(eerie music)
(camera shutter clicking)
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Every suspect accused of a crime
has the right to remain silent.
Many agree to be interrogated anyway,
but they can stop the interview at any moment,
making it a race against time.
Justice hangs in the balance.
(pensive music)
- On the 6th of March,
Linda Roberts woke up
about 6:00 in the morning,
went to check on her father, Anthony Tomaselli.
She didn't think there was anything wrong with him
but it wasn't until her sister, Mary Beth Tomaselli,
did a closer inspection of him
and noticed that he was unresponsive
and started yelling and screaming
and she called 911.
(siren wails)
When the paramedics arrived,
Linda Roberts was doing CPR
while Anthony was on the couch.
EMTs took over, placed him on the floor
because it's a much flatter surface.
They tried to resuscitate him,
but they were not able to do so
and he was pronounced deceased at the scene.
Anthony Tomaselli was 85 years old,
had three children and a lot of outlying family.
He was well respected, everybody seemed to like him.
- He was a barber, he was a family man,
he had a lot of habits.
One was to have that diet Coke and vodka
before he went to bed, his little nightcap.
He liked to go to the beach.
Just a nice guy enjoying his golden years here in Florida.
- Because he was starting to suffer from dementia
and other health issues, Mary Beth and Linda,
the two adult daughters, decided to live with him.
They were watching over him,
making sure he goes to his doctor's appointment,
taking his medications,
and he was living with his daughters
and living the good life.
(eerie music)
- Linda Roberts, she advised that they had all gone
for a trip to the beach and they returned back home
and sat on the couch for some length of time
and Anthony Tomaselli fell asleep on the couch.
(eerie music)
- There was no indication of foul play,
no signs of trauma,
no signs of forced entry to the residence.
It looked like Anthony Tomaselli just died
basically of old age.
Mary Beth Tomaselli virtually gave the same story
that Linda Roberts had given.
So there was no conflict in their statements between them.
Once it was determined at the scene
that there was no foul play,
the body removal service responded
and eventually his body was cremated.
Anthony Tomaselli's case was closed within a few days.
(intense music)
(phone rings)
Anthony Marsh called the sheriff's office,
talked to the sergeant of the homicide unit
and basically said he had some information
about Linda Roberts actually having confessed to him
that she and her sister, Mary Beth,
had killed their father in 2015.
And during this confession,
Anthony Marsh turned on his phone recorder
and recorded the confession from Linda Roberts.
We take a lot of strange calls that people call in
about things that go on.
So when he said this,
I mean, you have to look at this as like,
okay, let's talk to this guy and see what he's got to say.
He said that he plays a guitar in local establishments
and the sisters did come in there to see him several times
and he is on friendly terms with both.
- We wanted to get a statement from him first
about what had actually transpired.
- He's now got his arms folded
and he's rocked back in the chair.
So this is obviously something
he's uncomfortable talking about,
even though that was the crux of why he even contacted us.
So anytime you see that, you start to wonder why that is.
- We were surprised that she allowed him
to have a iPhone pointed at her
as she's talking about this murder of her father.
It wasn't very covert.
He had it on his leg and was pointing at her
for some length of time.
I just thought suspicious that she wouldn't have
figured that out.
We're glad that we had it, but we did think it was kind of odd.
(suspenseful music)
(pensive music)
- He pushes her quite heavily and she still responds to him.
Usually, that would shut somebody down,
but he's full steam ahead with the morality
of what's going on here
and she still continues to answer
these questions, very interesting dynamic.
- What we were thinking was,
was this a true confession or just some admissions?
We thought that maybe this crime actually hadn't occurred.
Some of the questions that we had,
what would be Anthony's motivation
for doing something like this?
Does he have an axe to grind?
Because a normal person
probably just would've listened to the story,
then try to convey the story to us later
and not have all the detail.
Anthony Marsh told us that once he heard the information
from Linda Roberts,
it just bothered him so much that he was compelled
to tell somebody about this.
I don't know if that's his real motivation,
but that's what he said it was.
- I just didn't know how it was gonna turn out.
Were the suspects in this case,
were they gonna be spooked about something
and then didn't want to talk to him?
But the only risk in in not doing
is that we wouldn't get it.
So you gotta go forward and do what you can do.
(somber music)
We would rather have law enforcement do the recording
on a wire than have somebody just do it on the iPhone
'cause it's gonna be somewhat problematic at trial.
It could be attacked saying law enforcement wasn't present.
So I said let's think if we can get these folks on a wire
and do this again.
That takes out what I consider all the slack outta the line
because anything that Anthony Marsh
would be able to be attacked for at trial
is now not relevant.
Both Detective de Leon and I wanted our own
recording of Linda Roberts
and subsequently Mary Beth Tomaselli,
but we needed Anthony Marsh to be the intro person
because obviously at that stage, they would've not talked
if we knocked on the door.
(intense music)
- He goes in and we're listening not too far away
because obviously there's security concern.
If she decides to go crazy or pull a gun on him
or do something, he's there by himself.
So we gotta be close enough that we have to rush in
if something happens, but not too close enough
to know that there's police cars parked
in front of your house.
(ominous music)
Obviously.
- When you get a wire on somebody
and it's got this much detail,
it's kind of a home run.
Anthony Marsh, he did a very good job at it.
When somebody says it was this much alcohol,
it was this much Halcion,
it looks like this is a credible homicide.
- She definitely wanted to establish
that it was not just her,
that she was in a co-partnership with her sister
and that it was their idea.
She did not wanna take responsibility.
What that tells me is it probably was her idea.
(intense music)
I gotta get going.
- All right, good bye.
- [Anthony] Okay.
- We had, at that point, not looked at it as a homicide yet.
So you have to look at things that were mentioned
like we found a pillow,
there's his prayer cards,
he had urinated on himself due to the suffocation,
the narcotics were there.
So that was enough to be able to establish
that we now have a murder.
So we brought the limited photos that we actually had
and the testimony that we had gotten so far
and we spoke with the chief forensic pathologist
and he was able to come to a conclusion
that he could change the death certificate
to rule it as a murder
and that was a big part of what we need for the case.
(dates clicking)
(pensive music)
And sure enough, all three children divided the money
equally after the assets were divided,
the house was sold and each child got about $100,000.
So they got financial gain from his death.
Obviously, Linda and Mary Beth are involved in our murder,
so we need to go interview them.
We had no solid evidence to get Mary Beth
and if you get independent confessions from her,
implicating herself in the murder,
then I'm not relying on Linda Roberts
to provide us that information.
We had the sisters under surveillance.
So we brought them in for questioning.
We wanted to target Mary Beth Tomaselli first.
She was timid and we wanted her ultimately
to flip on her sister and tell us what happened.
- We're starting to establish who is the leader
and who's the follower.
Linda, she's obviously the leader in this.
You could just tell that she's more of a forceful personality
and I can tell, Mary Beth,
she is more the follower personality type.
- I think she's like, okay, this is obviously the real deal.
The police are now involved in it.
It's serious business now.
This is really happening.
This could be the end of it for me.
(intense music)
(pensive music)
(eerie music)
- She did have a tendency to tell us a lot of backstory
about what was going on.
What that meant to me was,
let me see if I can mitigate
this as much as I can.
I'm gonna tell him why this was such a justified murder
and we were kind of doing the right thing.
It's very difficult to replicate something physically
that never occurred.
So it just adds more credibility that he's non-compliant
about going into this assisted living facility
and adamant that he was staying home.
They were getting tired of taking care of him
and that, I think, ultimately led the decision
that they're gonna have to murder him.
- When Mary Beth said that this was premeditated,
it was a big moment because it's first degree now.
When you have a defendant saying,
"We gave it some forethought
and we decided to kill this person,"
it's hard to beat that, it just is.
- That's pretty shocking behavior.
After he was dead,
after they went through all of this procedure,
the Halcion, the washcloth, the pinching of the nose,
all these things, they shut the TV off
and they went to bed 'til the next morning.
- I wasn't surprised that she confessed so quickly.
She was probably connecting all the dots in her head.
She probably was thinking about
what had actually had happened, you know?
And now the police are talking to me like,
that didn't happen by magic.
- She knew that murdering somebody was wrong
but she felt that her dad was suffering
and they're gonna put him out of his misery.
Left to her own devices, I don't think
she would've come up with this plan on her own.
I think she went along with it.
- When Mary Beth Tomaselli started flipping on her sister,
saying whose idea this was and she was involved in it,
the case got a lot better.
We were actually in a very good position
going into our interview with Linda Roberts.
(Mary Beth sobs)
(somber music)
- The strategy with her was gonna be a little bit different.
I knew her personality type was gonna be slightly different
than her sister's and because she was more
the leader in this,
I anticipated that she was gonna be less than candid
about her involvement.
- I didn't want to tell Linda that we had spoken
to her sister yet
and I really didn't want to talk too much
about being on the wire.
Unless there's a need to give that up,
I'm not gonna give it up.
I don't like telling all the cards that we have all the time.
I want it to come from them.
- Her story was the same story that she gave in 2015
and I'm shaking my head, probably during the interview,
knowing that this is BS
'cause we've gone so much further than this now.
Like, it was time to move forward
and be the pointing of the stick and, you know,
kind of tell her what time it was.
(dramatic music)
(ominous music)
(tense music)
- Detective de Leon was the nice guy in this situation
and that was not working and she knew that.
Nice guy's not working,
evil guy has to be coming in.
Sometimes you have to be the hammer to come in there
and say, hey, this is all bull (beep).
(tense music)
- Sometimes there has to be a lot of rough language
so they know that you're serious.
But once she knew we had the goods on her,
I think that's what changed it.
(tense music)
(suspenseful music)
- So at the end of, after both interviews,
we decided that we were gonna
put both Linda and Mary Beth
in the same room together, which was being recorded,
and see if there's anything to be garnered from this.
Sometimes they say a lot of crazy things
that they don't tell you during the interview.
(door creeks)
- I never use the word slam dunk
because there's so many other legal hurdles
that we have to go through to get this far,
but we had everything that we wanted.
We had confessions from both of them,
admissions on some things,
the video and audio recording in detail.
We were happy with the outcome of this.
(tense music)
- Both stated in essence that they had killed their father
and that they had quote "euthanized him"
because he had been ill.
Both women said that the killing was,
in their words, quote, "premeditated".
- [Interviewer] I mean, how rare it for something like this
to come around so many years later?
You'd think the case is closed.
- This wasn't even a cold case.
It had all the appearances and all the signs
of a natural death and for it to come back around
and not be a natural death and to be a murder
in a situation like this, this is rare.
It's terrible that they put that much effort and thought
into killing their dad.
It's pretty bad.
- [Reporter] Standing before a judge Wednesday afternoon,
these two sisters marked the four year anniversary
of their father's death in orange jumpsuits.
- Both sisters decided to take a plea.
I think the evidence was so strong
they had no other choice but to do it.
(somber music)
When you're a little bit older,
15 or 20 years could be a life sentence.
I do believe that Linda was actually the ringleader in this.
So I think that's probably why she got the higher sentence.
- For four years,
they lived with this secret, four years.
Had it not been for Anthony Marsh stepping forward,
they would probably be living their life right now.
Instead, they're doing time for killing their dad.
- They should remember about Anthony Tomaselli
that he was just an elderly man living his life out.
Everybody seemed to like him.
- Here's a loving father who tended to their every need,
paid for their housing and their clothes
and their food and, you know,
moral support during their lives.
- This whole thing shouldn't happened.
But for Linda and Mary Beth,
he eventually just became too much of a pain for them
and they decided to end his life
and that's a tragedy in itself.