Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Pregnant Woman Stabbed 70 Times, Apartment Set on Fire in Facebook Marketplace Meet-Up Horror

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Pregnant Woman Stabbed 70 Times, Apartment Set on Fire in Facebook Marketplace Meet-Up Horror · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I've been staring at the timeline of this case for
• 0:01
  the last two hours, and there are two time stamps
• 0:04
  that I just I cannot get my head around five
• 0:07
  point three eight pm and six point zero nine pm.
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's thirty one minutes.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Thirty one minutes. That is the entire window from the
• 0:15
  moment the killer, this nineteen year old kid, Nita's Revucas
• 0:18
  arrived at the apartment complex, to the moment firefighters were
• 0:22
  on scene trying to save Aliza Morales. It's it's staggering
• 0:26
  in the span of a sitcom episode, a completely mundane
• 0:29
  transaction over all things, a used truck spiraled into a
• 0:34
  triple felony that just wiped out a mother, an unborn child,
• 0:37
  and destroyed a home.
• 0:38
  Speaker 3: It's terrifyingly efficient, and I think that speed, that compression
• 0:41
  of violence is what makes this case so difficult to process.
• 0:45
  We're used to crime narratives that have a long build up.
• 0:48
  You know, they're stalking their long standing feuds.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: Gang violence, there's a story leading up to it.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: Exactly. This wasn't that.
• 0:54
  Speaker 3: This was a Facebook marketplace transaction. It's the definition of
• 0:57
  what criminologists would call a blitz attack. It's overwhelming, and
• 1:01
  it comes out of what seems like nowhere exactly.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: And that's really why we're doing this deep dive today.
• 1:06
  We aren't just here to recount the grim details of
• 1:09
  the murder of Eliza Morales, which happened just a few
• 1:12
  days ago on January twenty seventh, twenty twenty six. We
• 1:15
  are trying to look at the the anatomy of an escalation.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: That's a good way to put it.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: I have the police affidatus, the press releases from the
• 1:22
  Dupitch County States Attorney, and the initial case filings right here.
• 1:26
  We need to figure out how a dispute over a
• 1:28
  nineteen ninety four Ford ranger turns into what prosecutors are
• 1:32
  literally calling pure evil.
• 1:34
  Speaker 3: And we absolutely have to talk about the venue Facebook marketplace.
• 1:38
  It's become the garage sale of the twenty first century.
• 1:40
  It feels incredibly low stakes. I mean, think about it,
• 1:43
  you're clearing out clutter, you're looking for a deal.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: I sold an old chair in there last month.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: We all use it.
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: But this case just rips the veneer off that comfort.
• 1:51
  It forces us to look at the hidden volatility, the
• 1:54
  sheer unpredictability of these peer to pure transactions.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: Okay, so let's get into the setup, because on paper,
• 2:00
  this looks like the most boring standard transaction in history.
• 2:04
  You have Gabriel Morales, who's Eliza's husband. He has a
• 2:07
  nineteen ninety four Ford Ranger tark read he listed on
• 2:11
  Marketplace around January twenty fourth.
• 2:13
  Speaker 3: Can we just pause on the vehicle for a second.
• 2:15
  A nineteen ninety four Ford Ranger. That is a thirty
• 2:18
  two year old truck.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: It's technically an antique.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: It is.
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: And anyone buying a thirty two year old work truck
• 2:24
  for what presumably a couple of thousand dollars or less,
• 2:28
  you enter that transaction with a certain set of expectations,
• 2:31
  or at least you should.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Sure you know it's not coming off the showroom floor.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: Not even close.
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: You expect rust, you expect quirks. You expect that you
• 2:39
  might need to replace the alternator next week, or that
• 2:41
  the AC doesn't work. It's a buyer beware situation. By
• 2:45
  its very definition, that's the deal you make.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: But the buyer here, Nitas Ravuckus, is nineteen years.
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: Old, which that might explain a fundamental mismash and expectations.
• 2:54
  A nineteen year old maybe this is his first or
• 2:56
  second car purchase. He might see a vehicle purchase very
• 2:59
  different diferently than say, a seasoned mechanic.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Right to him, this might have been a huge financial
• 3:04
  outlay every dollar he had.
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: It could have been and he might have had this
• 3:08
  idea in his head of what he was getting. Yeah,
• 3:10
  and the reality of a thirty year old truck just
• 3:13
  didn't line up with that picture.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: So Revuka's responds to the ad. He lives in Westmont, which,
• 3:17
  for those who don't know, the areas right next door
• 3:19
  to Downer's Grove where the Morales family lives. Yeah, it's
• 3:21
  all very close, very suburban Chicago close. They meet up
• 3:25
  that same weekend, and looking at the investigation notes, this
• 3:29
  is the part that is just so unnerving. There were
• 3:32
  zero red flags.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: Nothing.
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: And usually when you do a forensic reconstruction of a
• 3:37
  crime like this, you find the breadcrumbs.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: You always find something.
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: You find a hostile text message. During the negotiation, you
• 3:44
  find a neighbor who says, oh, yeah, that guy was
• 3:47
  pacing around, he seemed agitated here nothing. The transaction was completed,
• 3:52
  money exchange, title, signed, keys, handed over. By all accounts,
• 3:56
  it was a successful deal.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: It was done the story should have ended there credits roll,
• 4:01
  but then a day or two later, the post purchase
• 4:04
  regret sets in. Authorities haven't released the specific mechanical sailure
• 4:09
  that Revuck is allegedly found, but whatever it was, he
• 4:12
  became convinced he was ripped off.
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: And this is where we get into the psychology of
• 4:16
  the aggrieved buyer. In the digital age, we are so
• 4:19
  used to instant recourse. If Amazon sends you a broken toaster,
• 4:23
  what do you do?
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: You click a button, print label and get a refund.
• 4:26
  It's totally impersonal and frictionless.
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: Exactly, there is no friction. But in a private party
• 4:32
  sale of a nineteen ninety four Ford Ranger, there is
• 4:34
  no return button. There's no customer service line to call.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: You're on your own. It's between you and the seller.
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: And for some personality types, that lack of recourse doesn't
• 4:43
  just feel like bad luck. It feels like a deep
• 4:46
  personal insult. It feels like a humiliation. They feel like
• 4:48
  they've been made a fool of.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: That's a really good point. It's not about the money,
• 4:52
  it's about the ego.
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: It becomes about the ego. And while we don't know Revucks,
• 4:56
  this is full psychological profile. Yet his reaction fits the
• 5:00
  pattern of what some profilers call a grievance collector. Instead
• 5:03
  of handling this civilly, you know, messaging Gabriel saying, hey,
• 5:07
  the truck broke down, can we talk, or even taking
• 5:09
  him to small.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Claims court, which would be the normal adult thing to do.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: The normal thing.
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: Instead, he escalated immediately and disproportionately to direct confrontation.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: And he didn't even use the digital tools at his disposal.
• 5:21
  He didn't blow up Gabriel's phone with angry texts, he
• 5:24
  didn't leave a bad review. He just went back.
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: That's the deviation, That's the moment the crime really begins.
• 5:30
  In my mind, returning to the seller's home unannounced after
• 5:33
  the deal is done. That is a massive breach of
• 5:36
  the social contract of these transactions.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: So let's walk through the timeline of January twenty seven.
• 5:41
  So Tuesday evening five point three eight pm, Ravuca's returns
• 5:44
  to the apartment complex on Ogden Avenue in Downers Growth.
• 5:48
  Now I looked up the location. This isn't some sprawling
• 5:50
  anonymous high rise. It's a smaller, two or three story complex.
• 5:53
  It feels very residential, very quiet.
• 5:56
  Speaker 3: And critically As you mentioned, Gabriel is not home. He's
• 5:59
  at work. Their two year old daughter is reportedly not
• 6:02
  in the immediate vicinity, maybe with her relative or at daycare.
• 6:06
  The reports are slightly unclear on her exact location, but
• 6:09
  she wasn't in the apartment.
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: Eliza is alone and she's five months pregnant. She's five
• 6:15
  months pregnant at home.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: On a Tuesday evening, Ravacs gets into the building. Somehow,
• 6:21
  he meets Eliza in the vestibule.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: The vestibule is an interesting detail.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: It's that little entryway space between the main building door
• 6:27
  and the inner door. Right It suggests she might have
• 6:30
  buzzed him in thinking it was a delivery, or maybe
• 6:33
  she went down to see who was at the door
• 6:34
  without letting him all the way in. It starts as
• 6:36
  a conversation, where is your husband? Or I want my
• 6:39
  money back for the truck. But it doesn't stay in
• 6:42
  the vestibule.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: No, and this is where the invasion aspect really kicks in.
• 6:45
  The altercation moves from that semi public festibule into the
• 6:50
  private sanctuary of their apartment.
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: That transition is absolutely key once an aggressor crosses the
• 6:56
  threshold from a public or semi public space into your
• 6:59
  living space. The dynamic shifts completely. It's no longer a dispute,
• 7:04
  it's a dominance display. He's invading her territory, her home.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: We do have to warn listeners now the details that
• 7:11
  are coming out with the prosecutors always are graphic. We're
• 7:13
  going to discuss the specific forensic details of the attack,
• 7:17
  but it's necessary to understand the legal charges and the
• 7:20
  psychology we're going to discuss later.
• 7:21
  Speaker 3: Yes, the brutality isn't just a grim detail. It's legally
• 7:25
  relevant to the intent element of the law.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: So he's inside the apartment, he pulls a knife, and
• 7:31
  what happens next is described by prosecutors as a frenzy.
• 7:34
  Eliza Morales was stabbed approximately seventy times.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: Let's just stop on that number. Seventy seven zero.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: Just an unfathomable number. I can't even process it.
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: In forensic pathology, we have a term for this. It's
• 7:47
  called overkill. It's a level of violence that far exceeds
• 7:50
  what is necessary to cause death. If you are robbing someone,
• 7:53
  or if you just want to escape a situation, you
• 7:55
  might stab once or twice to capacitate them.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: Sure to get away.
• 7:59
  Speaker 3: You don't stab seventy times. Seventy times takes time. It
• 8:02
  takes a significant amount of physical exertion. This is not
• 8:05
  a quick act.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: And the location of the wounds the filings were specific
• 8:09
  about this, yes they were.
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: They were concentrated on her head and neck. This is
• 8:14
  highly specific and very personal. When injuries are clustered around
• 8:18
  the face, it's often interpreted by profilers as an attempt
• 8:21
  to depersonalize the victim. The attacker is trying to erase
• 8:25
  the person.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: So it's not random flailing, not at all.
• 8:28
  Speaker 3: It signals a level of personal rage that goes far,
• 8:31
  far beyond I'm mad about a used truck. It's just
• 8:35
  a total loss of emotional control, or perhaps a release
• 8:39
  of some kind of pent up rage that had absolutely
• 8:41
  nothing to do with the truck at all. The truck
• 8:43
  was just the catalyst, the spark that led a much
• 8:45
  larger fire.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: And then we have what is to me the most
• 8:48
  heartbreaking and horrifying detail of the entire case. Eliza was
• 8:52
  five months pregnant with a baby girl.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: She was visibly pregnant, she was showing.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: And Rebuca's later confessed to the police that during the attack,
• 9:00
  Eliza actually told him she pleaded with them, she said,
• 9:02
  I'm pregnant.
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: This this is what makes the psychology of this particular
• 9:07
  attacker so deeply disturbing. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists often talk
• 9:12
  about something called a biological break. Even in violent individuals,
• 9:16
  the signal of pregnancy, the signal of I am carrying
• 9:19
  a child, usually causes some kind of hesitation.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: It's a fundamental instinct, It's a deep seated species preservation instinct.
• 9:27
  It's a universal signal of vulnerability that should in a
• 9:31
  normally functioning brain de escalate a conflict.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: But here the breaks just failed.
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: They failed completely. The information that she was pregnant didn't
• 9:39
  stop him. In fact, based on the confession notes, the
• 9:42
  violence continued after that disclosure. That is why the state's
• 9:46
  attorney is using language like pure evil. It's not just
• 9:49
  legal hyperbole. It denotes a person who is operating so
• 9:52
  far outside the fundamental constraints of human empathy that it's
• 9:56
  hard for us to comprehend.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: And the rage wasn't limited to Eliza. There was another
• 10:00
  living being in that apartment, the family.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: Dog, Zula, a pit bull mix.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Yes, and this is part of the triad of violence
• 10:07
  we often see in these cases. Isn't it. Violence against
• 10:09
  humans often correlates with, or is preceded by, violence against animals.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: It's a huge red flag.
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: The dog likely tried to intervene. Dogs are territorial, they
• 10:19
  protect their owners. Zula probably saw her owner being attacked
• 10:22
  and did what a dog would do.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: Revucks stabbed the dog between the eyes.
• 10:27
  Speaker 3: Which again, look at the targeting, that shows precision and intent.
• 10:30
  He wasn't just flailing wildly and the dog got in
• 10:32
  the way. He targeted the animal. It's another layer of brutality.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: Incredibly, Zula survived. The police report says the dog managed
• 10:41
  to run out through a sliding glass door. I saw
• 10:44
  news reports that Zula is at a vet hospital and
• 10:46
  is expected to recover.
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: Which is a small miracle in this ocean of tragedy,
• 10:50
  but also forensically, it's significant a wounded, bleeding dog running
• 10:55
  through a crime scene and out of the building. It
• 10:57
  just adds to the chaotic nature of the scene that
• 10:59
  Revuck is creating.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: So let's try to get inside his head for a second.
• 11:03
  Eliza is dead, the dog is gone. Revokes is standing
• 11:07
  alone in this apartment, covered in blood. It's been maybe
• 11:10
  ten fifteen minutes since he arrived. What is his headspace
• 11:15
  at this moment, because his next move is It's just
• 11:18
  baffling to me.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: It's the classic behavior of a disorganized defender. He clearly
• 11:23
  did not have a plan beyond the initial confrontation. He's
• 11:26
  reacting to his own adrenaline, his own panic. He realizes,
• 11:29
  oh my god, what have I done? And decides he
• 11:31
  needs to cover it up right, But he chooses the
• 11:34
  single most conspicuous, loudest method possible arson.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: He sets the apartment on fire.
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: He tries to burn the evidence, and look at what
• 11:42
  he uses. He uses chemical sanitizers. Prosecutors mention things like
• 11:46
  hand sanitizer that he likely just found in the apartment
• 11:48
  and other household items as accelerants. He starts fires at
• 11:51
  two points of origin, the kitchen stove and near the
• 11:54
  front door.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: Why hand sanitizer? What does that tell you?
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: It tells you everything about his lack of plan. He
• 12:00
  didn't bring gasoline with him. He didn't bring later fluid.
• 12:04
  This confirms the lack of premeditation for the murder itself.
• 12:07
  If he had gone there intending to kill her and
• 12:09
  burn the place down, he would have come prepared.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: He would have had a kit he would have had.
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: A kit using hand sanitizer tells us he was improvising
• 12:16
  in a state of pure panic, grabbing whatever he thought
• 12:19
  was flammable.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: But setting a fire in a multi unit apartment complex.
• 12:25
  That is not a quiet cover up. You're guaranteeing you
• 12:28
  get caught.
• 12:28
  Speaker 3: It's a siren. It's the opposite of a cover up.
• 12:31
  You have smoke detectors, you have fire alarms, you have neighbors,
• 12:34
  smoke spreads. He essentially called the police on himself. He
• 12:37
  turned a private, horrific crime scene into a very public emergency.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: Before he leaves, he grabs a lies a cell.
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: Phone and runs, which is another massive unforced error in
• 12:47
  twenty twenty six. Stealing the victim's phone is essentially putting
• 12:50
  a GPS tracking anklet on yourself and telling the police
• 12:53
  follow me.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: So the alarm goes off. Firefighters arrive at six point
• 12:57
  zero nine pm a find Eliza's body near the entrance.
• 13:02
  They try to resuscitate her, but the trauma is just
• 13:04
  too severe. She's pronounced dead at.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: The scene, and because of that fire alarm, the response
• 13:09
  was immediate. The crime scene was discovered within minutes of
• 13:13
  the killer leaving. If he hadn't set that fire. It
• 13:16
  might have been hours before Gabriel came home from work
• 13:18
  and found her the fire. His attempted cover up actually
• 13:23
  accelerated the entire investigation.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's talk about that investigation. You mentioned blips attack earlier,
• 13:28
  but this is also a Blix investigation. The Downers Grove
• 13:31
  police solved this in record time.
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: It was a masterclass in combining modern digital forensics with
• 13:37
  good old fashioned police work. In a modern homicide, the
• 13:40
  very first thing detectives do is look for what we
• 13:42
  call the digital handshake. Who was the last person the
• 13:45
  victim communicated.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: With, And because this whole thing started on Facebook Marketplace,
• 13:50
  that communication is logged on Meta servers. It's right there.
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: It's right there, timestamped, and platforms like Meta which owns Facebook,
• 13:57
  have portals for law enforcement in what are called called
• 14:00
  exigent circumstances, and a homicide and arson is the definition
• 14:04
  of exigent. They can provide that data very very quickly.
• 14:07
  Police likely saw the marketplace messages about the truck sale
• 14:10
  to Nitas Rovuca's almost immediately.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: So they had a name within the first hour, probably easily.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: Then they had the stolen phone pinging right, They.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Can track its location in near real time.
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: They tracked his movements from the apartment complex right back
• 14:23
  to his home address in Westmont. At the same time,
• 14:26
  they're canvassing the neighborhood, talking to witnesses and polling camera footage.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: And you have to assume in a suburb like Downers
• 14:33
  Grove there are ring cameras, traffic cams, business security systems everywhere.
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: You cannot move through a suburb. In twenty twenty six
• 14:41
  without being recorded. His entire path from his home to
• 14:44
  hers and back again was almost certainly captured on video,
• 14:47
  creating a digital and visual trail they could follow.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: So at eleven four to two pm, and this is
• 14:52
  less than six hours after the murder, police are knocking
• 14:55
  on his door.
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: In Westmont and the evidence was just sitting there waiting
• 14:58
  for them. They execute a search war and find bloody clothing.
• 15:02
  They find Eliza's stolen phone. This wasn't a case of
• 15:06
  we need to wait weeks for DNA results to come
• 15:09
  back from the lab. The physical chain of evidence was
• 15:12
  direct and unbroken.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: And then he confessed.
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: He did, He waved his Miranda rights and he spoke
• 15:18
  to detectives. He admitted to the stabbing. He admitted to
• 15:21
  setting the fire, he admitted to stabbing the dog, and,
• 15:24
  crucially for the charges were about to discuss, he admitted
• 15:27
  that he knew she was pregnant because she told him.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: The confession is just devastating. Let's unpack the legal side
• 15:32
  of this, because the charges are incredibly heavy and Illinois
• 15:36
  law has some very specific nuances that are important.
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: Here it's a laundry list of the most serious felonies
• 15:41
  you can commit. He's facing three counts of first degree murder.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: Why three counts for one victim?
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: For Eliza, It's a common prosecutorial strategy. They charge under
• 15:51
  different legal theories. One count is for intentional murder, meaning
• 15:55
  he went there with the intent killer. Another count is
• 15:58
  for felony murder based on the underlying felony of armed robbery,
• 16:02
  which was stealing the phone.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: So if you kill someone while committing another serious crime,
• 16:06
  it's automatically verse degree murder, that's right.
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: And the third count is another felony murder charge, this
• 16:11
  one committed during the course of the aggravated arson. Prosecutors
• 16:15
  pile these charges up to ensure that if a jury
• 16:18
  has a problem with one legal technicality, the other charges.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: Will still stick.
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: It gives them multiple paths to the same conviction.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: But then there is the charge that really caught my
• 16:27
  eye in the documents, intentional homicide of an unborn child.
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: This is based on Illinois Statute seven twenty ILCS fifty
• 16:35
  nine to one point two. This is a very powerful
• 16:38
  piece of legislation and not every state has one like it.
• 16:42
  In some states, killing a fetus is only considered homicide
• 16:45
  if the fetus is viable, meaning it could survive outside
• 16:48
  the womb, which is.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: Usually around twenty four weeks. Eliza was at twenty weeks
• 16:52
  or five months correct.
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: The Illinois law is much broader. It protects the unborn
• 16:57
  child from conception to birth. It creates a separate and
• 17:01
  distinct crime for ending the life of the fetus.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: And what does the prosecutor have to prove for that
• 17:07
  charge to stick? What's the key element?
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: The key element is knowledge. The statute requires that the
• 17:13
  offender knew the woman was pregnant, or that a reasonable
• 17:16
  person in his position should have known.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: And his own confession gave him that on a silver platter.
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: He gift wrapped it for them when he admitted to
• 17:25
  detectives that Eliza told him I'm pregnant. He essentially signed
• 17:28
  his own conviction on that specific charge. Without that confession,
• 17:32
  a defense lawyer could argue he didn't know she was
• 17:34
  only five months along. Maybe he didn't notice in the
• 17:37
  heat of the moment. But the confession removes all doubt.
• 17:40
  It makes it a knowing act.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: So with all of these charges, what kind of sentencing
• 17:43
  are we looking at here?
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: Well, Illinois abolished the death penalty years ago, but for
• 17:48
  a double homicide, which this effectively is under the law
• 17:52
  involving the murder of a child and the unborn child accounts,
• 17:54
  plus the exceptionally brutal or heinous nature of the crime,
• 18:00
  looking at a mandatory sentence of natural life.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: In prison, no possibility of parole none.
• 18:05
  Speaker 3: He will die in prison. There is virtually no judicial
• 18:08
  discretion on this.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: I also saw a note about him being denied pre
• 18:11
  trial release in Illinois. They recently ended cash bail with
• 18:15
  the Safety Act, which has been controversial.
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: Right the Pre Trial Fairness Act, and a lot of
• 18:20
  people misunderstand how it works. It doesn't mean everyone just
• 18:23
  walks free before trial. It means judges make thetension decisions
• 18:26
  based on a person's level of danger to the community,
• 18:29
  not the size of their bank account.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: So it's not about if you can afford bail, it's
• 18:33
  about if you're a threat exactly.
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: And in this case, Judge Joshua Diden looked at the
• 18:37
  charges a brutal double murder, arson and the high flight risk,
• 18:41
  and he ruled that Revocas poses a specific, real and
• 18:45
  present threat to public safety. So he is detained. No
• 18:48
  amount of money could get him out, which is how
• 18:51
  the system is designed to work for crimes this severe.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: The state's attorney, Robert Berlin, released a public statement. I
• 18:57
  want to read a part of it because the language
• 18:59
  is so strong. Yeah, he said, the sheer brutality of
• 19:01
  this senseless attack is surprisingly unmatched in its savagery. And
• 19:06
  he called the motive petty frustration.
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: And that's the disconnect that just hurts the most, isn't
• 19:11
  it petty frustration. We can on some level understand crimes
• 19:15
  of passion or crimes of desperation or greed, but killing
• 19:18
  a pregnant woman in her unborn child and burning down
• 19:21
  a building because you're unhappy with a thirty year old truck,
• 19:23
  It's nihilistic. There's no logic to it.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: It's a complete failure of being a human being, it
• 19:28
  really is. I want to talk about Eliza for a minute,
• 19:29
  because in the middle of all this legal talk and
• 19:32
  forensic analysis and psychology, we have a thirty year old
• 19:35
  woman who's just at home living her life.
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: And by all accounts, she was the vibrant, nurturing center
• 19:42
  of her family. She and her husband, Gabriel, were high
• 19:45
  school sweethearts. I mean, think about that history. They grew
• 19:47
  up together and.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: They were building a nursery. That detail from the family statement.
• 19:52
  Speaker 3: That just destroys me. The nursery, it's the ultimate symbol
• 19:55
  of the future. They were literally preparing for a new life,
• 19:58
  and instead this is inexplicable violence. This death came to
• 20:03
  their door.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: Gabriel statement to the press was very brief but so powerful.
• 20:08
  All he said was I'm going to spend the rest
• 20:10
  of my life missing her.
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: And we have to remember the scope of his loss.
• 20:14
  It's almost impossible to comprehend. He didn't just lose his wife,
• 20:17
  he lost his unborn daughter, and he.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: Lost his home.
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: He can't go back to that apartment, no never. Between
• 20:22
  the fire damage, the water damage from the firefighters, and
• 20:25
  just the profound psychological trauma of what happened in that
• 20:27
  vestibule in that living room. That home is gone forever.
• 20:31
  He is displaced in every single sense of the word,
• 20:34
  all because he sold a used truck.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: The community in Downers Grove and Westmont, these are tight
• 20:39
  knit suburbs. People know each other. They held vigils on
• 20:42
  January twenty.
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: Ninth, and thousands and thousands of dollars have been raised
• 20:45
  on GoFundMe campaigns for the family, and it shows that
• 20:48
  people desperately want to help. But money can't fix this.
• 20:51
  It can pay for funeral, it can help with a
• 20:53
  security deposit on a new apartment for him and his
• 20:55
  surviving child, but it can't fill that void.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: This brings us to the so well portion of our
• 21:01
  deep dive. We always try to find the takeaway for you,
• 21:04
  the listener, and here it feels like we have to
• 21:06
  talk about safety because millions of us use Facebook marketplace.
• 21:11
  I sold the coffee table last week, You've bought stuff
• 21:13
  on there.
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: We all do it in ninety nine point nine nine
• 21:15
  percent of the time. It's perfectly fine, but we are
• 21:18
  all suffering from what's called survivor bias because nothing bad
• 21:22
  happened to us the last ten times we used it.
• 21:24
  We just assume nothing bad will happen the next time.
• 21:27
  This case is a brutal reminder of the point zero
• 21:29
  one percent.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: So what changes now after reading this entire file? Do
• 21:33
  we just stop using these platforms? Is that the answer?
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: I don't think we stop because they're too integrated into
• 21:39
  our lives now. But we have to change the protocol.
• 21:42
  We need to treat these transactions with the same level
• 21:44
  of security awareness that we would treat a blind date
• 21:47
  you met online or a major bank withdrawal. You wouldn't
• 21:51
  invite total stranger from a dating app to your home
• 21:54
  alone at night on the first meeting, No way, So
• 21:56
  why do we do it for a five hundred dollars transaction?
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: Let's break down the must noos for everyone listening. The
• 22:03
  practical steps.
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: Okay, the first rule, and this case proves it definitively
• 22:08
  de territorialize the transaction. Never ever do business at your home.
• 22:13
  I don't care if you're selling a sofa.
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: Or a car.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: Even for something big like a truck, you may think, oh,
• 22:18
  they have to come here to see it, especially for
• 22:19
  a truck.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: Drive it to a neutral location.
• 22:22
  Speaker 3: Your home address should be the most protected piece of
• 22:25
  information you.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: Have, So where specifically, is the grocery store parking lot
• 22:30
  good enough?
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: It's better than your home, But there is an even
• 22:33
  better option, a safe exchange zone. Almost every police department
• 22:37
  in the suburbs Downers Grove, Westmont and Naperville, you name it,
• 22:41
  they all have these. Now. It's a designated couple of
• 22:43
  parking spots, usually right in front of the police station,
• 22:47
  that are under two hundred and forty seven high definition
• 22:50
  video surveillance.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: Why does that specific location matter so much?
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: It's a powerful psychological deterrent. A predator or even someone
• 22:58
  with poor impulse can Dave's very differently when they are
• 23:02
  standing ten feet from the door of a police station
• 23:04
  with a camera pointed at them. The risk of getting
• 23:06
  caught is too high. If Revucas had been told meet
• 23:10
  me at the Downers Grove police station to discuss a refund,
• 23:12
  this murder absolutely would not have happened. He wouldn't have
• 23:15
  brought a knife to a police station to have that conversation.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: Okay, that's number one. What about the buddy system crucial?
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: Never go alone to a transaction, and don't be alone
• 23:25
  when the other person comes to you, even at a
• 23:27
  neutral site. Predators attackers, they look for isolation. Eliza was alone,
• 23:33
  rebuck is new or at least quickly realized she was alone.
• 23:36
  If Gabriel had been there, or a brother, or even
• 23:39
  just a neighbor standing in the room, the entire dynamic shifts.
• 23:43
  There is strength and safety in numbers, and then.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: There's the old advice trust your gut.
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: We say this a lot, but we need to define
• 23:50
  what that actually means in practice. We are all socially
• 23:53
  conditioned to be polite. We don't want to be rude.
• 23:55
  We don't want to offend the guy by saying, you
• 23:57
  know what, I don't like your vibe. I'm not opening
• 23:59
  my door right.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: We worry about getting a bad review or just creating
• 24:02
  an awkward moment.
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: You have to value your life more than your politeness.
• 24:06
  If a buyer shows up unannounced days after a sale,
• 24:09
  like Rabuckas did, that is an immediate five alarm red alert.
• 24:14
  That is not normal behavior. It is aggressive boundary crossing behavior.
• 24:17
  Do not open the door, talk through the door of
• 24:19
  the intercomm and if they don't leave, you call nine
• 24:21
  one one period.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: I've also seen a lot of discussion online over the
• 24:24
  last few days about platform responsibility. Shouldn't meta shouldn't Facebook
• 24:30
  be doing more here?
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: There's a very strong argument for that. Right now on Marketplace,
• 24:36
  you can buy and sell almost completely anonymously. Why isn't
• 24:40
  there some form of ID verification? If Airbnb requires me
• 24:44
  to upload a copy of my driver's license to rent
• 24:47
  a room for a weekend.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: An uber knows exactly who your driver is exactly.
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: Why can I arrange to meet a total stranger to
• 24:54
  exchange thousands of dollars in goods based on a Burner
• 24:57
  profile with a fake name and a picture of a
• 24:59
  son set. It doesn't make sense.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: It's a friction argument again, right. Meta wants it to
• 25:04
  be as easy and frictionless as possible to encourage use.
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: That's their business model. Friction reduces volume. But AI could help.
• 25:11
  AI could flag aggressive or threatening language in the chats.
• 25:14
  It could flag if a user has a history of
• 25:16
  disputes that are escalating. But until the platforms are forced
• 25:20
  to step up, either by regulation or by lawsuits, the
• 25:22
  burden of safety is one hundred percent on us, the users.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: It's a heavy burden to carry for selling a used bicycle,
• 25:28
  it is we.
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: Are inviting the entire world into our lives through these apps,
• 25:33
  and most of the world is decent and kind. But
• 25:37
  the fraction that isn't there on the app too, right
• 25:41
  alongside everyone else.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: We're coming to the end of our time. We've unpacked
• 25:44
  the crime, the legal ramifications, the forensics, and the safety protocols.
• 25:49
  But I just can't stop thinking about the absolute staggering
• 25:53
  triviality of it all.
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: The truck.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: The truck, a nineteen ninety four Ford Ranger. It's probably
• 25:57
  worth what fifteen hundred dollars, maybe less if it had
• 26:00
  mechanical issues.
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: It's less than the cost of a new iPhone. And
• 26:03
  that was the price of a life, two lives.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: Eliza Morales did nothing wrong. She wasn't involved in a
• 26:08
  drug deal. She wasn't in a gang. She didn't provoke this.
• 26:11
  She was just at home on a Tuesday.
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: She was the innocent bystander in a transaction she didn't
• 26:16
  even personally initiate. Her husband was the one who sold
• 26:19
  the truck. She paid the ultimate price for his marketplace listing.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: And that forces us to ask a really uncomfortable question.
• 26:26
  I think we all love the convenience, We love the
• 26:29
  idea of turning our old junk into cash with a
• 26:31
  few clicks, But is the convenience of a doorstep transaction
• 26:35
  ever worth the vulnerability of inviting the world and all
• 26:38
  its unknown volatility right into your living room.
• 26:41
  Speaker 3: That's the question everyone listening needs to answer for themselves
• 26:44
  before they post that next listing. You look at that
• 26:46
  old bookshelf for that video game console, and you have
• 26:49
  to ask, is it really worth it?
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: Please take care of yourselves, watch out for each other,
• 26:54
  and use the safe exchange zones.
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: Stay safe.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: We'll see on the next deep dive.