Latest / Creepy Horror Stories / The Virgin, The Wife, and Four Bullet Holes

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The Virgin, The Wife, and Four Bullet Holes · Creepy Horror Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: There is a version of this story where everything makes sense.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: A man finds love late in life, marries, and starts over.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: That version ends at a wedding reception with champagne and photographs.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: This version ends on a street corner in East Los
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Angeles with four bullet holes and an engine still running.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: This case stayed with me long after I finished reading it,
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: not because of the violence. because of how completely a
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: person can be seen and still not be seen at all.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Bruce Cleland was 42 years old when he walked up
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: to a spice vendor at a farmer's market in 1995.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: He had never been on a date, not one. 42
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: years old, raised in South Pasadena by a stable, comfortable family.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: A man who had scored perfectly on the math section
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: of the SAT and had hasted his college board exams,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: in physics and chemistry. The people who knew him described
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: him in one consistent cluster of words, loyal, honest, reliable.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: A man who showed up when he said he would,
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: who kept his word, who had never given anyone a
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: reason to distrust him. And somehow with all of that,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: he had arrived at middle age without a single romantic relationship,
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: not a girlfriend, not a first date. That detail is
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: not just a fact about Bruce. It is the architecture
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: of everything that followed. The woman behind the spice table
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: was named Rebecca Salstato. She was 28. She had grown
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: up in East Los Angeles in conditions that were the
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: opposite of Bruce's childhood. In almost every measurable way, her
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: father was absent. Her mother, by the accounts of people
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: who knew the family, was distant and abusive. She had
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: three sisters and a son named Salvador, whose own father
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: had walked away four years earlier. She was selling herbs
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: and spices at a farmer's market because that was the
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: work available to her, and she was, by all accounts, striking.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Warm when she chose to be. Capable of making someone
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: feel like the only person in the room. Bruce had
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: no experience reading what that kind of warmth might cost.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: The rational explanation for what happened next is simple. A
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: lonely man met a charming woman, fell hard, and moved
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: too fast. That explanation is true as far as it goes.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: But it stops working somewhere around the moment Bruce's friend
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: Bertha saw Rebecca introduce him, not in person, on paper.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: Rebecca had shown Bertha Bruce's credit report before Bertha had
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: ever met him, face to face. Not a photograph. Not
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: a description. A credit report. That detail sits quietly in
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: the background of the whole story. It is easy to
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: file under ambition and move on. But it means that
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: before Bruce ever walked through a door that mattered to Rebecca,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: she already knew exactly what he was worth. Bruce bought
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: Rebecca a house, not an apartment, not a rental arrangement.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: A house on a hill, the kind with a view,
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: the kind with enough room for Rebecca and Salvador to
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: have a life that looked nothing like the one Rebecca
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: had grown up in. Bruce kept his own place a
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: condominium near the ocean. Two separate homes, two separate lives,
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: a relationship held in deliberate suspension. Rebecca had told him clearly,
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: no physical intimacy until they were married. She had said
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: this to Bruce. She had also said it to at
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: least one friend. And the way she said it, the
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: way it was framed, suggested it was less a personal
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: value and more a mechanism, a door kept locked, so
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: the key retained its value. Something about that arrangement deserves attention. Bruce,
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: a man with no prior experience in romantic relationships, had
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: found a woman who asked him to wait. And he waited.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: He financed surgeries, breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, lip work. He paid
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: for jewelry. He furnished the house on the hill. He
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: gave her son a staple home. He invested... in the
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: most literal sense of the word, in the life Rebecca
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: was building around herself. And he waited for the door
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: to open. When it came time to plan the wedding,
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: Rebecca hired a photographer named Beth Lamb with no budget ceiling.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Whatever it costs, it costs. Bruce was paying. The venue
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: was a luxury country club. Bruce paid for that too.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: At some point during the planning, Rebecca said something to
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Beth that Beth would not forget. The exact phrasing, as
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: it was later recalled, was something close to this. You
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: want to know the trick to getting a ring like this?
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: Don't sleep with them until you are married. She said
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: it with the confidence of someone describing a technique that
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: had worked. Beth remembered it. She filed it away. She
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: would remember it again later, at the worst possible moment.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: The honeymoon came and went. Afterward, Rebecca told friends that
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: Bruce had not performed well. Within days of returning, she
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: reached out to a man she had met at her
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: bachelorette party, a stripper, to arrange a meeting. The marriage was,
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: in practical terms, already over before the luggage was unpacked.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: Approximately three months after the wedding, Rebecca retained a lawyer
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: and filed for divorce. Her terms were not modest half
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: of Bruce's assets, plus ongoing expenses. Bruce refused to sign.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: He did not want the marriage to end. His parents
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: later said that the last time they saw him, the
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: night of the murder, Bruce told them he was going
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: to try to work things out with Rebecca, that they
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: were going to dinner, that he thought there was still
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: something worth saving. Those were the last words he said
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: to his family about the future. What Bruce did not
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: know And what would only surface in the investigation that
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: followed was that, while the divorce papers sat unsigned, Rebecca
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: had already been forging his name on life insurance policies,
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: multiple policies, all naming her as beneficiary. The total coverage
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: exceeded $ 1 million. She had also, by that point, recruited
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: two men to do something that the divorce papers could
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: not accomplish cleanly or quickly. The investigators would later conclude
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: that she had used her sexuality to maintain control over
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: both of them. Neither man, based on available evidence, appears
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: to have needed much convincing. The rational explanation that Rebecca
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: was a desperate woman, making reckless choices, stops working here.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: What emerges instead is something more deliberate. A sequence of steps,
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: each one building on the last, each one closing off
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: the exit. Bruce did not know he was standing in
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: front of The first thing police noticed when they arrived
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: at the scene was how ordinary it looked. A dark
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: street in East Los Angeles. A stop sign. A black
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: SUV with its headlights on and its engine still running.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: Two doors left open. Rebecca Cleland was lying on the
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: pavement nearby, conscious, crying. Bruce's body was a short distance away,
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: crumpled at the entrance of a garage driveway. There was
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: blood in the gutter. The detectives who caught the case
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: that night faced three immediate possibilities. A gang shooting in
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: the wrong place at the wrong time. A robbery gone wrong.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: Or something more targeted. Nothing at the scene pointed clearly
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: toward any of them. Rebecca told investigators she had no
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: idea what happened. She said someone hit her from behind
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: and then she lost consciousness. When she came to, Bruce
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: was gone and her engagement ring had been stolen. Everything
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: about that story could have been true. East Los Angeles
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: had real violence, real danger, real robberies. And Rebecca looked
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: like a victim. She was on the ground. She was crying.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: She had a bruise. The rational explanation was sitting right there,
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: waiting to be picked up. But the rational explanation had
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: a problem. Several problems. A witness near the scene had
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: seen a man running with a gun. That man got
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: into a waiting car and disappeared. A getaway driver. That
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: detail was not consistent with an opportunistic robberies. Robberies do
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: not come with getaway drivers. Robberies do not arrive and
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: leave on a schedule. Something about this killing had been arranged.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: Investigators began pulling phone records. What they found on Rebecca's call,
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: log from that evening. rewrote everything they thought they knew
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: about the night. Eleven calls. She had made at least
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: eleven phone calls during dinner, in the hours before the shooting.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: Every time Bruce looked away, the phone came out. She
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: was reaching someone repeatedly, at intervals, while sitting across from
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: the man she claimed to love. While the waiter refilled
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Bruce's glass, while he talked about trying to save their marriage,
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: eleven calls to a number. Police would trace back with
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: devastating precision. That is where the rational explanation stopped working.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: If this were a robbery... Rebecca could not have known,
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: in advance, where to be robbed. If this were random
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: gang violence, there would be no reason for eleven coordinated calls.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: The witness who saw the gunman later identified him in
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: a police lineup, and before the night of the murder,
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: a man in the area had purchased a black market
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: weapon of the same type used to kill Bruce. The
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: purchase happened before the dinner, before the restaurant, before Rebecca
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: said she had no idea what was coming. Every piece
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: of evidence was pointed in one direction, and that direction
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: had Rebecca at the center. There is something that does
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: not fit neatly into the narrative of a cold, calculated
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: killer though. The people who knew Rebecca, the ones who
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: had watched her work through Bruce's finances, With patient precision,
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: who had seen her file, divorce papers, who had heard
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: the things she said about the marriage, most of them
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: still did not believe she was capable of ordering someone's death. Greed, yes. Manipulation, yes.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: But murder, they hesitated. That hesitation is important. It means
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: the machine Rebecca built was invisible, even to people who
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: were watching it closely. There is a version of the
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: night of the murder that Bruce Cleland believed until the
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: last moment of his life. In that version, he and
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Rebecca were going to dinner to try again. He had
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: told his parents earlier that evening that he wanted to
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: reconcile with her. His parents, who had already lost their
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: daughter to cancer the year before, listened to their son
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: describe hope. That was the last time they heard his voice.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: Bruce walked out of their home, believing the woman he
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: married still wanted a future with him. Rebecca drove that night,
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: She later told police it was because Bruce had been
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: drinking more than usual. That detail alone, the control of
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: the car, the control of the route, the control of
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: when and where they stopped, would only become visible in hindsight.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: They were in a part of East Los Angeles that
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: Bruce did not know well. Rebecca pulled the SUV over
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: near a stop sign and mentioned that the rear hatch
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: seemed to be open. She got out to check it.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: Bruce stayed in the passenger seat. A man approached from
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: behind the vehicle. Bruce was shot once in the back
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: as he tried to run. He made it only a
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: few steps, then two bullets in the back of the head,
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: then one in the face at close range. Execution distance,
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: four shots total. His body came to rest at the
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: entrance of a garage driveway just off the street. There
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: is no version of this story where Bruce had any chance.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: The positioning was deliberate. The timing was was deliberate. The
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: moment Rebecca stepped away from the car, the door was
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: already opening somewhere else in East Los Angeles. The man
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: with the gun climbing into the passenger seat of a
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: second vehicle being driven toward a coordinate Rebecca had confirmed
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: with 11 phone calls. When police arrived, the SUV's lights
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: were still on. The engine was still running. The radio
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: was still playing. and Rebecca was lying on the ground nearby, conscious,
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: telling officers that she had been struck from behind and
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: remembered nothing. Something in that scene felt wrong to the
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: first detectives on site, though none of them could have
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: named it precisely. The air of the whole thing was
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: too arranged, too clean for a robbery. The car in
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: too visible a spot, Rebecca too close, too conscious, too composed.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: For someone who had just watched her husband die, she
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: told them her ring had been stolen. The diamond ring
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: Bruce had bought her. Gone. What happened next still cannot
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: be explained as anything other than the single greatest miscalculation
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Rebecca Cleland ever made. Beth Lamb attended the funeral. Beth
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: had been hired by Rebecca to photograph the wedding. Hired
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: without any budget ceiling, given the kind of access most
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: photographers only dream about. During the planning sessions, Rebecca had
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: said something to Beth that stayed with her the way
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: a splinter stays under skin. Something about the ring, about
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: how to get a man to buy a ring like that.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: The secret, Rebecca had explained, was to never sleep with
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: him until after the wedding. Beth had filed that comment
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: away without quite knowing what to do with it. At
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: the funeral, she saw the ring. It was on Rebecca's finger.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: The same diamond ring that Rebecca had told police was
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: stolen the night her husband was murdered. The same ring
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: that had become part of the official account of what happened.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: A robbery, a theft, evidence of a stranger's violence. The
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: ring was sitting in plain sight on Rebecca's hand at
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: the funeral of the man who bought it. Beth called
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: the police. When investigators arrived and asked to see Rebecca's hands,
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: the ring was still there. There was no version of
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: that moment that supported Rebecca's story. A stolen ring does
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: not return to the finger of the person it was
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: stolen from before her husband is in the ground. The
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: ring had never left her. She had kept it. She
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: had worn it to his funeral. That one object, chosen
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: by Rebecca, paid for by Bruce, declared stolen, then worn
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: to his burial, collapsed the entire structure of her account
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: in a single image, and what it opened underneath was
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: not ambiguity. What it opened was the full shape of
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: everything that had been built since 1995. The credit report
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: that Bertha saw instead of a person, the celibacy that
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: lasted exactly as long as it needed to, The insurance
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: policies with forged signatures worth more than a million dollars.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: The 11 calls during the last dinner. Every detail recontextualized.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Every other detail. And at the center of all of it,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: a diamond ring that Rebecca Clayland could not bring herself
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: to leave at home. Seven months after Bruce's death, Rebecca
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: was arrested alongside both men. The shooter. The driver. The
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: jury heard the phone records. The insurance forgeries. The witness identification.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: the ring. They returned, a verdict of guilty on first-degree
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The judge sentenced all
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: three to life without the possibility of parole. The people
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: who had known Rebecca, the ones who believed she was
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: greedy but not dangerous, learned in that courtroom what the
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: difference really costs, and Bruce's parents, who had buried their
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: daughter the year before, now had no children left. Seven
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: months after Bruce Cleland was shot Four times in an
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: East Los Angeles street, police arrested Rebecca and both men.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: The investigation had quietly assembled what the crime scene could not.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: Phone records, a black market weapon purchase, a witness identification,
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: and a diamond ring that refused to disappear. The jury
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: took no extraordinary length of time to reach its verdict.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: First-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder. All three received life
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: without the possibility of parole. There is something in that
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: outcome that feels clean on paper and hollow everywhere else.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: Bruce's parents attended every day of the trial. They had
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: buried their daughter the year before. Cancer. Quiet. Final. Bruce
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: had been the surviving child. The one who called. The
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: one who showed up. When the verdict was read, they
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: were the people in that courtroom who had lost the
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: most and gained the least. Justice named a sentence. It
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: did not return anything. What the trial established, piece by piece,
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: was that nothing about the relationship had been accidental. The
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: spice market encounter in 1995 was the beginning of a selection,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: not a story. Rebecca's friend Bertha had seen Bruce's credit
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: report before she ever met him in person. The celibacy
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: was declared to friends as strategy, not conviction. The wedding
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: was designed and funded entirely by the man who would
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: not survive the marriage by four months. Every step had
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: a direction. Bruce never saw it. The insurance policies are
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: the detail that sits longest after everything else settles. Rebecca
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: had forged Bruce's signature on more than $ 1 million in
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: life insurance, naming herself as beneficiary, before she ever filed
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: for divorce. That means the divorce papers and the insurance
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: forgeries were running simultaneously. Two exit strategies. One required Bruce
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: alive and cooperative. The other did not. When he refused
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: to sign the divorce settlement, only one of those strategies
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: remained viable. The 11 phone calls made during their final
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: dinner have never been fully explained in terms of exact content.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: Investigators traced the numbers. The direction of those calls is
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: not in dispute. What remains is the image itself. Bruce
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: across the table, eating, perhaps hoping perhaps rehearsing whatever he
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: planned to say about reconciliation. Detail, second reconciliation, and Rebecca,
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: phone in hand, every time he looked away, coordinating the
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: last hour of his life. His parents last saw him
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: that evening, before the dinner. He told them he was
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: going to try to save the marriage. That was the
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: last thing he said to them about his future. He
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: said it the way someone says it, when they still
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: believe it is possible. What no one who knew Rebecca
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: before the arrest could fully absorb was the gap between
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: what they suspected and what she had actually done. People
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: who knew about the credit report, about the celibacy plan,
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: about the forged signatures, People who had already decided she
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: was calculating and cold still could not place her at
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: the edge of that street. Watching the distance between fraud
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: and murder felt too wide to cross. It was not.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: That failure of imagination is not a flaw in the
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: people who knew her. It is the mechanism the entire
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: scheme depended on. Bruce Clayland was 42 years old. He
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: had never been on a date before. He met Rebecca.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: He had spent decades invisible to the world of romantic attention.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: And then one afternoon in a farmer's market, a woman
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: smiled at him and everything shifted. He bought her a
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: house on a hill. He paid for surgeries, jewelry, furniture,
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: a wedding at a country club, a honeymoon. He refused
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: to sign divorce papers. because he still believed the marriage
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: was worth saving. He told his parents. So, hours before
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: he died, the ring Rebecca said was stolen the night
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: of the murder was on her finger at his funeral.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: Beth Lamb saw it across the room, the same ring
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: Bruce had bought, the same ring Rebecca had chosen, the
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: ring that was supposed to be gone. Beth Lamb called
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: the police. Officers arrived and asked to see Rebecca's hands.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: The ring was there. Bruce's parents had no surviving children.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: After that night, they had lost a daughter to cancer
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: and a son to a diamond ring and 11 phone
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: calls and a plan that started in a spice market
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: and ended on a street in East Los Angeles with
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: four bullets fired at close range. The last confirmed image
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: of Bruce Clayland is not from the crime scene. It
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: is from that evening, standing with his parents, telling them
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: he was going to try. He believed it when he
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: said it. He walked out the door and did not
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: look back. This show is made by Oboe Media.