- It was a big news story.
Wealthy Palm Springs art dealer missing.
- There were no signs of force.
Nothing was thrown about.
But his Mercedes was not in the garage.
- It's suspicious when you have a missing person.
And all of a sudden, their home is being sold out under them.
- We would be like, what the hell?
How can this be another twist?
- Then witnesses tell me he was murdered
and gave me a handwritten map.
That's where they dumped the body.
- The location where these bones were located
was exceptionally remote.
- It was unbelievable to me the elaborate scheme and plan
that these guys went through.
I was in shock.
- The plot was very complex.
He was the next target in what they dubbed
"Operation Craigslist."
- In the county jail, he did make a phone call.
And the only thing he said was, "Run."
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[gentle music]
♪ ♪
- Palm Springs is a beautiful desert city
with a long history.
It became very popular with the celebrity crowd
in the '40s and '50s.
- We're so close to Hollywood, 100 miles away.
So you had people that came out here for the sun and fun
and away from paparazzi.
And that's why we have so many good stories about the stars
being here.
["God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" playing]
- The Festival of Lights is a Christmas parade
that is held every year in Palm Springs.
- It happens on the first weekend of December
and brings the whole community together.
- My good friend, Clifford Lambert,
really loved the Christmas parade.
But that year, Cliff didn't show up.
♪ ♪
- He was very well known in the gay community.
So when he didn't show up to that Christmas parade,
his close friends were very concerned
because that was his favorite thing.
[foreboding music]
- I was Cliff's hairdresser,
and I had some friends and clients in the salon.
And I remember somebody telling me that they had
seen Cliff at his favorite haunt,
just down from his house,
having dinner with somebody on December 4.
But they hadn't heard from him or hadn't been able
to get ahold of him afterwards.
So we started putting things together, and it was alarming.
♪ ♪
- On December 12, 2008, a missing person's report
came across my desk by the name of Cliff Lambert.
Reading the report, I noticed that his longtime friend,
Edward, had reported him missing,
hadn't heard from him for a couple of days.
The first thing you do with a missing person,
try to call them and see if they're OK.
And give them a call, and his voicemail box was full.
I started conducting a more thorough investigation,
contacting friends, see if anybody's heard from him.
Nobody has.
- Over the next several days, the police department
spoke to many of us, asking if we
knew of anybody that might harbor
any resentment towards Cliff.
And I couldn't think of anybody.
[tense music]
- I'm still expecting him to show up.
But a couple of days went by,
and I had spoke with his friend Edward again,
who had the key to the house.
So he allowed me to enter the house,
and there was nothing unusual.
♪ ♪
There were no signs of force.
Nothing was thrown about.
Everything was in the right place.
His friend explained that the Rolls-Royce
was still in the garage, but his Mercedes was missing.
I did notice that his mailbox had, like, mail protruding out,
and there was papers on the front of the door.
But that in and of itself isn't suspicious.
He could have been gone for the weekend and not told anybody.
♪ ♪
A few days goes by, and Cliff doesn't show up.
We sent out the press release.
We were hoping that would turn on some information on him,
but it didn't.
- Remember, social media wasn't a thing.
So if we put it out now, we would be getting
more people saying, I knew Cliff,
I saw him at this party,
there's no way he'd go missing, you know, things like that.
But we didn't have those kind of tips or clues.
♪ ♪
- At this point, I need to speak to his friends
and learn all I could on Cliff Lambert.
[birds chirping]
- Cliff was born in St. Louis, Missouri.
He had the biggest dreams and ambitions.
He was going to be a celebrity.
- Cliff is a fascinating individual.
You have to think about who he was and the time period
that he grew up in.
By all accounts, he was out through most of his life.
- He ended up getting a job on a radio show.
And that afforded him to create relationships
with a lot of celebrities.
And later, he ended up going into the art world.
- He had actually worked to create this process
where famous pieces of art can be available, basically,
as posters.
And that was how he made his money.
Cliff Lambert lives a very expensive lifestyle.
When you would walk into his house,
people described it like walking into Versailles.
♪ ♪
- Cliff was a person that
liked to have others around him.
He would have dinner parties.
He was happiest when he was in a relationship.
- He had a boyfriend for a very long time, 12 years or so.
- And his name was Travis.
And Cliff really loved him
and wanted him to carry his last name.
So Travis Hobbs became Travis Lambert.
They were both really happy with that.
But then in 2007,
Travis died in a drowning accident in a swimming pool.
♪ ♪
Cliff was just beside himself.
He was just devastated.
And I don't think he ever really got over it.
Cliff was very lonely.
And in 2008, it actually drove him
to create a profile on Craigslist
to begin looking for somebody to fill that void.
♪ ♪
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- Our first big break didn't come through
until I received a phone call at my desk from
a real estate agent over in San Francisco,
inquiring about Mr. Lambert
and his residence in Palm Springs.
He expressed that he had a client in San Francisco
that had power of attorney, that a house was gifted to him,
and he wanted to do what he called a fire sale.
♪ ♪
The real estate agent was suspicious that
when he ran Mr. Cliff Lambert's name,
he came back as a missing person.
So at that point, I called my partner detective,
who does do fraud and property crimes, Simon Min,
and asked him to come on board with this investigation.
♪ ♪
- It's suspicious when you have a missing person
and all of a sudden, their home is being sold out under them.
We received documents from the agent that pertained
to Cliff's home here in Palm Springs.
And there was a deed and a power of attorney
with the name of Kaushal Niroula from San Francisco.
♪ ♪
- Who is Kaushal Niroula in San Francisco?
And why is he trying to claim ownership
of Cliff Lambert's house?
This was essentially the big break
that led me to believe that there was something
more nefarious was going on.
- There is a name that has no bearing
on the residence itself.
And there's a huge distance gap between
Palm Springs and San Francisco.
At this point, I'm asking, is Kaushal Niroula
involved in Cliff Lambert's disappearance?
[unsettling music]
♪ ♪
We're looking for proof of life.
And oddly enough, there are transactions
on Cliff's bank account,
like somebody went on a spending spree.
- When we learned who the thumbprint belonged to
and what happened to this man,
it was terrifying for us.
[somber music]
♪ ♪
- Cliff would always stay in touch with friends,
always let somebody know
when he would be out of town.
But this time, none of that happened.
We were all just very concerned.
- At this point in the investigation,
there wasn't much to go on other than the fact
that we have someone with a power of attorney signed
by Cliff Lambert to Kaushal Niroula in San Francisco,
and he's trying to sell Mr. Cliff Lambert's house
below market value.
But at this time, instead of interviewing Kaushal Niroula,
I want to get more information about him.
I want to know everything I can about who he is.
That way, I'm not going in blind.
♪ ♪
- So I called
the San Francisco Police Department
and spoke to an investigator in their fraud unit.
And immediately when I said the name "Kaushal Niroula,"
it was like an alarm that went off on the phone
because Kaushal had so many charges in San Francisco
for fraudulent activity.
- Niroula was arrested a year prior.
He had been locked in jail in the county.
- But at this time,
Kaushal Niroula is out of jail.
- Kaushal Niroula is a convicted con man.
Very, very good-looking, dressed impeccably.
He would tell people that he was the prince of Nepal
and that he was exiled.
Kaushal Niroula had undertaken a con scheme
where he conned someone out of over $400,000 worth of artwork.
He then ended up stealing $300,000, approximately,
worth of jewelry in order to pay the restitution
for his art theft scheme.
And in 2007, Kaushal Niroula was
responsible for swindling someone out of
half a million dollars in Hawaii.
- He was a prolific fraudster.
But does he have any involvement
in the disappearance of Cliff Lambert?
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- I asked the real estate agent if they could pause any sale
because there is suspicious factors
behind his disappearance.
Then, the real estate agent continued to tell me
that an attorney by the name of David Replogle,
from the Bay Area, he had done this deal between Mr. Niroula
and Mr. Cliff Lambert,
and that Mr. Niroula took on the power of attorney.
♪ ♪
- So there's still no signs of Cliff.
I'm looking for proof of life.
And I found that there are transactions
on Cliff's bank account after he was reported missing.
♪ ♪
It looked like somebody went on a spending spree
in San Francisco.
They were buying chocolate, clothes, computer products.
It looked like somebody was having a good old time.
But when I received surveillance photos from ATMs,
it was not Cliff Lambert, nowhere near Cliff Lambert.
It was a picture of a Hispanic male
on all of these transactions.
I take a little clip of that, and I send it to
the San Francisco Police Department.
And the investigator up there immediately identifies
these pictures as Danny Garcia.
And says he was also involved in fraudulent activities
with Niroula.
♪ ♪
- We find out that Kaushal Niroula and Danny Garcia,
they've been under investigation
by the San Francisco Police Department,
amongst other police departments up in the Bay Area,
for many scams in which they defraud people
out of their belongings.
They are essentially part of a, like, a ring of con men.
So now we had one more name, one more person of interest.
With the names now, I go back to Mr. Lambert's good friend,
who reported him missing, and asked
if he recognized any of the names.
And lo and behold, he did recognize Danny Garcia
and stated that Danny Garcia was a boyfriend of Mr. Lambert
but they had parted on bad terms
several months before his disappearance.
[tense music]
- In April of 2008, Cliff told me that
he met somebody from San Francisco on Craigslist,
and his name was Daniel Garcia.
He described him as something different
than he normally likes.
He said, this boy is Hispanic, and he has dark hair.
Daniel came to the desert a handful of times
to visit Cliff to see if they might get along
or if there was a spark.
♪ ♪
But Daniel ended up making it clear
that he was looking for an investor
for a new business he wanted to open,
meaning that he wanted his money.
Cliff told him, that's it, this is done,
and he would have to leave.
- At this point, all I knew was that Danny Garcia
was a connection to Cliff Lambert.
But how was that related to Cliff's disappearance?
Then on January 7, I get a phone call
from Cliff's neighbor that there is a U-Haul truck
in front of Cliff's house.
- Frank comes to me, and he tells me,
Simon, there's somebody at Cliff's house with a U-Haul.
They're trying to leave. You need to go get the U-Haul.
♪ ♪
- I advise our patrol officers to quickly respond
that somebody is trying to move the items out.
As I'm driving towards the downtown area
to get to his house, I notice a U-Haul truck
driving southbound away from the direction
where his house would be.
- So between myself, Frank, and patrol,
we tactically start setting up units to go intercept
all the vehicles that are leaving.
Is Cliff there?
Is Cliff not there?
Are we going to find somebody who shouldn't be
there cleaning out this house?
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- Clifford Lambert was missing,
and we received a phone call.
There's somebody at Cliff's house with a U-Haul,
trying to clean out his home.
It's suspicious.
And then I get another call from Detective Browning saying
hey, I got this U-Haul driving south
away from Cliff Lambert's house.
♪ ♪
- I pull over the U-Haul truck.
Simultaneously, officers are arriving
on scene at Cliff's house.
- I get on scene, and I find a person
talking to one of the patrol officers.
And as I approached, he identified himself
as Miguel Bustamante.
And he said, we were hired to do a job.
But it didn't look like movers.
It looked like Miguel Bustamante
at Cliff's home trying to steal
all the contents of the residence,
a lot of Cliff's property,
personal items of value, art.
And we can't verify that any of this property
was legitimately given to Miguel and his crew
by the actual owner, Clifford Lambert.
So Miguel Bustamante was detained at the scene
and taken to the jail.
- Now we have one more person of interest in this case.
[tense music]
- Within an hour or so of Miguel Bustamante
being arrested for the burglary,
he called for detectives.
He wanted to talk to us.
- Here we go.
- We confirmed the two people driving the U-Haul truck
were, in fact, just hired.
So they were not in charged.
Our main concern now is trying to get to
what he knows about Cliff Lambert.
- For me, that was huge because we never released the names
of the people involved in this case.
- Now we have information that
there is some kind of connection between
Danny Garcia, Kaushal Niroula, and Miguel Bustamante.
So we're up to three people associated
with this missing person's case with no sign of Cliff.
- His initial comments were that Cliff Lambert
owed the cartel money, and they took him to Mexico.
- It's a crazy story.
I did not believe whatsoever that Cliff was in Mexico
and he was abducted for the cartel.
- He proceeded to volunteer information
that he had Lambert's Mercedes in his possession in Daly City,
in his apartment complex.
So we had Daly City Police Department
go to the residence,
and it was there.
So now we had Cliff Lambert's vehicle.
We were hoping it would turn out some information
on what happened to Cliff Lambert.
- Cliff Lambert's Mercedes was brought back
to Palm Springs for processing.
The technicians were able to find traces of blood
in the trunk.
But it was inconclusive at the time
because it was very minute.
So we obtained a search warrant to inspect Cliff's house.
We recovered Cliff's toothbrush, his hairbrush,
his fingerprints.
And we uploaded it into CODIS, the database
in missing persons' cases,
so that it can be used at a later time.
♪ ♪
- Once law enforcement was able to do
forensic testing of his house,
they found the presence of blood.
However, it didn't result in any DNA findings.
- It was inconclusive as to person,
but it tested positive for blood.
So it was enough to write a probable cause declaration
to continue the investigation into all the suspects
identified in this case.
- Also, we did book Miguel for the burglary.
And we asked the courts that he be held in the county jail
until his arraignment.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- A lot of Cliff's friends would talk to each other,
trying to come up with scenarios,
where he may have gone on his own.
And we were praying that one of them was true.
- We still hadn't interviewed Danny Garcia.
Still hadn't interviewed Niroula.
We did have investigators from San Francisco Police Department
just kind of keep an eye on them because he has
no idea that we're on to them.
First, I want to know exactly what happened
to Cliff Lambert.
That gives me a lot more ammunition
for the interviews of them.
At this time, Miguel Bustamante
was still in the county jail.
I received a phone call from an investigator explaining to me
that he did have an inmate who was cellmates
with Miguel Bustamante and had the truth
on Mr. Lambert's disappearance.
I went down to meet with the inmate,
see what he was referring to.
And he gave me a piece of paper with the names
of Danny Garcia and Kaushal Niroula.
And it did have a handwritten map on there.
And according to the inmate, he was told by Miguel
that's where they dumped Mr. Lambert's body,
somewhere in the desert.
So Detective Min and I went and searched the area
identified in the map.
I was pretty confident we had a murder investigation.
But it's very hard to prove up a homicide without a body.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- We have a map at this point.
We have information that Cliff Lambert was killed,
a confession of an inmate to another inmate.
But to me, that was pretty credible information now.
- We searched for Cliff's body for months using the map.
We drove up and down the freeway.
- We were searching for anything that looked
like a fresh burial site.
But we were not able to find anything.
[somber music]
- I prayed every night that he would just
walk back in
with a little smile on his face and a smirk,
saying, it's all right, I'm OK.
Don't worry about me. I'm all right.
Unfortunately, it didn't unfold that way.
- Without Cliff's body, this case became about documents.
It was following a trail of bits and pieces of evidence.
And the case was so convoluted that it required
additional evidence to corroborate everything
that they've done up to this point.
♪ ♪
- In reviewing the power of attorney documents,
I noticed a notary stamp.
And now I'm thinking, I need to speak to this person
to see if Cliff Lambert did, in fact, sign his name
and give Kaushal Niroula power of attorney.
- I'm a mobile notary.
And I get calls all day long for people
that want a notary to come to them, to their home
or to their office.
I received a call on the 20th of December asking
if I could go to a residence in a neighborhood
called Noe Valley.
I grabbed my notary book, and I got into my car.
And I drove to the location.
When I get to the address, I rang one of the buzzers.
There was no answer.
And all of a sudden, this guy comes up
and grabs the bag from behind, and he says, "Give me the bag!
Give me the bag!"
And he's pulling me with the backpack,
and I'm being dragged down the sidewalk.
All of a sudden, my head hits a telephone pole.
And I was in shock.
And I said, "Get the [...] away from me!"
And he went like this, and he walked down the sidewalk.
And I was like, what was that?
And I called 911, and I told them what had happened.
And I stood in the street. I was trembling.
I had never been so scared.
I was terrified.
A few days later, my notary partner, Glenn,
calls me and says, I just got a call
from the Palm Springs Police Department,
and they want copies of your journal.
Remember when we got a phone call from someone
called Kaushal Niroula saying he would like
to set an appointment for his friend, Cliff Lambert,
and we met those guys late at night in a hotel
and we notarized a bunch of power of attorney documents?
They want the signature and the thumbprints in your journal.
- The person who put their thumbprint
and signed the power of attorney
should be Cliff Lambert.
So I asked if we could get that book analyzed.
And we got the results relatively quick.
But that thumbprint came back to David Replogle.
David Replogle's name was crucial because up until then,
he had claimed to be an attorney just
brokering a deal for Niroula and Cliff Lambert
to sell the house.
- It was clearly the plan all along
that someone was going to have to pose as Cliff Lambert
in order to execute this power of attorney.
- Apparently, David Replogle later
realized that he made a mistake leaving his own fingerprint
as Cliff Lambert.
So he decided that the new plan is
to hire somebody to get that notary book back by force.
- If they were able to get that notary journal,
there would be no proof whatsoever
that the thumbprint belonged to David Replogle,
not to Cliff Lambert.
[tense music]
- That event was a significant turning point
in this investigation because it showed
that David Replogle was posing as Clifford Lambert.
- It appears that the plan was to clean out
all of Cliff Lambert's money,
as well as transfer the deed of his home into their control.
But there was no evidence that these con men
definitively killed Cliff Lambert.
♪ ♪
- However, with that information from the notary,
we were able to secure arrest warrants and search warrants
for David Replogle, Kaushal Niroula,
and Danny Garcia for essentially defrauding
Cliff Lambert and taking in excess of
$300,000 from his bank accounts.
At this point, we can't find Danny Garcia.
We think he's hiding out somewhere.
But we find out that Kaushal Niroula and David Replogle
will be in court because they had proceedings from prior
events that Replogle was representing Niroula on.
So we go up to San Francisco with the warrants in hand.
- We're at the Hall of Justice.
And I'm standing in the hallway where Kaushal had his hearing.
- When the court recessed, they came out with everybody else.
And both Replogle and Niroula were arrested.
♪ ♪
And later that day, Kaushal Niroula,
he's in the county jail in San Francisco.
We monitor their phone calls.
So he did make a phone call to Danny Garcia.
And the only thing he said was, "Run."
And he hung up.
[sirens wailing]
[tense music]
- After arresting David Replogle and Kaushal Niroula,
Niroula did make a phone call tipping off Danny Garcia
that we're onto him.
So he was in the wind.
Next, we interviewed both Niroula and Replogle.
Of course, they claim not to know anything about
Cliff Lambert or his murder.
- But Miguel Bustamante told another person at the jail
that he knew Cliff Lambert was murdered
and taken out to the desert.
During our investigation,
we find that Bustamante had a roommate
by the name of Craig McCarthy.
We found evidence that Craig McCarthy
worked at a medical center in San Francisco.
So Detective Browning and I decided to go pay a visit,
and we found him.
So we're speaking to Craig McCarthy
to get an understanding of what he knows first.
And when we started asking, did Miguel participate
in the disappearance of Cliff Lambert,
and were you in Palm Springs with Miguel?
Craig's demeanor is very soft spoken.
And that's when Craig started telling us, oh, yeah,
we were hired to do a job by Danny Garcia.
- So now we know that he was involved,
and we have one more suspect.
So we asked Craig McCarthy if he knew anything about
Danny Garcia's whereabouts.
He says, he's hiding out with his friend in Sacramento.
So I put the warrant into the system.
That triggered Sacramento to have
a task force search for him.
[siren blaring]
His phone was pinged by the task force.
And they did, in fact, find him hiding
in a closet in a friend's house,
where they took custody of him and several electronics
that he was hoarding there.
- He was arrested.
And what was surprising was that there was
multiple amounts of hard drives, laptops,
cell phones in his possession at the time.
They needed to be checked for any evidence.
♪ ♪
- I interviewed Danny.
And he claimed that Cliff was a good friend of his,
and Cliff was going to help him invest into a software project
that he had.
But I know that Danny is lying to me because Cliff Lambert
and Danny left on bad terms.
- Daniel Garcia is really the most
critical element of this case.
He is the link to Cliff Lambert,
and also the link to everyone else
that was involved in this case.
- It took a very long time to inspect the data
seized from these hard drives.
But it would help us to uncover
what actually occurred in this scheme.
- It was exceptionally complex.
There was financial evidence,
records, credit card receipts.
There was also a lot of computer records
that needed to be gone through.
What struck me was just the large scale
of the entire operation that these individuals
perpetuated in order to kill Cliff Lambert.
- This plan, dubbed "Operation Craigslist,"
was in play way before Cliff went missing.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
When Cliff met Danny online on a dating website,
Cliff flew him down, they spent six days together.
Danny did what Danny does and tried to pull a con on him.
Cliff was not a dumb man. He sent him home.
- That's when Garcia and Niroula decide that in order
to gain control of Cliff's estate,
that Cliff must be killed.
- Sometime over the summer,
Daniel Garcia and Kaushal Niroula
talk to David Replogle.
They come up with this story that Cliff Lambert has
inherited this large amount of money and some works of art.
- Which is a fictitious inheritance ruse
to get Cliff's signature.
- In early fall, Kaushal Niroula
adapts this persona of a lawyer,
and he reaches out to Cliff Lambert about this new fortune.
- Then they create legal documents
that will transfer power of attorney to Kaushal Niroula.
- Next, they recruit two individuals,
Miguel Bustamante and Craig McCarthy, to act as the muscle
who will actually kill Cliff Lambert.
- So on December 4, Miguel Bustamante, Craig McCarthy,
Kaushal Niroula flew down from the San Francisco area
to Palm Springs.
- They set up a deadly meeting.
[line beeps] - Hi, Mr. Lambert.
I am reconfirming for 5:30 California time
tomorrow evening, and just looking forward
to meeting with you.
- And the next day, they murder Cliff in his home.
- With Cliff out of the way and the documents
signed and notarized, they now had full control and power
to do whatever they wanted with his money, his home,
basically his estate.
- What these con men put together
was a really diabolical plan.
- Daniel Garcia, Kaushal Niroula,
Miguel Bustamante,
David Replogle, and Craig McCarthy
were charged with murder, as well as
financial crimes that were related
to the death of Cliff Lambert.
- And in subsequent interviews,
Craig McCarthy tells us he is wanting to cut a deal
for a reduced sentence.
- When we brought Craig McCarthy down
from San Francisco to Palm Springs,
he gave a full detail about what happened
on the night of the murder.
[suspenseful music]
Kaushal met Cliff at Cliff's home
around 8:30 PM.
Craig and Miguel were hiding on the back of the house.
This is where we have text messages
between Kaushal Niroula and Miguel Bustamante
that indicates, "Kill him.
Kill him now."
And that was the signal for Miguel and Craig
to enter the house.
♪ ♪
- He reenacted the entire murder on video.
- Cliff said, ah-ah!
- Cliff is on his floor, dead.
While Kaushal was cleaning the house,
Miguel and Craig wrap Cliff in this rug
and put him in the trunk of Cliff's Mercedes.
♪ ♪
The next day, they drove 100 miles away from Palm Springs,
pulled off the side of the road,
buried Cliff Lambert in a shallow grave,
and drove off to San Francisco,
hoping that this body would never be found again.
[somber music]
- When the news broke that Cliff had been murdered,
the whole thing was such a shock.
The details of how it happened in his own kitchen,
it was such a horrific crime.
It was heartbreaking.
The men that did this to Cliff
are sociopathic.
They're animalistic,
that they would just discard him
without any remorse.
He deserved better.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- Anytime you have a case where you don't have the body,
there's always a lingering issue of,
where is this person, are they still alive?
And those are issues you have to overcome as a prosecutor.
♪ ♪
Fortunately, however, in this case, Daniel Garcia,
Kaushal Niroula, Miguel Bustamante,
David Replogle were convicted of all the charges
and were sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole.
Craig McCarthy ended up pleading to a lesser sentence,
25 years in state prison.
- This was a group of monsters,
nefarious and diabolical from the get-go.
I was relieved some justice finally being served.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- But then, years later, the DA's office
sent the news release to the station,
and we all just gasped.
It was, what?
Can this really be happening?
It's the case that just keeps on giving.
How can this be another twist?
[tense music]
- Four men convicted in the murder of Clifford Lambert
have been granted a new trial.
An appeal filed on behalf of Niroula
alleging comments Judge David Downing made
in court proceedings that Garcia secretly recorded
on his court-issued laptop about Niroula
having HIV and refusing to read his motions.
♪ ♪
- The fair and right thing to do
was to give them a new trial because
it was clear that the judge had some bias
against them.
- It was shocking that they captured the judge
making some homophobic statements.
But the four top guys in this case
were all going to get to be retried.
- I was perplexed.
I thought, OK, a judge made an inappropriate comment,
but they were guilty of murder.
I can't help but feel angry with authorities.
- It's been eight years since a jury found Kaushal Niroula
and Daniel Garcia guilty of murdering Palm Springs
retiree Clifford Lambert,
authorities never able to find his body.
- Then, while the second trial was pending,
remains were found that were connected to Cliff Lambert.
♪ ♪
- I remember reading about a recovery of bones
in the area of the 5 Freeway.
I actually called LA County Sheriff.
Can you please check the DNA and see if
it matches our missing person?
♪ ♪
- We received information that they had a presumptive hit
for DNA on some bones that had been located
in Castaic, off the highway,
years beforehand.
It was great news for the second trial
that what we had believed all along
was, in fact, now supported in the evidence
definitively that Cliff Lambert had been killed.
♪ ♪
It was also exceptionally sad to see someone
of Cliff's stature left there, buried,
alongside discarded items and trash.
Absolutely gut-wrenching.
Then, unbelievably, during the course of the retrial,
Kaushal Niroula was murdered by his cellmate.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
Fortunately, at the second trial,
all three of the defendants were convicted
of all the charges and were sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole.
To hear those three times guilty
on every count
was beyond reassuring because they were held accountable.
Justice for Cliff Lambert would have been
dying 95 years old in his bed.
And there's no way I can achieve that for him.
But I hope this is something.
- This was a highly sophisticated plan
and scheme to murder someone, steal their identity,
transfer all their assets for their
own personal financial gain.
[somber music]
- For those of us that knew Cliff and loved him,
it was just so sad and heartbreaking.
[gentle music]
But I hope that people will remember Cliff
as a fun, easygoing guy that loved to laugh.
He liked to do things for people.
He liked to make people smile.
And he was all around a good human being.
♪ ♪