She marketed herself as the broker to the stars.
It's amazing when you think of who she sold apartments to.
Steven Spielberg, Bruce Willis,
Billy Joel, Bette Midler.
It just goes on and on and on.
* *
- 24 hours after Linda's death,
the medical examiner reports back on the autopsy.
- It was determined that Linda
received around ten blows to the head.
She had a broken spine, and her neck was fractured.
She also received lacerations to the face and ear.
- The medical examiner's report also reveals
that, due to rigor setting in,
Linda died sometime during the day.
And it's an all-out media frenzy
wanting to know who murdered Linda Stein.
* *
- Being that it was a high-profile case,
pressure was very, very, very tough.
- I'm going to get a cup of coffee,
and I got reporters chasing me up the street.
People have an enormous appetite for news.
It becomes a circus.
* *
- Coming up...
- We're talking multimillion-dollar deals,
so we're talking about a lot of money.
- She asked me, "What would you think
if someone was stealing from me?"
[dramatic music]
* *
- It's been less than 24 hours since Linda Stein,
real estate mogul to the stars,
was discovered facedown in her penthouse apartment.
* *
Her death has just been classified a homicide,
with New York City's press and famous faces
putting extra pressure on the NYPD to find the killer.
Detectives start at the beginning.
* *
- It's always a good starting point
to talk to the last person that you know
that was with the victim.
* *
- And the last person to see Linda Stein alive
is Linda's personal assistant Natavia.
* *
- Natavia was the first person to see her in the morning
and the last person to see Linda.
* *
- Natavia Lowery, she was early to mid-20s,
and she's been working directly with Ms. Stein
for probably two months.
- Natavia was a very friendly girl,
very talkative.
- I asked Natavia to just, like--
hey, can you just trace your day back?
* *
- Natavia told us that she walked
to and from the office and Linda's apartment.
She told us that Linda had some hand issues,
that she wasn't able to always button something
or zip something up.
If Linda had to get ready or get dressed,
she would help her button her clothes,
curl her hair, help her put on her makeup.
- Natavia said she wasn't there all that long.
She just had to make up her hair.
* *
Linda was gonna leave the apartment
and do her daily routine of exercise.
So Natavia goes back to the office.
* *
- Natavia had gone to the apartment again
to check on Mrs. Stein and give her some comps
from the real estate office.
- Natavia said Linda wasn't there.
* *
So she left an envelope with the doorman.
* *
- Natavia tells detectives of a business meeting
Linda had scheduled for that night
as well as a social plan she was trying to make.
* *
- The date October 30th is my birthday,
so, you know, we were gonna have a drink.
* *
I called her around 1:00 in the afternoon.
[line trills]
Natavia, who was her assistant,
answered the phone, and she said no,
she was out walking in the park.
I said, "Okay, have Linda call me,
you know, a little later."
* *
- Natavia makes one more round trip to the office
and returns to Linda's apartment
around 5:00 p.m. with more paperwork.
* *
- The door was locked.
And she said, you know, that was kind of odd.
So she left the items, like, on the table outside
and went home after 5:00.
* *
- Natavia's helped police fill in some of the timeline.
They believe Linda was alive in the morning
but aren't sure about the afternoon.
- I don't hear anything from Linda.
The next morning, I got a call around 8:00,
8:30 in the morning from Linda's two daughters.
Mandy said to me,
"Mommy's dead."
I'm like, "What?"
* *
And I could hear Samantha crying in the background.
* *
- Richard Johnson, who was the editor of "Page Six,"
called me and said,
"I've got really bad news for you.
You know, Linda Stein is dead."
I couldn't believe it.
And then when he said murdered...
what--I-- [sighs]
It's just too fantastic, too impossible.
My poor Linda.
* *
- Having a clear picture of Linda's last day,
detectives move on to interview her colleagues
at the office, and they're surprised to learn
Linda did not make friends everywhere she went.
- Linda had a lot of pull at Douglas Elliman.
She was their only independent realtor.
She would take 70% of the profit.
We're talking multimillion-dollar deals,
so we're talking about a lot of money.
- With all that money at stake, detectives wonder
if any of Linda's coworkers could have been jealous,
mistreated, or vengeful.
* *
Detectives learn of a man who worked
and was romantically involved with Linda
when things ended badly.
- He was a man from the real estate agency.
I think she was trying to get him fired,
and everybody, you know, said, "This must be the guy."
- Raul Garcia, his name came up through a number of people.
Longtime associate
and Linda Stein's old boyfriend.
He goes, "Two years earlier, she wanted me to drop
"everything I'm doing right then and there
for the sake of pushing up a closing on an apartment."
He said, "No, I'm already involved
with things I'm doing today, so I can't do it."
I'll do it tomorrow.
Next thing you know, he finds out he's out of a job.
He realizes, like, "Wow, I can see
where I could be a suspect."
But this was, like, a year earlier
or two years earlier.
It wasn't like it just happened two weeks ago.
- But detectives find no evidence
to tie Raul Garcia to the scene of the crime,
and his alibi checks out.
But then, just as detectives are about to start
a new round of interviews,
the manager of Linda's building reveals a game-changing lead.
* *
- Ed McQuaid had already been a friend of mine
probably close to 20 years at that point,
and Ed--very quiet, laid-back guy--
says, "I just put a video system in the building."
* *
- I had just installed this new system
about six weeks earlier.
All the recordings were crystal clear.
Could make out the features
on everybody coming and going in the building.
- A small team of detectives take shifts
combing through the footage from the day of the murder,
when there were construction workers working
throughout the building.
- We were renovating the lobby at the time,
but we also had some waterproofing going on
up in the roof.
Probably 15 to 20 people working up there
on any given day.
- Are we missing something? If we are, what are we missing?
- Normally, we would shut down jobs in the building at 4:00,
and a couple of days before she was murdered,
I had given the tile man permission
to stay back a couple of hours.
Linda came in, and it was probably around 5:30, 6:00.
The guy was still there.
He was still working, and she was very annoyed
that the construction worker was still working after 4:00.
- Linda could get very angry over small things.
- Just a year earlier, there was a homicide
in downtown Manhattan where a victim was killed
in her building by a construction worker.
Could Linda have met the same fate?
* *
- Linda didn't like the noise going on,
and there was all kinds of equipment
and tarps laid out, and she started cursing at them.
- Could one of the workers have had enough
of Linda's temper and snapped?
* *
- That's gonna raise a flag.
- We realized that there was some motive.
It's what we call a clue.
- Coming up...
- I just felt like that video was going to have a tell.
- "I don't know what had happened.
I woke up, and she was on the ground."
[dramatic music]
* *
- Digging into the murder of Linda Stein,
realtor to New York City's elite,
our guys looked deeper into how her combative personality
may have clashed with construction workers
in the building.
But could her confrontational behavior
have led to her murder?
- Linda didn't like the noise going on up above
and the people trashing through the steps.
She didn't want them coming by the vestibule,
running down the steps with equipment.
She felt it was an annoyance,
and she started cursing at them.
* *
- Detectives quickly begin tracking down
all the workers in the building that day.
- Through the course of the next couple days,
through probably 10 to 15 different detectives,
we've probably interviewed 30 construction workers,
maybe 40.
* *
We're running rap sheets.
Some of them had minor arrests in the past.
They all were interviewed.
It didn't appear that any of the construction workers
that day accessed the 18th floor for any reason.
* *
Nothing that's gonna raise a flag.
They're ruled out completely.
* *
- Three days after Linda's murder,
as detectives continue to pursue leads,
Linda Stein is remembered by loved ones
and New York City's high society
at a memorial service to celebrate her life.
- Linda's funeral was at Riverside.
There were crowds in front of the funeral parlor
and photographers.
* *
- I went to Linda's memorial.
It was a very heart-wrenching experience.
Amazing turnout of people.
I mean, you know, it was full.
* *
- We were shoulder to shoulder with each other.
Everybody in the whole funeral parlor
had a Linda Stein story.
- I remember one time, we were driving out to the Hamptons...
Because she had a chance to show a property,
and so while we were speeding out to the Hamptons,
she's getting dressed in the car,
doing her hair, you know, putting on a dress.
I mean, like, completely getting dressed
in the car while we're driving.
So I was, you know, driving,
praying that we wouldn't be stopped by the police.
That was the kind of life it was.
If you had a high-money client
and they wanted to see something,
you made it happen.
That's what she did.
I mean, that's what she was known for.
- She had cancer.
She had two mastectomies on the same breast.
There were a lot of close calls to find out
if her cancer was back.
And so she came out here to the Hamptons
in the winter, and she would walk
for hours and hours by herself on the beach
like she was walking off the cancer.
Through her having cancer, she raised millions of dollars
for Memorial Sloan Kettering.
She got Elton John to perform at their great benefits.
She worked very, very hard
in money for cancer research.
- At the funeral, her daughters got up and spoke.
It was great because there was smiles
amongst all the tears because of the way she was eulogized.
* *
- It was just enormously sad.
* *
As it went by, I kissed her coffin.
I wanted her to take my kiss to the other side.
* *
- The newsworthy funeral
and stories of Linda's generosity
amped up the need to solve the case,
with all of New York and beyond wanting justice.
- It's a headline case.
Homicides happen every day in New York City.
Cases like this tend to just become a complete vacuum
and suck up all the attention.
- Honestly, it starts with the mayor.
He gets the calls.
What do you think he's gonna do?
He's gonna call the commissioner.
What's the commissioner do?
He's gonna call the chief of detectives.
And what's the chief of detectives gonna do?
He's gonna call the Manhattan chief of detectives.
So sh-- rolls downhill in a police department
pretty much like anywhere else.
- We felt the glaring light of public pressure,
but that just motivates us at the NYPD.
[indistinct police radio chatter]
In the week after Linda's murder,
detectives review the surveillance footage
from that day over and over.
- I go through that video to see if we spotted anything...
Anything suspicious,
any strangers coming in and out of the building...
Anything that didn't look right
to see, did we miss something?
- The only people that show up are the roofers, Natavia.
Matter of fact, Linda Stein doesn't show up
on any of the tapes.
We were told that she went out running.
You start figuring out, like, where is Linda leaving?
Where is Linda coming?
She never left. She never came back.
* *
- No one had seen Linda Stein at all.
No one heard of Linda Stein after Natavia left.
So that made it more interesting now.
- With confirmation that Linda never left the apartment,
there's a new focus on the surveillance.
- I went through the footage myself,
and I kept rewatching it.
I just felt like that video was going to have a tell,
and until I found out what that tell was,
I kept looking at it over and over again.
- I give all the kudos in the world
to Detective Loffredo.
- There's probably some point where I should have given up,
but I didn't.
I kept watching it over and over again.
- She's like, "Holy crap.
Look at this. This could be huge."
[dramatic music]
* *
- Detective Loffredo has been doggedly reviewing
surveillance footage from Linda's apartment building
to search for any suspects arriving or leaving
the day of Linda's murder.
A week after Linda's death
and countless hours of viewing,
she may have caught something.
* *
- When I interviewed Natavia Lowery
and asked her about the events of that day
and how she got back and forth,
she specifically told me that she walked
to and from the office that day several times.
* *
And I said, "Oh, you walked back and forth several times?"
And she's like, "Yeah."
She did not explain that she went anywhere else that day.
Just to and from Linda's apartment.
* *
One of the times I was watching the video,
I saw Natavia Lowery walk in the building,
and this time, I noticed that she had money in her hand.
* *
And I thought to myself,
"Why would she have money in her hands?"
* *
And then it dawned on me that maybe she got dropped off
by a taxicab, and when I looked back
at the video and I kept watching it,
I noticed that the doorman at some point had walked out
like he saw something coming
and then walked back in with Natavia...
Which made me realize
that there was a taxicab out front
that had just dropped her off.
* *
And when the door swings open, in the reflection,
you could see the taxicab
pull up and drop her off.
Not at any point did she say, "I took a taxi."
- So now we know Natavia is lying about only walking.
Detective Loffredo revisits Natavia's story
to see what else doesn't add up.
- Natavia told us that Linda could not grasp things tightly.
She needed help and assistance
when grabbing things that were small
or needed to be squeezed, like a curling iron.
* *
Linda had a business meeting that night
with some real estate guys
that had a business venture with her.
This was a really big meeting for Linda, she said.
At some point, Linda said she was gonna go for a walk.
She went by herself, and she never came back,
so Natavia went home.
* *
Everything sounded normal with her story.
The only thing that did catch my attention
was the fact that she had just finished describing
that Linda would need her to get ready
and she left without helping her get ready,
and when I asked her who was gonna help Linda
get ready that night for her business meeting,
she said, "I don't know."
And I found that to be suspicious.
Why wouldn't they make prior arrangements,
and why would she think that, on that particular day,
she would go home on time
and not wait for Linda to come home?
* *
Why weren't you concerned that she didn't come back?
* *
This time, it dawned on me that something was different.
* *
I told Detective Walla and Detective Rivera
that I think that this was a really important
piece of the picture.
- Further scrutiny of the footage
reveals another unsettling detail.
- There was nobody else that went upstairs
to the apartment, only Natavia.
- I specifically focused on the lobby of the video,
and Linda did not come in and out of the building.
* *
- Detectives Walla and Rivera's next call
is to talk with Natavia again.
* *
- So we get to the Seventh Precinct,
and that's where we set her down,
and Tony and I both started to talk to her
about everything that happened again that day,
and she agreed to talk.
* *
- Natavia stated that she didn't know
what happened to Linda, and we proceeded
just to talk to her a little bit more.
* *
- She stuck to the same story, and I said,
"Well, Natavia, you have a lot of inconsistencies."
* *
- So she kind of looked surprised.
She was getting a little nervous.
* *
And then finally, we said, you know,
"We don't believe your story.
You have to tell us what really happened."
* *
- Coming up...
- She says that a male wearing all black
enters the apartment.
- "I know where you live. I know who your family is."
- She heard the male hitting Linda.
[dramatic music]
* *
- Detectives Walla and Rivera have brought
Linda Stein's personal assistant Natavia
in for another interview,
since she was the last person to see Linda alive.
* *
- I went in by myself.
* *
I said, "There's something that we know
that we never shared with you."
* *
"That you keep telling me and Detective Loffredo
that you walked wherever you went."
* *
"You're seen on video..."
* *
"Getting out of a cab with money in your hand
"in front of 965 5th Avenue
on the date of Linda's death."
* *
"Where did you go?"
* *
"Oh, sorry, I didn't tell you.
"I was extremely emotional.
Linda was trying my last patience that day."
[horn honks]
"I took a drive in a cab."
* *
"Yeah, I cleared my head.
"I went to go call my mother,
but my mother was no help."
* *
"I just didn't go anywhere."
* *
I told her, "You're full of it."
* *
And then she started getting really emotional,
almost tearing.
I grab her hand.
I'm, like, holding her hand,
shaking it a little bit like this.
I says, "Natavia, what did you do?"
"Did you do something to Linda that day?"
* *
And she came in with some blackout story.
* *
She says, "It happened in college once.
"I choked my roommate,
"and I didn't even know I did it.
"I don't know what had happened.
I woke up, and then she was on the ground."
And then something snapped in her head,
and she's like, "I don't know why I told you that."
* *
"That's not what happened."
"I didn't do that. I didn't kill Linda."
* *
I said, "We're gonna take a little break,
"and you think about everything
that's going on here."
I go back out, talk to Tony.
We started leaning towards,
this girl's not going home tonight.
* *
- We went back into the interview room
and proceeded just to talk to her a little bit more
about family, friends, who does she know.
* *
And she felt a little bit more comfortable.
And at that point,
I asked her, "What really happened?"
And she looked at me, and she said
she received a phone call from an unknown male
on her phone.
[phone buzzing]
- Somebody called her on her phone and said,
"Open up the door. Leave the door open.
I know where you live. I know who your family is."
And basically threatening her.
* *
- Natavia says that she left the door open.
[door clicks open]
She says that a male
wearing all black...
Enters the apartment.
She heard the male hitting Linda.
* *
She says that the male told her,
"Take the bag and put a stapler
"and other office supplies in the bag
and leave the building."
The male said, "You're the only one
that's gonna see Linda last,"
and to leave.
[elevator bell dings]
And she leaves the building.
* *
Knowing that we had surveillance camera,
knowing that Detective Loffredo
looked at it so many times and made several observations
of no one entering the elevator--
it was only Natavia and no one else,
no one wearing black, no one leaving...
* *
We believed that Natavia made the story up,
but she was getting closer to the real story.
* *
- So now we went from "I blacked out"
to "a ninja dressed in all black came up and did this."
* *
Here's two times now she's telling us
that she's standing in Linda's apartment
and Linda's dead.
* *
Regardless of how she got dead,
Linda's dead,
and Natavia's standing over that body.
So we go back in a third time.
- And said to her, "Natavia, this is not making any sense.
"You know, we know that you're the only one
that was in that apartment, that there was no male."
* *
- We tell her, say, "Listen, no ninja came up.
"It didn't happen that way.
You got to tell us what the hell's going on here."
* *
"What pushed you to the point
that you needed to kill Ms. Stein?"
* *
"How did she wind up like that?
How did she wind up with those wounds on the top of her head?"
* *
- Natavia started to kind of cry a little bit,
and she said she didn't mean it...
* *
And that Linda Stein had got her upset...
* *
And she couldn't take it.
* *
Linda was badgering and screaming at her,
and she just freaked out
and struck her with an object.
* *
She said it was a yoga stick.
- "How many times did you hit her?"
"A lot. I don't know."
* *
"I wasn't counting. A lot."
* *
"She just went down."
* *
I says, "What did you do next?"
And she says she left the building.
- We felt that we got her to a point
where she's telling us some of the truth.
* *
- I think we all knew there was more to it.
* *
We took her possessions from her,
informing her that she's now in custody
and you're not going home tonight.
- We didn't have the full story.
We didn't know why she struck Linda.
[dramatic music]
* *
- Natavia is in custody
the day following her admission
to beating her boss Linda Stein to death.
Detectives work with the DA's office
to get her confession on tape.
That's when Natavia throws in a twist.
She claims Linda provoked her for no reason.
* *
- I found it very shocking that she was capable
of murder
and that she could sit across
from detectives and attorneys
and she wasn't scared or upset.
On the other hand, I guess that's what it takes
to be able to kill someone is being able to do it
and being cold afterwards.
* *
- But detectives believe Natavia
isn't telling them the real reason
she killed Linda
and, in the following days,
turn up the investigation on motive.
* *
- The night before Linda was murdered,
I was in Linda's apartment.
She asked me, "What would you think
if someone was stealing from me?"
And I was like, "That would be terrible."
She goes, "Well, what do you think I should do?"
And I said, "Well, I think whoever it is,
you should confront them."
And then I kind of left,
and I never saw her again.
* *
- Detectives pull all recent phone records
with her credit card companies and find their answer.
* *
- We heard Natavia on the phone saying
that she was Linda Stein requesting a credit card.
- She was using Linda's credit cards.
* *
She had opened credit cards in Linda's name
and was charging on those credit cards,
so it looked like grand larceny was her motive.
* *
- We think Linda went down
and got the American Express bill
and confronted Natavia when she showed up
for work that day.
- I believe that Linda Stein was gonna call the police
and make a complaint,
but Natavia didn't want that to happen,
and she just freaked out and murdered Linda.
- Detectives can see the taxi number
in the reflection and track its destination
to a nearby clothing store.
- Why would she take a cab to a store?
When we looked at the video surveillance,
she had her cargo pants inside out,
maybe 'cause there was blood on it.
We interviewed the clerk at the store.
As it turns out, she went to try
and replace those pants.
* *
And that was the taxi ride.
* *
- With Natavia's confession
along with all the other evidence,
the case is tried before a jury
nearly three years after Linda Stein's murder.
Natavia Lowery is found guilty of second-degree murder
and grand larceny.
She is sentenced to 25 years to life.
* *
- It was a grueling case,
but the New York City NYPD detectives--
we've been doing it since the 1840s--
they come through.
- The case was very high-profile
because of what Linda did and who she knew.
Like any other case, it's important to solve it
to bring it to justice and have closure to the family
and everyone else.
* *
- Linda Stein is an intrinsic part of the city,
somebody who was with it and who knew everybody
and lived in a penthouse on 5th Avenue
and had a marvelous sense of humor.
You know, she was an enchanting character to me,
and I was so pleased and so lucky
to know Linda.
She lives on in everybody who she touched,
and the best legacy I think you can have
is that people miss you.
* *