[ambient street noise]
[man 1] Friday night of Memorial Day weekend,
we get a call for a missing person at, uh, 115 Central Park West.
The building is known as the Majestic.
It's a very affluent building.
[man 2] The Majestic had every amenity known to man.
Doormen, concierge,
everything that you need to live in that stratosphere.
[man 1] We respond to the location.
We're met by Mr. Abdela,
who says his daughter, Daphne Abdela, hasn't returned home.
[man 2] Lee Furman starts to interview the father to find out what was going on.
And the doorman says, "She's not missing."
"She's back in the utility room at the back of the lobby."
The doorman shows us where it is.
When Mr. Abdela opens the door,
we see a young girl, young boy,
in a bathtub, in water, washing each other off.
This is Daphne Abdela and her boyfriend, Chris.
I'm thinking, "They're fooling around. They're in a bathtub."
As awkward as that scene must have been,
he noticed there was some blood.
[Furman] So I asked about the blood, and Daphne said,
"I cut my head rollerblading."
It wasn't a lot of blood that we'd say,
"Something's going on. Something happened."
It could have been a fall.
I noticed Chris also had a cut over his eyebrow.
But again, small. Nothing significant.
I could tell she was mad that we were there.
She yelled at her father, "Why'd you call the cops?"
"I hate the pigs. I hate 5-0."
And then Daphne yells out, "Get the fuck out. Close the door."
At that point, Mr. Abdela said,
"I'm okay now. Everything's good. I'll take them upstairs."
So we left.
Before Lee Furman gets too far away from the Majestic,
he hears a job come over the radio
about somebody reporting a dead body in Central Park,
and it's coming from the Majestic.
[disconcerting music playing]
[Furman] I came over the radio and said, "We were just there. We'll respond."
And we return to the Majestic.
It ended up being Daphne Abdela who called the police.
So she invites us inside.
I go in, and she said,
"There's a body in the lake."
"A body in the lake. Really? What's the chances of that?"
[Butcher] This was an evil crime.
So over the top.
Who would destroy someone so brutally?
And why?
[low, menacing music playing]
[man 1] Every case takes a piece out of your soul.
[Butcher] You cannot do this job unless you really care.
[man 2] You want to find out the truth.
That's what detectives do.
[Parrino] I've always liked the peek behind the curtain. What really happened?
[Rivera] It's so important for a family to know who murdered their relative.
That's my job.
[man 3] In New York City, the NYPD…
this is it.
[siren wailing]
[pensive synth music playing]
[ducks quacking]
Central Park is essential to the heart of New York City.
[McNeely] It's not just a park you would associate with…
Something with a great lawn,
maybe a couple ball fields, and some playground area.
It's way more than that.
[Butcher] We all live in concrete.
We walk on concrete.
We live up in the air, far from nature.
So, Central Park, for a New Yorker, is more than a backyard.
It's an oasis.
[disquieting undertones building]
[Butcher] But all New Yorkers share Central Park.
Not just the good people, but bad people too.
[suspenseful music playing]
Central Park was very dangerous in the '70s and '80s.
I never would go there at night.
That's when we were having 2,500 homicides a year.
A lot of them happened in Central Park.
[man] By the late 1990s,
the city was objectively getting safer.
Every single indicator of crime, public safety,
was moving in the right direction.
When the city turned around and things became better,
Central Park became better as well.
However, whenever there was a crime there,
it was all-hands-on-deck.
[man 2] Somebody gets a hangnail in Central Park, it's like,
"Oh my God, everybody has to go and figure out what's going on."
So when somebody gets murdered, it's a big deal.
[tense music playing]
[Plansky] On May 23rd, 1997,
I'm just starting my fifth year as an assistant DA.
I'd just started riding along with a more senior homicide assistant,
which means that I'm being trained to investigate and prosecute homicides.
And somewhere between 3:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m.…
[beeper beeping]
…I remember being awakened to the sound of the beeper going off.
And because I'd just moved into my legal sublet,
I did not have a phone line hooked up.
So I had to go out onto the street.
Found a pay phone and I dialed the number on the beeper.
And the person on the other end said,
"There's some kind of brouhaha in Central Park."
[chuckling] I thought that was the understatement of the year.
[suspenseful music playing]
[man] It's early morning.
We'd been notified by nightwatch dispatcher.
He says, "We have a body floating in Central Park Lake."
I was the commanding officer of Manhattan Detective Nightwatch.
Our job was to establish the crime scene,
then hand off to the catching detective who has the case.
I got to the scene
right on the west side of Central Park, right next to Strawberry Fields.
We had a trail of blood, maybe 40, 50 feet, going to the gazebo.
And we followed the blood trail.
And I walk up to the lake.
And there in the lake
is a human body floating head up.
[Plansky] When I first saw the crime scene,
I couldn't help but feel this incredible sense of dissonance.
That lake is in the center of this beautiful park.
And yet what I was seeing at this crime scene
was among the most brutal I've ever seen.
[suspenseful music playing]
I went to the death scene to investigate the body in its setting,
in its circumstances.
Most crime scenes are confined to one location.
In this case, we had the path leading into the park
where there were blood drops,
the area by the gazebo where the pool of blood was,
and the body in the lake.
And I looked at the edge of the water.
Just bobbing and floating among the reeds
was just this pale man,
what was left of a man.
And I stepped a little closer
and saw that his abdomen was ripped open,
and his intestines were floating in the water.
I've seen hundreds of bodies in my tenure in NYPD.
This was the only body I ever saw with a floating intestine.
It remained with me.
[Butcher] His wrist was hacked.
His right hand, hanging, almost detached.
These multiple slashing, gouging stab wounds.
You think "overkill."
What overkill means is… is passion, anger, rage.
Every murder is horrible, and every homicide crime scene
is upsetting and emotional and hard to digest.
But there's definitely variation.
And homicides that are committed with knives
tend to be the most brutal.
At this point in my career,
this was the second homicide crime scene I'd ever been to.
To be exposed to something like that so fast,
this was definitely a baptism of fire.
[music trails off]
[mysterious, intriguing music playing]
I was a third-grade detective investigator working at Manhattan North Homicide Squad.
And I'd been there for almost four years.
Friday, May 23rd, 1997, I was not scheduled to work a day tour.
I was coming in early to go to a court appearance downtown.
I get to the office at about eight o'clock in the morning.
The lieutenant looks at me and says, "Look, there's a murder in the park."
"You gotta call downtown, cancel your court case, and come with us."
[Plansky] I was told that somebody from Manhattan North Homicide
was being assigned.
And then Rob Mooney shows up.
And the second he starts talking,
now I know who's in charge.
[funky, groovy music playing]
[Plansky] This guy is 6'5".
He's got an enormous head.
He's got '70s rock star kind of hair
with this '70s-style mustache.
Looks like one of the long-lost members of the Allman Brothers Band.
And he always wore a Grateful Dead pin on his lapel.
Big Deadhead. Loves the Grateful Dead.
[Mooney] I've probably seen the Dead close to 300 times in my life.
The diversity in that community gave me a serious advantage
in not being judgmental about people.
You don't judge a book by its cover.
And in this case, it turned out to be true.
[low rumbling]
[Butcher] The victim didn't have a wallet, but there were some papers we'd found.
And there was a name, Michael McMorrow.
[Plansky] We learned that Michael was 44 years old.
He lived in Manhattan with his mom,
and he worked in a real estate company.
[reporter 1] Today, mystery surrounds a gruesome murder
of a man in New York's Central Park.
[reporter 2] McMorrow was slashed more than 50 times, his throat cut.
You could actually hear the cavalry of the media,
'cause in New York City,
everything that happens in Central Park is top billing.
[low, foreboding music playing]
When I see the size of the victim, the guy was over six feet.
He was… Looked like he was over 200 pounds.
So for someone to be able to go out there and… and mutilate,
dismember someone like that,
there's more to the picture. I couldn't really understand it.
The condition of the victim's body
and amount of violence that attended to all these injuries
was a clear indication this was not a random act of violence.
This was not a robbery that went bad.
And so the mystery then becomes the mechanism of what happened.
[suspenseful, erratic music playing]
[Furman] So I'm inside the apartment. Now it's two o'clock in the morning.
After Chris left, that's when Daphne called us.
And she said, "I was afraid of Chris."
"I didn't want to say anything while he was around."
Daphne said she was in the park with her boyfriend, Chris.
They were hanging out, they went for a walk,
and Chris went crazy.
He killed a guy.
And while Daphne's talking, Mr. Abdela just walks away, like…
I'm looking at him. He walks away. Like, "This is your daughter."
"You're not saying anything. You're not stopping her from saying this."
Again, maybe he's just used to this.
So in my mind, I'm thinking, "She's bullshitting me."
"You're 15 years old. You're young."
Maybe she got in trouble, so she wants to cause problems for her father.
So I'm not asking her questions. She's just divulging this information.
Then she went into, "I tried to give him CPR."
That she tried to help instead of being part of it.
She's saying, "Chris did this. Chris did that."
Nothing "me," nothing "I did."
Until, while Chris was trying to get rid of… rid of his body,
she told him, "Chris, you should try to gut him and sink him."
"Try to cover it up."
To be around something like that should be shocking to you.
But her demeanor was just, like, normal, just very relaxed.
[Mooney] Lee Furman had some patrol cops from the Central Park Precinct
go to the park,
who in fact discovered the body floating in the lake.
[foreboding music intensifies]
So that changed the tenor of everything going on in the apartment.
[intricate, dramatic music playing]
[Plansky] After Lee Furman responded to the 911 call in Daphne's apartment,
we had, clearly, reason to believe Christopher was directly involved in this.
So later that morning, acting on that information,
detectives went to Christopher Vasquez's apartment,
and they placed him under arrest for the murder of Michael McMorrow.
He had to go to central booking.
And, uh, the lieutenant at the time says to me,
"Fix your tie. You gotta walk him out to the car."
When I first looked at Chris Vasquez,
I was kind of a little bit shocked, 'cause he looked like this little kid.
You know, I knew he was 15, but he looked like he was 12.
And he clearly had injuries on the side of his face and on his hands.
That impression only added to my concern
about how this actually occurred,
'cause it didn't seem likely to me
that he was gonna be the sole responsible person
for all the mayhem that occurred at this scene.
What we really didn't know was what we had in Daphne.
So the way that she presented herself was as a witness.
But most witnesses to incredibly violent crimes
don't volunteer that they suggested it would be a good idea to gut the victim
in order to sink his body in the lake.
So Daphne Abdela is arrested
at 12:30 in the afternoon on May 23rd.
And we went over to try to get a statement from her.
We wanted to talk to her,
and the dad, on her behalf,
refused to speak to us.
The first time I saw Daphne Abdela, she was a kid.
She was little.
In my brain, I'm having a hard time connecting this person to this crime.
[camera shutters snapping]
We were informed that they both asked for lawyers.
So there was no opportunity to have an interrogation with them.
So that's a huge loss.
Any time that you don't get that opportunity, um, that's a problem.
We had two 15-year-olds and Michael,
who's 30 years older than both of them.
So how in the world did these people come together?
How did this become a murder?
[suspenseful, intriguing music playing]
Detectives looked at Daphne's family
and learned that her father was a well-to-do businessman,
her mother a French model.
They had adopted her as a baby.
And she lived a life of incredible privilege.
She had everything.
[woman] In the late '80s,
many moms would bring their children to the park.
We'd all play in Strawberry Fields.
And then fast-forward about 13 years.
And one day we hear that somebody has been arrested for murder.
And it was a girl named Daphne.
And as we learned more about it,
our friends all realize that that little girl named Daphne
was one of the kids who played almost every afternoon
with all of our kids.
When I heard about the murder, I got so obsessed with it.
I couldn't stop thinking about it.
It was then that I wrote a proposal to have a book done on it.
In writing this book, I wanted to talk to anybody and everybody
who knew Daphne, who knew Christopher.
Daphne went to Columbia Grammar when she started school.
And at first, she fit in pretty well,
but as the years went on, she became more, uh, belligerent.
And finally, in eighth grade, she was asked to leave Columbia Grammar,
which is not usual for a private school in the city.
[Mooney] Daphne engaged in a lot of self-destructive behavior,
i.e., booze and drugs.
And Daphne's family paid for her to go to really expensive rehab,
I think, twice before this happened.
[Sands] Daphne started high school at Loyola
after she was asked to leave Columbia Grammar.
She was tough. She was brash. She was arrogant.
Her attitude became worse and worse.
She just refused to follow any rules, any curfew, any decent behavior.
[reporter] The other suspect is 15-year-old Christopher Vasquez.
He is described as a former altar boy and a Boy Scout
who grew up in a five-story walk-up in Spanish Harlem.
I learn that Chris Vasquez was from a pretty good family.
He was an altar boy.
He lived right next to the church on 97th Street.
He was such a good boy, very helpful, very obedient.
[Butcher] He lived over in East Harlem.
Nothing fancy.
A very nice boy, very well dressed.
Um, he didn't hang out. He wasn't a troublemaker.
Everybody's devastated by this. We can't believe it.
[Butcher] Christopher's parents were separated.
And his mother was raising him.
And she put him in a private school, which is expensive.
So his parents worked hard to give him a good life.
[Mooney] And he was a good kid,
but he was very introverted
and would get picked on a lot at school
because of his size and his… and his introverted behavior.
[reporter] Chris was someone the kids teased.
They called him a "herb," slang for a loser, a weakling.
-[kid 1] I dunno why he did it. -[kid 2] He's a herb. He's a real herb.
[Sands] Both Christopher and Daphne were excellent rollerbladers.
And they would go to the park most afternoons.
They met each other there.
Neither Daphne nor Christopher had many friends.
Daphne because she was so obnoxious,
and Christopher because he was so withdrawn.
When they met up, they struck up a bit of friendship,
then they started hanging out.
They hung out together
for about two or three months before the murder.
[Butcher] Two 15-year-old children from private schools,
and that made an absolute circus of coverage.
A shocking crime that has led to the arrest of two teenagers
for allegedly stabbing a real estate agent and dumping the body.
One of them a millionaire's daughter.
When I first learned what had happened to my uncle,
I was… I was in shock.
Especially since, for me and for my sister,
we spent a good amount of time with my uncle in Central Park.
That was a special place for all of us.
We knew it was a special place for him,
so for him to have lost his life so tragically,
uh, in this place that was so special,
it was devastating.
It was very hard to, uh, see my, you know, my mother,
and the grief that she was in.
And the fact that they lived together,
I think the loss was felt by her more than anybody,
and I think she still felt like she should have been his protector.
[somber, pensive music playing]
We grew up on the West Side of Manhattan, a block from Central Park.
Michael was extremely likable.
Made a lot of friends and had a lot of friends.
I didn't call him "Michael." I never referred to him as "Mike."
I called him "Irish." That was his nickname in the neighborhood.
He was quick to laugh.
And that's basically what you saw of Irish,
was he was laughing most of the time, cracking jokes.
He was just a guy.
Just a guy.
So why would someone want to destroy him like this?
There's the mystery.
[mysterious, intriguing music playing]
[reporter 1] The two teenagers accused in the brutal Central Park stabbing
of a Manhattan real estate agent say they're innocent.
[reporter 2] Christopher Vasquez
and Vasquez's 15-year-old girlfriend face an arraignment later today.
[Plansky] The arrest is not the end of the story.
It's really the beginning of the story.
It's a pretty confusing situation.
We don't feel like we know exactly what happened at this point.
[court official 1] Defendant is charged 125.25.
First degree.
[court official 2] This defendant, along with Chris,
referring to the co-defendant,
attempted to conceal the identity of the victim.
[reporter] Fifteen-year-olds Daphne Abdela and her boyfriend, Christopher Vasquez,
entered "not guilty" pleas during an arraignment yesterday.
[Plansky] Under New York State law, from the second that someone is arraigned,
you have 144 hours to file an indictment.
If you don't file an indictment within that statutory time period,
then the defendants must be released from custody.
So we had to assess pretty quickly whether we felt we had enough evidence
to establish reasonable cause that would get us to an indictment.
Now, the clock starts.
[mysterious, uneasy music playing]
[Butcher] This became a wide-ranging investigation.
This required multiple crime scene teams
to go and collect evidence from each of these locations.
And then, of course, there was the team of detectives
interviewing the family members, the witnesses.
They're waiting for evidence to come in. That's how you build your case.
[Mooney] Because of things Lee Furman observed at Daphne's apartment,
there was evidence that needed to be collected.
Blood evidence on the clothing, blood on her Rollerblades,
and there was blood on the watch that she was wearing.
When NYPD gathers evidence,
they don't fool around.
It's not just a picture of some blood in a bathtub.
They take the whole bathtub,
because it's got blood of the perpetrators,
maybe blood of the victims.
We searched Daphne's bedroom.
In one of her drawers,
I found Michael McMorrow's wallet with his ID and some money.
That's just another piece of evidence that places her there with Michael,
with Chris at the scene.
[Plansky] The problem is that, horrific as this crime scene was,
merely being present while the crime's committed is not a crime.
It may be morally and ethically indefensible,
but it's not a crime.
You have to prove the elements of the crime
beyond a reasonable doubt, every element.
[Mooney] We learned from Michael McMorrow's family
about Michael's regular behavior
and some of the people he would spend time with in the park.
[Charles] Michael had a group of people he knew in the park.
And after work, he'd go over there with, you know, a six-pack or something.
He had his, you know, drinking buddies.
[Plansky] Michael struggled with alcohol.
He was just a regular guy with regular problems.
Irish was trying to change himself.
You know, going to AA.
The one that Irish went to was, uh, at the Y off Central Park West,
and that's where he met Daphne.
[taut, suspenseful music playing]
[Mooney] The investigation was progressing as it should have.
People were being interviewed
that we discovered were present prior to the murder in the park.
We discovered, on the day of Michael McMorrow's murder,
Daphne and Chris agreed now to be boyfriend and girlfriend.
They go rollerblading, and she gets into all kinds of trouble.
She's picking fights with older men in the park.
She's doing crazy things.
Allegedly making a statement to one, "I'm gonna kill somebody tonight."
Prior to the murder, Daphne and Chris, they had been drinking,
and they ran into this group of people by Strawberry Fields,
one of which was Michael McMorrow.
Now, Chris is being the lapdog. He's just following along.
Daphne is this much more "experienced," shall we say, child of the same age.
She was the genie in the bottle.
When Christopher found that bottle, and opened that cork,
and she popped out, she controlled everything with him.
[tense music pulsing]
[Mooney] During the search at Chris Vasquez's apartment,
there was blood on his clothing,
and they recovered a knife.
We don't know at that point whether or not it's the knife.
So we had to get DNA testing done.
[subdued, suspenseful music playing]
[Butcher] Mr. McMorrow was taken down for autopsy.
He had a blood alcohol level of .31 at autopsy,
which is about more than three times the legal limit.
Would that make him impaired?
Probably, yes.
But he did have the ability to walk from Strawberry Fields
down to the lake on his own two feet.
So we're trying to establish what happened.
There was bruising to the back of his legs.
It was a pattern bruise.
The destruction of his face
indicated this was a very personal, very rageful attack.
On one side of his chest were maybe eight or nine or ten stab wounds,
all grouped together, that indicated he wasn't moving.
Now, you can see a man standing
and having his face hacked,
and his hands hacked as he fought for his life.
Then he goes down.
And now his attacker stands over him and brutally hacks at him.
Stabs him multiple times, over and over and over.
The biggest question, I think, that I had in my mind
about what actually occurred…
This is a big guy.
How did he end up down on the ground,
despite his level of intoxication,
that it allowed skinny little Chris Vasquez to inflict all that damage?
And the answer is Chris didn't do it by himself.
At least that's the supposition.
[somber music playing]
[Charles] When I did finally learn what they did to the body,
that angered me.
I don't care if they're 15. There should be some justice here.
[Matthew] My sister was 15 years old.
I was 17 years old.
We couldn't fathom how somebody our age could… could do something like this.
Daphne Abdela will remain behind bars until at least Wednesday.
That's when another court date is scheduled.
At that time, some grand jury action must have been taken,
or the 15-year-old goes free.
[tense music building]
[Plansky] The DNA analysis came in.
His pocketknife had a mixture of blood
on the blade and in the hilt.
And that mixture was his blood and Michael McMorrow's blood.
[Mooney] It's the murder weapon.
That's a rock-crushing piece of evidence.
[Plansky] It was hard to wrap your mind around the fact
that they were capable of that sort of extreme violence.
But at the same time, we knew that they were.
We knew that they've done this.
We felt at that point
that on the totality of the information that we had at that moment,
that we had enough probable cause to charge both of them.
The key piece of evidence for Chris was the knife.
For Daphne, it was her statements.
Clearly, she had placed herself in an active role
in terms of trying to dispose of the body.
We presented that evidence to the grand jury.
The grand jury found it persuasive.
They returned indictments for murder two against both of them.
Within the first few days of this investigation,
we found out who the two defendants had retained to represent them.
Christopher Vasquez retained a man named Arnold Kriss,
a former assistant DA.
Clearly a formidable adversary.
Daphne and her family retained Ben Brafman.
Ben is one of the most prominent defense attorneys in New York
and probably in the country.
He's represented everybody from mafioso to Wall Street people.
Ben had a portfolio that was diverse,
and usually with good results for him and his clients.
It was, you know, kind of a stark reminder
of how much was at stake here and how difficult this was gonna be.
[Mooney] Some detectives might get a little bit intimidated
by the presence of somebody like Ben Brafman.
My opinion was, "You have a law degree,
and you're dressed way nicer than I am,
but we both put our pants on the same way this morning,
and I'm ready if you're ready."
"So let's do it."
[reporter 1] At this point, I have more questions than answers.
Who was Mr. McMorrow,
and why was he in the park drinking with children?
The media was shaping the narrative to paint Irish as a pervert.
They're painting an untruthful image of Michael.
[reporter 1] Why he apparently liked to drink into the night in the park
with a mostly young crowd remains unclear.
What is clear is that it cost him his life.
The most obvious explanation
if you see that a 44-year-old guy
is drinking with two 15-year-olds at night in Central Park…
It's not that much of a leap to try to paint that picture.
[reporter 2] McMorrow later met up with the two teens near the lake
and may have made a pass at Abdela,
allegedly sending her boyfriend Vasquez into a knife-wielding rage.
I think the speculation was hurtful to my grandmother
and to my other family members because they were not real.
We wanted to make sure
that he was remembered respectfully and with dignity,
because that's what he deserved.
[Mooney] There wasn't one thing we learned about him that indicated
he would've done anything bad to anybody.
He was, in fact, a kind person that was good to everybody that he met,
to a fault.
And in… in this particular instance,
to describe him as being in the wrong place at the wrong time
is absolutely right on… right on the money.
The case against Chris was always stronger 'cause of the knife.
That was the single best piece of evidence we had in the case.
We knew that that knife was the murder weapon.
We felt we were gonna be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt
that Christopher was the knife wielder.
We felt less confident about the quantum of proof for Daphne.
While there was a lot of circumstantial evidence
that clearly placed her at the crime scene,
it requires the jury to take a little bit of a leap.
It was a more difficult case than the case against Christopher.
And then we got a pretty big surprise.
Mr. Brafman reached out to the DA's office as Daphne's lawyer
and said, "I've been interviewing my client,
and she would like to come in under Queen for a Day."
Ben's rationale for this was, "I think you guys got this wrong."
"She's really a witness here. She's not a defendant."
"Let me bring her in on a Queen for a Day."
That's an agreement
in which a defense attorney can bring in his client,
and she can speak essentially freely.
[Mooney] Anything you say cannot be used against you
unless you testify in court
and testify differently from what you've talked about here.
So we brought her down to the DA's office.
Daphne explained that, that night,
she and Vasquez just happened to skate into this group of people
Michael would spend his evenings with who were drinking in the park.
Shortly after, a cop on a scooter comes along and kinda disperses them.
And so they all scatter in different directions.
Daphne and Chris had the beer, so Michael followed the beer.
And they went down to the little gazebo at the side of the lake.
And that's where they sat drinking the rest of the beer.
And at some point,
Daphne and Chris…
decide that they're gonna go skinny-dipping in the lake.
When they come out, they're both freezing cold.
So her explanation was that…
Michael sees that she's shivering.
He puts his arm around her to try to warm her up,
and Chris snapped.
[foreboding music playing]
Because he thought that Michael was trying to make advances toward Daphne.
He pulled out his knife, and then he started stabbing him.
She was saying, "Christopher did it. He did everything."
"I'm a witness."
If this were true, she, in fact, is an eyewitness to a murder.
Her indictment would likely have been dismissed.
And that would've been the end of it for her.
But I wasn't satisfied.
Daphne was born, practically,
thinking she's superior to the rest of the world,
that she's the most important person in any room that she would go into.
So she, I'm sure, thought that she was gonna be smarter and be able to talk.
'Cause that's what they do. They all think they're gonna talk their way out of it.
There's nothing that we like better.
"You keep talking. Go right ahead."
So I wanted to keep her on a string.
I said there's physical evidence to corroborate what she said.
And so then I said, "Well, I wonder if it would be okay
if you guys would let us talk to her a few more times."
"I just want to clear up one or two things."
Brafman was like, "Yeah, not a problem."
He thought this was a done deal.
We did the follow-up interviews with her.
He sent some junior associate from his office.
[Butcher] Rob's got something about him.
Um, it's almost fatherly.
He's trustworthy, and people talk to him.
When Rob Mooney talked to Daphne Abdela,
they built a rapport.
He's brilliant at that.
[Mooney] I asked her, "Well, I have a question."
"I'm concerned about these bruises."
And I took a picture out of the… out of the file
that clearly showed this delineation and these rounded bruises
on the back of his leg, and I said,
"What do… What do you think these are?"
And so she got a little coy for a moment and was like, "Hmm."
She's turning the picture around, looking at it, being hesitant about it.
This guy reached out, tapped her on the shoulder, and said,
"It's okay. You can tell him." And I'm thinking, "Oh, thanks, pal."
"You're really helping me out here."
Then I reached in the box, take the Rollerblade out, and I say,
"Does this help jar your thought about this at all?"
So then she began to demonstrate
part of her true, uh, behavior.
And said, "I thought he was gonna hurt my friend,
so I kicked him."
I go, "Okay, I understand that, but explain it to me."
"Well, I kicked him, and then, you know… and he fell down."
"Then Chris jumped on him and was stabbing him some more."
And I was like, "Okay."
And then the lawyer went, "Okay, we're done."
She could no longer deny that she had any involvement.
She assaulted Michael McMorrow.
She kicked Michael McMorrow.
She rendered him helpless.
And now we have the proof.
Perpetrator, not a witness.
A killer.
[frantic music pulsing]
[Plansky] We knew, from the totality of the circumstances,
that she had to have helped Chris.
And now, for the first time, she's telling us.
Shortly after that came out,
we worked out a plea deal with Daphne Abdela.
Tonight, a teenager charged with a vicious Central Park stabbing
has cut a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Sixteen-year-old Daphne Abdela apologized for her role
in last year's murder and mutilation of Michael McMorrow.
The deal does not require her
to testify against her former boyfriend, Christopher Vasquez.
He is charged with the actual stabbing.
[Mooney] Daphne was gonna plead guilty,
and she was gonna take the maximum sentence for the charge,
but would not be testifying in court against Chris Vasquez.
We worked a lot with the DA's office, and he basically said,
"This is the best we could get. Because we had proof against him."
"We had a pretty solid case."
"But her, it was very late."
"If we took it to court, we're not sure we could have gotten any conviction."
[lawyer] I also want to request…
In March of 1998, Daphne comes to court,
and she pleads guilty to a crime called "manslaughter in the first degree."
Manslaughter in the first degree
is different from murder in the second degree,
which is what she was originally charged with,
because it doesn't require an intent to kill.
What she pled guilty to was an intent to cause serious physical injury
to Michael McMorrow.
She pled guilty to manslaughter in the first degree.
She allocuted in open court as to what she did
that made her guilty of that crime,
and she accepted a sentence of three to nine years.
[siren squawking faintly]
[tense, jittery music playing]
[Plansky] November 1998, we're starting this trial.
It was my first experience putting Rob on the stand.
And Rob came to court.
He was wearing a sport jacket and had a Grateful Dead pin on his lapel.
And me being the young, uptight assistant DA,
said, "Rob, that's inappropriate."
"You need to take that Grateful Dead pin off."
I was like, "Pft, not happening."
And I said, "Please take it off. You don't do that in a court."
"You don't wear a skull with a lightning bolt on the stand."
I go, "That's tough tarts. I'm not taking the pin off."
And Rob said, "You have two choices here."
[tense drumroll]
"I can either testify with the pin
or I can not testify with the pin."
"But either way, this story ends with me wearing that pin."
I thought about it for a second, and I said, "How soon can you go on?"
[rim shot]
[curious, intriguing music playing]
[Plansky] The defense that was put forward was,
"Three people went down to the lake. Two people came back."
"Neither one of them is talking. You don't know what happened at the lake."
'Cause if you're not sure
who was actually doing the… the cutting, the fighting,
then you've got to have reasonable doubt about this young man's guilt.
[Mooney] There's always concern when people point the finger at each other
that this is going to result in a stalemate,
and maybe the jury is not going to be convinced either way.
[Plansky] The defense did put the blame on Daphne,
that she may well have been responsible for this,
but I think the overall strategy was, "We just don't know."
"And if you don't know, then you've got to acquit my client."
In every case, there's a moment
when the jury is able to visualize
the person sitting in front of them doing the thing he's accused of doing.
I just had a hard time believing that all 12 of those jurors
were gonna be able to see Chris Vasquez committing that horrific crime.
[Matthew] When the jury went out to deliberate,
we'd already been waiting
nearly a year and a half or so for… for justice.
Um, our family was understandably nervous.
The longer it went on,
the more it seemed they had doubts about Christopher's guilt.
[Plansky] They were out, I believe, for two days.
And they came back "not guilty" for murder two,
and "guilty" for manslaughter one.
Essentially, the exact same conviction and sentence as Daphne Abdela.
It felt a little like a compromise to me.
[solemn music playing]
The jury was crying.
Crying.
'Cause they were looking at Irish's family.
It hurt the McMorrows 'cause they knew how much he suffered,
and they didn't think they got justice.
[Charles] I was very angry with that verdict.
Thirty-eight stab wounds is not manslaughter.
[Plansky] I think the jury didn't think that a kid that young
should bear the mark of murderer for the rest of his life.
I'm a big believer in following the law,
but the law is complicated because humans are involved.
And when humans are involved, emotions are involved.
[Butcher] Most of the cases that fascinate us are mysteries.
"Who did this thing?"
In this case, that's not it at all.
We know who did it, but why?
Call it a folie à deux,
where the two of them combined their insanity
to form one killing machine…
or just kicks.
Why? Why? Why?
That's the kind of thing that drives you crazy.
[Mooney] There's no way to know exactly what happened,
'cause there was three people, and one's dead.
That's what happens. That's why I say, when people go, "You solved that case,"
"Nah, that's a bad word."
Solving the case that you actually know what happened,
and a lot of the time, you don't.
You certainly can suppose what happened.
You can look at what some of the evidence
will lead you to think is the logical conclusion,
but without that narration, there's no way.
[reporter] The so-called "Baby-Faced Killers of Central Park"
are out of prison tonight after nearly seven years.
Abdela, now 21, was released Friday.
Her former boyfriend, 22-year-old Vasquez, was released this morning.
As part of their parole, the two are barred from seeing one another.
Yeah, my brother's life was worth a lot more than six years in prison.
[Butcher] I don't feel like justice was done.
I know, it's the system, and that's the law, they were kids,
and that's what happens…
but it just doesn't feel fair.
Not fair at all.
Years later, Daphne, when she was out on parole,
violated her parole.
[Mooney] She was in a halfway house
and assaulted one of the other residents at that house.
And actually went back and served the full term, nine years.
Chris got out after six years.
I'm not aware of him ever doing anything to reoffend in any way
in all the years since then.
[understated, pensive music playing]
It was a really difficult experience on both a personal and professional level.
You know, it was an unusual case,
an emotional case.
Those feelings linger.
One of the best things that came out of that case
was that I got to know Rob Mooney.
And I didn't know it at the time, but we were just getting warmed up.
[distorted audio warping]
[train car rumbling]
Eight o'clock in the morning, the phones are ringing like crazy.
Everybody's talking about a missing cleaning woman
in the financial district named Eridania.
Coworkers say that she always has dinner with them during their shift,
but the last time they saw her was around eight o'clock,
and she hasn't been seen since.
[McNeely] It's definitely a daunting task to search that building
for anyone or anything, because it goes up 26 floors.
She's not seen again on camera.
She's not seen getting off the elevator at any other time.
And she's not seen leaving that building.
Where is she?
[Titus] We looked at every nook and cranny of the building from top to bottom
and couldn't find her.
That means that instead of just 2 Rector Street being the place
where all of the investigation was gonna take place,
it now became New York City.
[dramatic outro music pulsing]