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He murdered his Wife to Get Her Money - and to be with his New Girlfriend · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Picture this. You know, it's midnight in upstate New York,
• 0:03
  the absolute dead of winter, right, freezing cold exactly, and
• 0:07
  there's this heavy, dual wheeled pickup truck and it's sitting
• 0:11
  completely upside down, just totally submerged in the pitch black,
• 0:14
  freezing water of a lake.
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: A literal nightmare scenario.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, on the shoreline, you have a husband
• 0:21
  screaming for help. He's frantically pointing to the water, telling
• 0:24
  everyone his wife is trapped inside.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: So first responders arrive and it is just pure chaos.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Right, total chaos. The water is so shockingly cold that
• 0:32
  a police diver actually risks hypothermia just going in to
• 0:35
  look for her. Wow. Yeah, But they managed to pull
• 0:38
  the woman out, and an EMT immediately starts furious chess compressions.
• 0:43
  I mean, they are rushing her to the local hospital.
• 0:46
  It looks like the absolute picture of a tragic freak
• 0:49
  accident on an icy rural road.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: It really does. But you know, then you look a
• 0:53
  little closer at the husband standing on the shore.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Right, because he supposedly just survived this underwater nightmare too.
• 0:59
  He claims he was fighting for his life in a
• 1:01
  sinking metal box.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: Exactly, and yet his hair, this feathered mullet he had,
• 1:07
  is perfectly dry, like every single hair is perfectly in place, which.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: Is just a wild I mean, how does that happen?
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: It doesn't, And it's the kind of detail that just
• 1:16
  stops an investigator dead in their tracks.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Because the physical reality of the scene is violently clashing
• 1:22
  with the story he's telling.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you enter this really tricky diagnostic gray area. I mean,
• 1:28
  a fatal car crash usually operates on very simple linear physics.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Right, A tire loses traction, a car hits.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: A tree exactly, the damage tells a straightforward story of
• 1:38
  mass and velocity. But when that physical story doesn't match up,
• 1:42
  you have to pivot right, move from simple physics into
• 1:45
  this incredibly complex web of multidisciplinary forensic.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Science, which is exactly what we are unpacking for you today.
• 1:51
  Welcome to the deep Dive. We are looking at this
• 1:53
  fascinating transcript of a documentary from the YouTube channel True
• 1:57
  Crime Central.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It details the death of Patty Wassick in Guildford,
• 2:01
  New York.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: And our mission today for you listening is to pull
• 2:05
  apart this supposedly open and shut tragedy. We are going
• 2:10
  to trace the breadcrumbs to see how a narrative of
• 2:13
  tragic accident completely you unravels.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: And we are talking about microscopic details here.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely, Like we'll explore how something is seemingly insignificant
• 2:23
  as a scraped to lip and literally a tiny annoying
• 2:26
  weed can just dismantle an elaborate, perfectly staged alibi.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: It's incredible and a concept from forensic pathology really anchors
• 2:35
  this whole case. For me. It's the idea that a
• 2:37
  human body is essentially a sea of evidence. A sea
• 2:40
  of evidence I like that, Yeah, I mean every single
• 2:42
  fiber on an article of clothing, every microscopic contusion or abrasion.
• 2:46
  It's an objective record of what that body actually experienced, right.
• 2:49
  It doesn't lie exactly, And drowning specifically as a cause
• 2:53
  of death relies heavily on this concept because it is
• 2:55
  notoriously one of the hardest things to definitively prove.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Wait, really, I would think in the lungs makes.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: It obvious, you'd think so, but no. To scientifically conclude
• 3:04
  that someone drowned, a forensic pathologist essentially has to rule
• 3:08
  out absolutely every other possible cause of death.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: First. Wow, Okay, so let's travel back to that freezing night.
• 3:15
  The setting is Guildford, New York, right, and we're talking
• 3:19
  about a tiny rural hamlet. The population is maybe twelve
• 3:24
  hundred people.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: Very small town.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there are literally no traffic lights. The documentary describes
• 3:29
  the residents as AsSalt of the earth folks. The local
• 3:33
  police department's day to day usually involves like lost kids,
• 3:36
  maybe minor fender benders.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: Or a domestic dispute here and there.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Right. One detective even noted they get all the big
• 3:42
  city crimes, but just in very small, infrequent doses. So
• 3:46
  when a nine to one to one call shatters the
• 3:47
  quiet reporting a massive truck flipped into Guildford Lake, the
• 3:51
  response is massive and immediate.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: The Guildford Fire Department and local first responders. They just
• 3:57
  converge on this pitch black lake.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: And the cold is just piercing around.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: Absolutely freezing, and they find Peter Wassick, he's the truck's owner,
• 4:05
  just hysterical on the bank. He's shouting that his wife, Patty,
• 4:09
  is still in the.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: Water, and the situation is so frantic that police actually
• 4:14
  have to place Peter in the back of a cruiser.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, just to keep him out of the freezing water
• 4:18
  and basically out of the way of the rescue effort.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: Meanwhile, a police diver goes into the lake and you
• 4:24
  can only imagine the zero visibility conditions down there. I mean,
• 4:28
  it's pitch black.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: It must have been terrifying. He finds the truck, but
• 4:31
  Patty isn't inside the cab.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Oh really, she wasn't in the truck.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: No, he locates her outside the vehicle. He brings her
• 4:37
  to the surface and they pull her into a small
• 4:39
  rescue boat.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: And the EMT on board. They don't even wait to
• 4:42
  hit the shore, right, they start CPR immediately right there
• 4:46
  on the water.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and they don't stop. They keep the compressions going
• 4:49
  in the boat all the way into the ambulance and
• 4:51
  straight through the doors of Sydney Hospital.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: And there's this really tragic twist here. Sydney Hospital is
• 4:57
  the exact place where Patty worked as emergency room nurse.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: Oh man, that is so heartbreaking.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, her own colleagues are the ones taking over the
• 5:06
  code when she arrives.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: Now the sheer, relentless effort of the EMT's doing CPR
• 5:11
  on someone who has been submerged for that long. It
• 5:14
  might seem futile to a lot of.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: People, right, like an hour underwater seems like an eternity.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: It is, but cold water immersion completely changes the biological
• 5:23
  rules of survival. They were operating under a very specific
• 5:27
  medical protocol.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Oh tied to something called the mammalian diving reflex.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: Right exactly.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember reading about this in survival stories. It's
• 5:35
  kind of like the body's emergency break, as I understand it.
• 5:39
  When the water is that cold, it essentially flash freezes
• 5:42
  your system, so your brain doesn't need as much oxygen.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: That's a really good way to visualize it. But the
• 5:47
  physiological mechanics are actually much more active than just a
• 5:50
  passive freeze.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, how so.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: Well, it's an ancient evolutionary survival mechanism, and the trigger
• 5:56
  isn't just being generally cold, it's specifically cold water makes
• 6:00
  contact with the face.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Wait really just the face?
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah. The moment that happens, the trigeminal nerve sends this
• 6:06
  immediate distress signal straight to the brain, and it overrides
• 6:10
  normal respiratory and circulatory functions, so.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: The body explicitly knows it's underwater, not just like standing
• 6:17
  outside in the snowstorm.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: Precisely, and three major things happen almost instantly. First is
• 6:23
  extreme brady.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Cardia, which is when the heart rate slows down.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: Right, it slows down to a crawl, sometimes dropping by
• 6:29
  fifty percent or even more. Second is intense peripheral vasoconstriction.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: Okay, big words, what does that mean?
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: Basically, the blood vessels in your arm's, legs and skin
• 6:39
  narrow dramatically. The body essentially abandons the limbs to.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: Force all the oxygen rich blood to the.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: Core exactly to the absolute essential organs the heart and
• 6:50
  the brain. And third, the overall metabolic rate drops to
• 6:54
  a bare minimum.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: Because the brains demand for oxygen just plummets.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: Right, yeah, so the cells don't eye off at the
• 7:00
  normal rate of asphyxiation.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: That perfectly explains why EMTs have that saying, you know,
• 7:05
  you aren't dead until you're warm.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: And dead, exactly right. If Patty's body triggered that reflex
• 7:10
  when she hit the freezing lake, she could theoretically survive
• 7:13
  submerged for an hour, maybe even more without permanent brain damage.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: Which is exactly why her colleagues at the hospital ran
• 7:21
  that code with absolutely everything they had. They were hoping
• 7:24
  that reflex saved her right.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: But tragically, despite the CPR, despite all the medical interventions,
• 7:30
  Patricia Wassick, who by the way, was a beloved mother
• 7:33
  of three, she was pronounced dead an hour later.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: And to everyone in that trauma room, it looked like
• 7:39
  a devastating freak accident, just a horrible tragedy.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: It did. But to see how that illusion starts to crack,
• 7:46
  we really need to look at the blueprint of the story,
• 7:49
  Peter constructed.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we have to examine the exact narrative he gave
• 7:53
  to Detective Lloyd that night on the shore. Yeah, because
• 7:56
  you can't dismantle an alibi without first understanding how the
• 7:59
  subtle built it.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: Absolutely so, Peter gave a highly detailed statement to the detective.
• 8:05
  He painted a very specific, vivid picture.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: What did he say happened?
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: Well, he said, Patty had just finished her three PM
• 8:12
  to eleven PM shift at the hospital. They realized she
• 8:14
  had forgotten to pick up their kids from the babysitter's house,
• 8:17
  so they jumped into their Chevy dual wheeled King Cab
• 8:20
  pickup truck. He says Patty was behind the wheel, driving
• 8:24
  along the road bordering the lake at about fifty to
• 8:27
  fifty five miles per.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: Hour, which I mean doing fifty five on a winding
• 8:31
  rural lakeside road at midnight in the winter already sounds
• 8:34
  super aggressive to me.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: It does, but let's keep following his story. He claims
• 8:39
  Patty rolled down her window to flick a cigarette out, okay,
• 8:43
  and as she did, she turned her head to look
• 8:45
  back out the window. When she faced forward again, Peter says,
• 8:49
  there's a deer standing dead center in the headlights.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: Oh, the ultimate rural driving nightmare. The sudden obstacle.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: Right, according to Peter, Patty panicked. He says, she swerved
• 8:59
  the head truck hard to the left to avoid the animal, overcorrected,
• 9:03
  and then jerk the steering wheel violently back to.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: The right, and that's when they lost control.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he says. The truck lost traction, slid sideways completely
• 9:10
  across the pavement, went over the embankment, and plunged right
• 9:14
  into Guilford Lake.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: Okay, so a chaotic, violent crash. But then he goes
• 9:19
  into the escape and the level of mechanical detail he
• 9:22
  provides here is what really caught my attention when I
• 9:25
  was reading the transcript.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: It is remarkably specific I mean, he says, water immediately
• 9:29
  started rushing into the cab. He claims he reached out
• 9:32
  with his left hand and grabbed Patty's jacket, trying to
• 9:35
  pull her toward his side of the truck to escape.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: That sounds heroic, so what went wrong?
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: Well, then he says he heard a distinct swishing sound
• 9:42
  and a sudden rush of water suck them both under.
• 9:46
  He says he lost his grip on her jacket.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: And this is the part I really struggled to digest.
• 9:51
  He says, he suddenly finds himself outside the truck, completely underwater,
• 9:55
  right in the pitch black, in freezing water. Move is
• 10:00
  to feel his way along the drive shaft of the truck.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he says, he follows this metal tube all the
• 10:05
  way back to the tailgate, which he notes was submerged. Okay, then,
• 10:09
  and then he tells the detective that he spent exactly
• 10:12
  forty seconds underwater trying to find her, exactly forty seconds, yes,
• 10:17
  forty seconds before he had to surface, screamed her name,
• 10:21
  realized it was too cold to die back down, and
• 10:23
  swam to shore to get help.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: Okay, just imagine being in a sinking car for a second.
• 10:27
  You are tumbling upside down, freezing water is violently flooding
• 10:31
  your nose and throat, the sheer terror, the sensory overload,
• 10:35
  it would be absolute chaos.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: Oh completely. When someone is in the grip of mortal panic,
• 10:40
  the higher reasoning centers of the brain just shut down, right.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: The amidola takes over. It's fight or flight purely instinctual.
• 10:47
  Who in the middle of a freezing underwater struggle for
• 10:49
  their life maps out a mechanical pathway along a drive
• 10:52
  shaft and internally counts, you know, one Mississippi, two Mississippi
• 10:56
  up to exactly forty seconds exactly.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: That level of chronological precision is a glaring red flag
• 11:02
  for experienced interrogators.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: It has to be.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because when trauma actually happens, human memory is almost
• 11:08
  never perfectly linear. Genuine statements from accident survivors are usually highly.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Fragmented, like they remember bits and pieces right.
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: They recall intense sensory flashes, the sudden sound of crushing metal,
• 11:20
  the physical shock of the cold water hitting their chest,
• 11:23
  a specific color, maybe a smell.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: They don't provide a perfectly sequenced, choreographed breakdown of their
• 11:29
  physical movements, complete with the Stopwatch count.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: No, they definitely don't. A rehearsed narrative lacks the messy,
• 11:36
  subjective gaps of a lived traumatic experience.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: It feels like he is anticipating the police's questions and
• 11:42
  answering them before they can even ask. You're like, how
• 11:46
  did you know where you were? Oh? I use the
• 11:48
  drive shaft to navigate? How hard did you try to save?
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: Or oh?
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: I give it exactly forty seconds?
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: It sounds exactly like a script he memorized. And when
• 11:56
  a detective hears a story that is neatly tied up
• 11:58
  with a chronological bow, they don't marvel at the witnesses composure.
• 12:02
  They immediately suspect deception.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: But strange behavior isn't always enough to convict someone. I mean,
• 12:07
  people react to trauma in bizarre ways. Some people laugh,
• 12:11
  some people completely shut down.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: That's true. Behavior is subjective, right, So.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: The investigation has to move past Peter's words and look
• 12:19
  at the physical reality of his body and eventually Patty's body.
• 12:22
  And this is where biology flat out refuses to corroborate
• 12:25
  his story.
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: Let's look at Peter's condition when he first ran to
• 12:29
  the nearby cabins to get help. Detectives interviewed a couple,
• 12:32
  Jessica and Tom, who owned one of those cabins.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: What did they say?
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: Jessica immediately noticed something completely incongruous about Peter. His hair
• 12:40
  was dry.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: His hair was dry after supposedly swimming around a sunken tailgate.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: And not just dry, but styled. The documentary specifically points
• 12:50
  out he had this feathered mullet look, and Jessica testified
• 12:53
  that his hair wasn't matted or messed up at all.
• 12:56
  You're kidding, No, it looked exactly like it would on
• 12:58
  a normal Tuesday afternoon.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: The man just claimed he was sucked out of a
• 13:02
  sinking truck, submerged in a lake, and spent forty seconds
• 13:06
  swimming around looking for his wife. Yet he shows up
• 13:09
  with a perfect blowout.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: It's absurd, and the bizarre anomalies didn't stop with his
• 13:14
  hair either. Jessica and Tom, acting like any good neighbors would,
• 13:19
  immediately offered to run out and jump in the water
• 13:21
  to try and save.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: Patty, which is the normal human reaction.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: But Peter actively discouraged them. He kept blocking them, saying,
• 13:28
  don't go in there, it's too cold, be careful.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: That makes zero psychological sense. I mean, if the person
• 13:34
  you love most in the world is drowning, you would
• 13:36
  be begging anyone and everyone to dive in. You'd be
• 13:40
  dragging them to the water yourself.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: Right, Deterring a rescue suggests you don't want anyone discovering
• 13:45
  what's actually out there until it's too late.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: That is so dark, And what about when he got
• 13:50
  to the hospital.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: His physiological state at the hospital was just as damning.
• 13:54
  If he had truly been fully immersed and grappling and
• 13:57
  freezing water, his body should have been in the throat
• 14:00
  of hypothermia, obviously, But the attending doctor checked his vitals
• 14:04
  and found his blood pressure was completely normal, his core
• 14:07
  body temperature was barely affected at all, and most tellingly,
• 14:11
  he wasn't shivering.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about shivering for a second, because we tend
• 14:16
  to think of it as just a symptom of being cold,
• 14:18
  like getting goosebumps or something. But it's actually an incredibly
• 14:22
  powerful biological engine, isn't it.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: It absolutely is. It is an involuntary survival reflex driven
• 14:29
  by the hypothalamus. When your core temperature drops below a
• 14:33
  safe threshold, your brain fires rapid signals to your skeletal.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: Muscles, wait them to contract, Yes.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: Forcing them to contract and relax at a very high frequency.
• 14:44
  The goal isn't just movement, it's the creation of kinetic energy.
• 14:48
  The friction of those muscle tissues rubbing together generates heat
• 14:52
  to warm the blood and save your vital organs.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: And you can't just decide not to shiver, right, I mean,
• 14:57
  try standing in a snow drift in a T shirt
• 14:59
  and telling you brain to hold still is literally impossible.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: You can't fake not shivering if you're actually hypothermic.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: Right, So, if Peter had been submerged in that lake,
• 15:07
  his body would have been violently shaking, convulsing to create heat.
• 15:11
  The fact that he was sitting calmly, perfectly still, with
• 15:14
  normal vitals paints a completely different picture.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: It suggests he probably only waded into the water up
• 15:19
  to his waist just enough to get his clothes wet
• 15:22
  for the performance wow.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: And while he's sitting there, warm and comfortable, his behavior
• 15:27
  toward the hospital staff was truly chilling. Just down the hall,
• 15:31
  Patty's colleagues are running a coat on her, desperately fighting
• 15:35
  to restart her heart.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: And Peter is sitting in his room complaining to the nurses.
• 15:39
  He was literally whining, saying, nobody's paying attention to me.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: The narcissism is just staggering. The doctors noted he didn't
• 15:47
  require any actual medical intervention, yet he was deeply aggrieved
• 15:51
  that the spotlight was on his dying wife instead of
• 15:53
  his perfectly dry mullet.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: It really is something. But you know, while behavior in
• 15:57
  vitals build suspicion, the ultimate arbiter of truth and a
• 16:00
  homicide is the forensic pathologist in this case, doctor James Tusian, right, And.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: This is a medical examiner who estimates he's conducted over
• 16:08
  four thousand autopsies in his career.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: Four thousand, Yeah, which means you have seen the human
• 16:13
  body subjected to almost every conceivable form of trauma.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: You'd know exactly what a car crash looks like internally,
• 16:20
  you know what a drowning looks like, and you definitely
• 16:22
  know what murder looks like exactly.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: So doctor Terzian received Patty's body just hours after she
• 16:29
  was pulled from the water, and his initial external examination
• 16:33
  immediately flagged inconsistencies with Peter's story.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: What did you find?
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: He found multiple abrasions and contusions, so scrapes and deep
• 16:41
  bruising over her right forehead, on the left side of
• 16:44
  her tin, and across her upper lip.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: Okay, but I try to put myself in the shoes
• 16:48
  of a medical examiner here. A car crash is a violent,
• 16:51
  chaotic event. Bodies hit steering wheels, windows, dashboards, So seeing
• 16:57
  a scraped forehead or a bruised chin probably does an
• 17:00
  automatically screened homicide on day one, Right, That's.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: A fair point. And doctor Terzian acknowledged that blunt force
• 17:05
  trauma can absolutely occur in a rollover into water. But
• 17:08
  it was the specific constellation of these injuries, combined with
• 17:11
  the internal findings, that began to paint sinister picture.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: What were the internal findings?
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: Well, even more critically, when he examined her mouth, he
• 17:19
  found small lacerations on the delicate tissue of the inside
• 17:23
  of her upper lip.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: The inside of her lip, that's specific.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and first he ran a standard toxicology scream. This
• 17:30
  became incredibly relevant because around this time Peter's story suddenly
• 17:34
  started shifting. Right.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: He realizes the initial story might not hold up to scrutiny,
• 17:38
  so he starts tweaking the variables exactly He initially said
• 17:41
  Patty was driving, then he backtracked and told police that
• 17:44
  he had lied to them at the scene.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: He claimed Patty had a history of alcohol problems, that
• 17:49
  they had been arguing about her drinking that night, and
• 17:52
  he was just trying to cover up the fact that
• 17:53
  she was driving drunk when she lost control of the truck.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Oh, the classic pivot to the eyelid to protect her
• 17:59
  honor defense So convenient.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: Right, So doctor Terzian checks her blood alcohol concentration. The
• 18:05
  results show a BAC of point zero.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: Five to five, which is such a critical number. We
• 18:11
  really need to frame that point zero five five for
• 18:13
  you listening. It is not heavily intoxicate, and in fact,
• 18:16
  at the time it wasn't even legally overlimit to drive,
• 18:19
  not at all. Depending on her metabolism, her body weight,
• 18:22
  and whether she had eaten dinner, a point zero five
• 18:25
  to five could simply be the residual effect of having
• 18:27
  a glass and a half of wine over an hour
• 18:29
  or two.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: It is absolutely not a level of impairment that explains
• 18:33
  a driver catastrophically losing control of a vehicle, over correcting
• 18:37
  and plunging off a road.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: And Peter's news story introduces this massive logical paradox, which
• 18:43
  is think about it. If Patty was a recovering alcoholic
• 18:46
  with a known history of DUIs and Peter knew she
• 18:50
  had been drinking enough that they were literally fighting about it,
• 18:53
  why on earth would he, as a supposedly concerned husband,
• 18:57
  let her get behind the wheel of a massive, dual
• 19:00
  wheeled king cab truck supposedly to go pick up their children.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: It makes absolutely no sense. If you are going to
• 19:06
  play the chivalrous husband covering up a tragic mistake, you
• 19:09
  have to explain why you facilitated the mistake in the
• 19:12
  first place.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: You don't hand the keys to someone you think is
• 19:14
  too drunk to drive, especially when your kid's lives are
• 19:17
  on the line.
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: No, you don't. But honestly, the toxicology report was just
• 19:21
  a minor discrepancy compared to what doctor Terzian found when
• 19:24
  he opened her chest.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: Okay, this is the part that gets really intense.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: Right because when a conscious person drowns, the biological mechanism
• 19:31
  is brutal but straightforward. The victim runs out of oxygen,
• 19:35
  their carbon dioxide level spike, and the brain triggers an
• 19:38
  involuntary gasp reflex.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: They take a breath underwater, Yes.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: The fluid rushes past the trachea and floods the lungs,
• 19:45
  displacing the residual air. So when a pathologist examines a
• 19:49
  drowning victim, they expect the lungs to be heavy, swollen,
• 19:53
  and physically water logged with the specific fluid from that environment.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: But when doctor Terzian examines Patty's lung they are totally dry.
• 20:02
  There is virtually no extra fluid.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: In them none. A woman who supposedly died trapped at
• 20:06
  the bottom of a lake fighting for her life in
• 20:08
  a sinking cab did not inhale any water.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: Now I know. The defense immediately lashed onto the concept
• 20:14
  of dry drowning. It's a term you see in sensationalized
• 20:17
  news articles all the time, usually about kids at pools.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: It is very sensationalized.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: Let's break down the actual science of dry drowning versus
• 20:24
  the media myth, because it's crucial to understand exactly why
• 20:28
  doctor Terzian rejected it for Patty.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: The medical theory of dry grouning centers on the larynx.
• 20:33
  That's the muscular structure at the top of the trichea
• 20:35
  that houses the vocal cords. It acts as the ultimate
• 20:38
  gatekeeper for your airway.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: Okay, so it protects.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: Lungs right in highly unusual circumstances. When water unexpectedly hits
• 20:45
  the back of the throat or the larynx, the muscles
• 20:48
  can experience a sudden, violent spasm. This laryngeal spasm effectively
• 20:53
  clamps the airway completely shut.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: It's a hyper aggressive defense mechanism to stop water from
• 21:00
  destroying the delicate lung tissue.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: So the body basically says, I won't let you drown,
• 21:04
  but in doing so, it suffocates you. The airway is
• 21:08
  sealed tight, so no water gets in, but neither does
• 21:10
  any oxygen. You asphyxiate underwater, but your lungs remain completely dry.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: That is the theoretical mechanism. Yes, but doctor terzy And,
• 21:18
  backed by his four thousand autopsies and decades of forensic literature,
• 21:22
  provided a really stark reality check to that defense.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: What did he say?
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: True? Fatal laryngeal spasms and adult immersion cases are astronomically rare.
• 21:30
  They are basically medical unicorns.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: When an experienced pathologist opens the chest of a body
• 21:36
  pulled from a lake and finds dry lungs, their primary
• 21:39
  diagnostic assumption is not, oh, this must be that one
• 21:43
  in a million laryngeal spasm. What is it? Then the immediate,
• 21:47
  overwhelming statistical probability is this person was not breathing when
• 21:51
  they entered the water.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: Dead bodies don't inhale.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: Precisely, if she was deceased before she ever hit the
• 21:57
  surface of Guildford Lake, her lungs would draw in a
• 22:00
  single drop of water.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: So, based on the dry lungs, the scraped lip, and
• 22:05
  the internal anomalies, doctor terzy and essentially tells the police
• 22:09
  the medical evidence flatly contradicts the story of a woman
• 22:12
  drowning in a crash.
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: He drew a hard line there.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: And if the biology proves she didn't die in the crash,
• 22:17
  then the physics of the crash itself must be a lie.
• 22:20
  It couldn't have been an accident. It had to be
• 22:21
  a staged event.
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: And this brings us to the accident reconstruction phase of
• 22:25
  the investigation. Enter Lieutenant Cobb.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: Ah. Lieutenant Cob He was a newly minted accident investigator
• 22:32
  for the Sheriff's Apartment, right he was.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: And his involvement is where the case truly pivots Accident
• 22:38
  reconstruction is such a beautiful discipline because it is entirely dispassionate.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: It doesn't care about emotions exactly.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: It doesn't care if a witness is crying, It doesn't
• 22:47
  care about shifting alibis, and it certainly doesn't care about
• 22:51
  perfectly styled hair. It relies strictly on mass, velocity, friction coefficients,
• 22:57
  and geometry.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: And Cobb's first big observation is geographical, isn't it. He
• 23:01
  walks the shoreline of Guildford Lake where the truck supposedly
• 23:04
  went in.
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: Yes, and he realizes Peter's story requires a level of
• 23:08
  bad luck that borders on the mathematically impossible.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: How so paint that picture for us.
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: If you survey that specific stretch of the lakeside road,
• 23:16
  the shoreline is almost entirely fartified. It is lined with
• 23:20
  heavy steel guide rails designed specifically to keep cars on
• 23:24
  the pavement.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: Okay, so it's protected, very protected.
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: And where the guide rails end, the lake is fronted
• 23:29
  by tightly packed houses and cabins. The physical barriers blocking
• 23:33
  a vehicle from the water are nearly continuous. Out of
• 23:36
  that entire stretch there is only one single unprotected gap,
• 23:40
  and that gap is exactly thirty three feet wide.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: Thirty three feet now a Chevy dual wheeled king cab
• 23:46
  is massive. They're like what seven or eight feet wide.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: At least, especially if you include the extended mirrors for towing.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: So if you are driving a truck that wide, a
• 23:55
  thirty three foot opening is not a huge target, especially
• 23:59
  if you're supposedly slowing out of control at fifty five
• 24:01
  miles per hour. It's literally threading the needle.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: Cobb observed that the sheer astronomical improbability of a driver
• 24:08
  losing control at fifty five miles per hour, sliding sideways,
• 24:12
  and miraculously threading the truck perfectly through the only thirty
• 24:15
  three foot gap on the entire lake without scraping a
• 24:18
  single guide rail or smashing into a cabin porch. It
• 24:22
  just defies belief.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: The geography alone suggests the truck was carefully aimed, not
• 24:27
  accidentally lost absolutely, But let's play devil's advocate for a second.
• 24:31
  Let's say Patty just had the worst luck in the
• 24:33
  history of Upstate New York. Peter's story hinged on an
• 24:36
  inciting incident. The deer in the road that's why.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: She swore right the phantom deer.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: So the police brought in an expert to verify that
• 24:43
  claim too, a New York State Environmental Conservation officer a
• 24:47
  DEC officer.
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: And these DEEC officers are masters of local wildlife tracking.
• 24:53
  They know exactly how to read the woods.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: So what did he look for?
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: This officer scoured the road, the soft dirt, shoulders, the
• 24:59
  embanked and the dense brush surrounding the area. He looked
• 25:03
  for hoofprints in the mud, broken twigs where an animal
• 25:06
  might have burst from the treeline, deer droppings, hair snagged
• 25:09
  on branches.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: And the result of his exhaustive search.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: Absolutely zero evidence of a deer anywhere.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: The ghost deer strikes again, so the catalyst for the
• 25:18
  crash totally vanishes. But cop doesn't just stop at what's missing.
• 25:22
  He looks really closely at what the truck actually left behind.
• 25:26
  And this is where the physics completely destroy Peter's narrative.
• 25:30
  Let's talk about how tires interact with asphalt.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: Peter claimed Patty swerved hard left, then jerked the heavy
• 25:36
  truck violently back to the right, causing it to slide
• 25:38
  sideways into the water. At over fifty miles per hour.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: Okay, so a massive lateral movement.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: Yes, And when you force a vehicle of that mass
• 25:47
  to move laterally at high speed, you fundamentally break the
• 25:50
  traction between the rubber.
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: And the road, so the tires stop rolling and start
• 25:54
  dragging exactly.
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: The extreme friction generates immense heat, which literally melts the
• 26:00
  rubber onto the pavement, leaving thick, dark striated skid marks.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: Right, we've all seen those on the highway.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: And furthermore, when a sliding heavy truck leaves the pavement
• 26:10
  and hits the soft shoulder, it acts like a plow.
• 26:14
  The lateral forces would violently gouge the earth, tearing up
• 26:17
  deep trenches of dirt and grass before it ever went
• 26:20
  over the edge.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: But Cob walks the path of the truck and he
• 26:24
  finds none of that.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: Does he No melted rubber on the asphalt, no violently
• 26:28
  torn earth.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: What does he find? Instead?
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: What he finds is a clean, gentle track in the
• 26:33
  dirt shoulder. And he used this brilliant analogy in the
• 26:36
  documentary to describe it. He said, the tire marks looks
• 26:39
  like an ink roller running across a piece of paper,
• 26:43
  slowly running out of ink.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's a perfect visual a continuous smooth rolling track.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: The tires never lost traction. They were rolling smoothly, turning
• 26:53
  in a gentle arc off the road and down the embankment.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: And that arc gave Cob a geometric measurement he could
• 27:00
  use to prove the speed right in accident reconstruction. This
• 27:04
  is known as a yaw mark analysis.
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: Yes, and it utilizes something called the critical curve speed formula.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: Okay, I am definitely not a mathematician, so let's walk
• 27:12
  through how you extract speed from a curved line in
• 27:16
  the dirt.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: The formula essentially calculates the absolute maximum speed a specific
• 27:21
  vehicle can travel along a curved path before the centrifugal
• 27:24
  force overcomes the friction of the tires, causing it to slide.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: So Cobb measured the cord and the middle ordinate of
• 27:31
  the curved tire track to determine the exact radius of
• 27:35
  the urn. He then calculated the coefficient affriction of that
• 27:38
  specific dirt and grass surface.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: So he basically takes the sharpness of the curve, multiplies
• 27:43
  it by how slippery the dirt is, and factors in
• 27:46
  the gravity and mass.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: Broadly speaking yes, And when Cobb ran the math on
• 27:49
  that rolling arc, the formula yielded a definitive.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: Number crumb roll please.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: The absolute maximum speed that truck could have been traveling
• 27:56
  to maintain that gentle rolling curve without skidding was around
• 28:00
  thirty miles per hour.
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: It was physically impossible for the truck to have been
• 28:04
  going fifty or fifty five miles per hour, as Peter claimed.
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: The tires literally wrote the truth in the dirt. It
• 28:10
  wasn't a sudden, violent swerve at highway speeds. It was
• 28:13
  a slow, calculated, controlled right turn. Someone deliberately steered that
• 28:19
  truck directly into the thirty three foot gap.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: And if you needed any more confirmation that this was
• 28:24
  a low speed, controlled event, Cobb found it when the
• 28:27
  truck was pulled from the lake and he examined the
• 28:30
  interior of the cab.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: Oh right. Because of Newton's first law of.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: Motion, exactly, an object in motion stays in motion with
• 28:37
  the same speed and in the same direction unless acted
• 28:40
  upon by an unbalanced force.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: Right, if a massive truck hits the water in the
• 28:44
  embankment at fifty five miles per hour, the truck stops abruptly,
• 28:47
  but the unbelted occupants inside, one hundred and twenty pound
• 28:50
  woman and a full grown man. They keep moving forward
• 28:53
  at fifty five miles per hour until they hit something
• 28:56
  inside the cab.
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: The deceleration forces would be catastrophic, the occupants would become projectiles.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: You would expect to see a severely bent or collapsed
• 29:04
  steering column where the driver impacted it.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: You would expect a spider webbed or shattered windshield from
• 29:10
  a head strike. You'd expect blood tissue and heavy internal
• 29:14
  damage to the dashboard.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: But when Cob opened the door.
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: The interior was completely pristine.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: Nothing was broken at all.
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: The steering wheel was perfectly intact, the windshield was solid
• 29:25
  glass without a single crack. Even the rear view mirror,
• 29:28
  which often snaps off in violent impacts, was perfectly glued
• 29:32
  to its original spot.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: The cab was a sterile environment that bore zero signs
• 29:37
  of a high speed, violent crash. It's just systematically dismantling
• 29:42
  his alibi piece by piece, it really is. But the
• 29:45
  detail that really made my jaw drop was the windows.
• 29:48
  Peter claimed he was grappling with Patty, trying to pull
• 29:50
  her out as the water rushed in, but Cobb notes
• 29:53
  the position of the driver's side window the window Patty
• 29:56
  supposedly escaped through or was sucked out of.
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: Right, it was rolled down, but only ten to eleven inches.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: It's physically implausible. Picture the scenario Peter described. You are
• 30:06
  in a sinking vehicle, the water is freezing, You are
• 30:09
  completely disoriented in the pitch dark, tumbling around. Yeah. The
• 30:13
  idea that a paniced adult could contort themselves and squeeze
• 30:17
  their entire body through a ten inch gap, which is
• 30:20
  basically the size of a mail slot, while wearing a
• 30:23
  winter jacket, is.
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: Absurd, completely absurd.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: And what about the passenger door. I mean, if she
• 30:29
  didn't go out the window, maybe she got out the
• 30:30
  door while he was fumbling around. Because the police diver
• 30:34
  did find her body ten feet outside the vehicle closer
• 30:36
  to the shore.
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: Cob checked that too. The passenger door was locked shut.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: So she didn't magically squeeze through a ten inch mail
• 30:42
  slot in the dark. She didn't open a locked door.
• 30:46
  The physical evidence leaves only one logical, chilling conclusion.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: Katty Wassick was never inside the cap of that truck
• 30:51
  when it plunged into Gilford Lake.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: Accident reconstruction stripped away all the emotional noise and laid
• 30:56
  bare the facts. The threading of the thirty three foot gap,
• 31:00
  the missing deer, the thirty mile four hour rolling tire track,
• 31:04
  the pristine interior, the locked door, and the narrow window.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: It all converged to prove definitively that the crash was
• 31:11
  a highly orchestrated, staged event.
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: And this creates a massive investigative vacuum because if the
• 31:16
  truck crash was staged, and doctor Terzian's autopsy proved she
• 31:20
  didn't inhale water and was likely dead before she went in,
• 31:24
  the question becomes where did the murder actually happen?
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: Right? The crime scene wasn't the truck, it wasn't the lake.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: This is where the Deep Dive takes a fascinating left
• 31:33
  turn away from vehicular physics and into the incredibly niche
• 31:37
  world of forensic botany.
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: It is the perfect example of how multidisciplinary teams solve
• 31:43
  complex homicides. Sometimes the most important crime scene isn't the geography,
• 31:47
  it's the victim's body itself.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: What did they find on her?
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: While doctor Terzian was examining Patty, looking past the abrasions
• 31:53
  and the lungs. He noticed something highly unusual clinging to
• 31:56
  her clothing and deeply tangled in her hair. Okay, he
• 32:00
  found small spiny plant materials. He identified them as burdocks.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: Let's give a quick botany lesson here for anyone who
• 32:06
  hasn't spent time in overgrown fields. A burdock is a
• 32:09
  type of weed. It produces these spherical seed heads covered
• 32:12
  in hundreds of tiny stiff hooks.
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: Yes, the genus is Arctium, and the seed heads, commonly
• 32:19
  known as burrs, are an evolutionary marvel of seed dispersal.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: They act exactly like natural velcrow. Right. I think they
• 32:26
  were actually the biological inspiration for the invention of elcro.
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: They were. They are designed to latch onto the fur
• 32:32
  of passing animals or the clothing of passing humans, hooking
• 32:36
  deeply into the fibers so they can be carried far
• 32:38
  away from the parent plant before dropping off.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: If you've ever taken a golden retriever through a tall
• 32:43
  field in the autumn, you know exactly what a burdock is.
• 32:47
  You spend hours pulling them out of their fur.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: So doctor Terzian finds these burrs embedded in Patty's hair
• 32:54
  and clothes, and his mind immediately goes to the environmental context.
• 32:58
  He asks a very simple question.
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: Do burdock weeds grow at the bottom of a freezing
• 33:03
  lake in upstate New York?
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: The obvious answer is no. People do not naturally walk
• 33:08
  around in their daily lives covered in burdocks, and they
• 33:11
  certainly don't acquire them while trapped inside a submerged vehicle.
• 33:15
  Recognizing the glaring environmental contradiction, Doctor Terzian contacts the investigators
• 33:20
  and tells them, you need to find the source of
• 33:22
  these plants. Wherever these burdocks came from is where she
• 33:25
  was before she ended up in that water.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: And the police don't just take a guess. They bring
• 33:30
  in a highly specialized expert, a university botanist from Binghamton University.
• 33:35
  I love this detail. You have a homicide investigation and
• 33:38
  they bring in an academic botanist to map the flora
• 33:42
  of a crime scene.
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: It demonstrates a rigorous commitment to the scientific method. The
• 33:47
  botanist's job was to conduct a comprehensive botanical survey of
• 33:51
  the entire perimeter of Guildford Lake.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: Did he find anything?
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: He meticulously scoured the shoreline, the embankment where the truck
• 33:58
  rolled down, the thirty three foot app and the woods
• 34:01
  immediately surrounding the area. His findings were absolute. There was
• 34:04
  not a single burdock plant growing anywhere within one hundred
• 34:07
  yard radius of the staging area.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: He also formally confirmed that burdocks are terrestrial plants. They
• 34:12
  do not grow in aquatic environments.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: It's Edmund Locard's exchange principle playing out in real time.
• 34:19
  Every contact leaves a trace. The burdocks are the trace evidence.
• 34:24
  If they didn't come from the lake, they had to
• 34:26
  come from somewhere else. The trace is pointing a neon
• 34:29
  sign away from the water.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: Following the botanical evidence, investigators secure a second search warrant.
• 34:34
  This time they aren't looking at the truck or the water.
• 34:37
  They are looking at Peter and Patty's own home.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: They execute the warrant and begin a grid search of
• 34:43
  the property, scanning the yard, the brush, the perimeter, and
• 34:47
  there on the side of the yard they find the
• 34:49
  botanical smoking.
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: Gun, a massive burdock bush.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: But the mere presence of the bush wasn't the evidence,
• 34:55
  was it. It was the condition of the plant that
• 34:57
  told the violent story of what happened.
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: That night, the investigators observed that this specific burdock bush
• 35:03
  looked like a bomb had gone off inside it. Half
• 35:05
  of the plant was violently trampled down, the stalks crushed
• 35:09
  flat against the frozen.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: Earth, and crucially, all of the spiny birrs were missing
• 35:13
  from the trampled side of the bush.
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: It's the negative space of the crime scene. The missing
• 35:18
  burrs from that crushed bush are the exact ones clinging
• 35:21
  to Patty's sweater and tangled in her hair.
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: And to seal the connection, crime scene technicians leaned in
• 35:27
  and closely examined the broken branches and the remaining thorns
• 35:30
  of that trampled bush. Tangled in the wood, they found
• 35:34
  strands of human hair.
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: They collected it, sent it to the lab, and confirmed
• 35:38
  the hairs were microscopically consistent with Pattiwassak's hair.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: That is the defining pivot of the entire case. With
• 35:44
  one single spiny weed, the location of the murder literally
• 35:49
  teleports from the freezing depths of Guildford Lake directly into
• 35:53
  their own backyard. It proves a violent physical struggle took
• 35:56
  place in the brush outside their home, a weed un murder.
• 36:00
  Speaker 2: It perfectly illustrates why Forensic science cannot exist in silos.
• 36:04
  It requires a chain of disciplines locking together. The medical
• 36:08
  examiner had the clinical eye to spot the anomaly on
• 36:10
  the body, The.
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: University Botanas provided the ecological proof that the staging ground
• 36:15
  was clean, and.
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: The crime scene investigators connected the final dot in the backyard.
• 36:20
  No single person broke the case, the collective weight of
• 36:23
  the science did so.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: The investigation has successfully answered the how the crash was
• 36:28
  a theatrical stage play, and they answered the where she
• 36:32
  was violently attacked in the burdock bush beside her house.
• 36:35
  But science only tells you the mechanics, it doesn't tell
• 36:38
  you the motive.
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: The investigators now had to confront the darkest psychological question,
• 36:43
  the why why would a husband meticulously orchestrate such a complex,
• 36:47
  calculated accident to murder his own wife.
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: To understand the motive, District Attorney Joseph McBride and the
• 36:53
  investigators had to dig deeply into Patty and Peter's history.
• 36:57
  What they uncovered was a harrowing narrative of manipulation, abuse,
• 37:01
  and profound cruelty.
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: Patty had endured a deeply tragic past. Interviews with her
• 37:06
  friends and family revealed that she had battled severe alcohol
• 37:09
  addictions starting when she was just a teenager.
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: The documentary highlights how her life spiraled. Early on, she
• 37:14
  ended up pregnant while still in high school. The stress
• 37:17
  was immense, and she used alcohol as a coping mechanism.
• 37:21
  By the time she was only eighteen years old, she
• 37:23
  had been arrested for her fifth d WI.
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: Her life was on the brink of total collapse. But
• 37:29
  at eighteen, after that fifth arrest, a local judge handed
• 37:32
  down a stark ultimatum that changed the trajectory of her life.
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: He told her she could either serve one hundred days
• 37:38
  in a jail cell, or she could check into a
• 37:40
  twenty eight day in patient rehabilitation program and get clean.
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: Patty chose the rehab. She completed the program, and miraculously
• 37:47
  it stuck. She completely sobered up.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: She turned everything around. She went back to school, trained
• 37:53
  as a nurse's aid, and eventually earned her credentials to
• 37:55
  become a fully fledged emergency room nurse. By the night
• 37:58
  she died, Patty had been completed least stringently sober for
• 38:01
  ten straight years. She was a respected medical professional and
• 38:04
  a fiercely devoted mother to her three children.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: Ten years of hard, fought sobriety. And this is where
• 38:09
  the sheer psychological depravity of Peter's plan comes into focus.
• 38:14
  Remember the toxicology report doctor Terzian Ran.
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: Patty's BAC was point zero five to five. She had
• 38:20
  alcohol in her bloodstream when she died.
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: The investigators had to figure out how a woman who
• 38:25
  hadn't touched a drop of liquor in a decade suddenly
• 38:28
  relapsed on the exact night of her murder.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: The answer is incredibly sinister. Peter intentionally set a trap.
• 38:35
  According to the people close to them, Peter had begun
• 38:38
  a deliberate slow drip campaign to reintroduce alcohol into Patty's life.
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: He would offer her a drink and say things like
• 38:45
  just one drink is fine, or you've been sober for
• 38:48
  ten years, you're cured. A glass of wine won't hurt.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: Anyone who understands the clitical reality of addiction knows how
• 38:54
  predatory and dangerous that is. You are never cured of alcoholism,
• 38:58
  you were in recovery. Peter wasn't trying to help his
• 39:01
  wife relax after a hard shift. He was actively laying
• 39:04
  the groundwork for his fake DWY narrative. He weaponized her
• 39:08
  own tragic history against her.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: What does it say about the psychology of a killer
• 39:12
  who doesn't just want to take your life, but actively
• 39:14
  wants to destroy your legacy. He wanted the entire town
• 39:17
  of Guildford to look at this submerged truck and say, oh,
• 39:20
  what a shame Patty fell off the wagon and killed herself.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: He wanted to use her past trauma as a shield
• 39:26
  to hide his crime. It's a level of manipulation that
• 39:29
  goes beyond mere murder into character assassination.
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: But the DA still needed to establish why Peter needed
• 39:35
  her dead. Why go to all this trouble? As is
• 39:38
  the case in so many domestic homicides, the motive fractured
• 39:42
  into two distinct but overlapping pillars, money and a new relationship.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: Let's follow the financial trail first.
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: The Wassack household was bleeding money. They were in massive debt,
• 39:52
  struggling to keep their heads above water. Peter was the
• 39:55
  owner of a local tavern called the Angel Inn, and
• 39:58
  he was desperate to expand the business, but he completely
• 40:01
  lacked the capital to do it.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: Investigators subpoenaed their financial records and insurance policies, and they
• 40:06
  found that Peter stood to gain a substantial windfall from
• 40:09
  Patty's death.
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: He had taken out life insurance on Patty. There was
• 40:12
  a payout for the total truck and assurance on the house.
• 40:15
  The DA estimated the total package was over two hundred
• 40:18
  thousand dollars.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: Now two hundred thousand dollars might not sound like a
• 40:21
  millionaire's fortune, but in a small rural town, having your
• 40:24
  mortgage suddenly paid off and getting a massive cash infusion
• 40:28
  to build out your bar is life changing money. It's
• 40:31
  a powerful incentive.
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: But the money was only the catalyst. The accelerant was
• 40:36
  the babysitter.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: A woman named Joyce Warden. Joyce was hired as the
• 40:40
  babysitter for the Wassack's children, and over time she became
• 40:43
  considered a close friend of both Patty and Peter. But
• 40:46
  the investigation peeled back the layers of that dynamic and
• 40:50
  revealed a much darker reality within the home.
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: And the investigators didn't have to guess at this dynamic
• 40:55
  because Patty herself told them she left behind a voice
• 40:58
  from the grave. A close this friend of Patty's tipped
• 41:01
  off the detectives that Patty was secretly documenting.
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: Her life investigators tore the house apart and discovered several
• 41:07
  hidden diaries. Patty had stashed them in secret spots tucked
• 41:11
  away in her bedroom, hidden deep in closets, and the
• 41:14
  entries were a terrifying chronicle of escalating abuse.
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: She documented violent altercations, describing how Peter would systematically belittle her,
• 41:21
  scream at her, and physically threaten her.
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: One entry in particular stood out. A detective noted that
• 41:26
  he remembers the exact phrasing to this day. Patti wrote
• 41:30
  in her own hand, at times, I fear Pete will
• 41:32
  kill me one of these days.
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: It is the holy grail of prostitutorial evidence, the victim
• 41:38
  accurately identifying her own murderer and documenting his lethal intent
• 41:42
  before the crime even occurs. The diaries also laid bare
• 41:46
  the truth about Joyce. Patty wrote that, in a desperate,
• 41:49
  deeply misguided attempt to Playkate Peter and save her abuse
• 41:52
  of marriage, she had agreed to bring Joyce into their bedroom.
• 41:55
  It began as a consensual three way relationship.
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: But the psychological dynamics of love triangles and homicides follow
• 42:02
  a very grim, predictable pattern, don't they.
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: They almost always do In forensic psychology we see this constantly.
• 42:08
  A triad might start as a purely physical arrangement, but
• 42:11
  humans are emotional creatures. Very quickly, the physical intimacy fosters
• 42:14
  an exclusive emotional attachment between two of the parties. Jealousy
• 42:18
  infects the dynamic. In the Wasick home, the relationship rapidly
• 42:22
  devolved from a triad into a covert diet just Peter
• 42:25
  and Joyce.
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: Patty was frozen out of the very relationship she permitted
• 42:29
  to try and save her marriage. She became the third
• 42:31
  wheel in her own home.
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: And in the evolution of a lethal love triangle, that
• 42:35
  original partner undergoes a psychological shift in the mind of
• 42:39
  the killer. They cease to be a spouse. They become
• 42:41
  an obstacle. Patty was the barrier standing between Peter, his
• 42:45
  new life with Joyce and the two hundred thousand dollars
• 42:48
  insurance payout he needed for his bar and.
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: The abuse wasn't just hidden in diaries, It spilled out
• 42:52
  into the open. The police found a neighbor, a man
• 42:55
  named Claris Edict, who was a local hunter.
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: In November of two thousand thousand and one, just months
• 43:01
  before the murder. Mister Edict was hunting up on a
• 43:03
  ridge that overlooked the backyard of the Wassack property. He
• 43:06
  testified that he looked down and saw Peter burst out
• 43:09
  the back door with Patty while their two young children
• 43:11
  were right there in the yard. Edic distinctly heard Peter
• 43:14
  scream at the top of his lungs, I'm going to
• 43:16
  kill you, and then he watched horrified as Peter drew
• 43:19
  back and violently punched Patty in the face, right in
• 43:21
  front of the kids.
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: The timeline of violence was established. The motive was clear
• 43:26
  money and the new girlfriend. The location was the Burdock Bush.
• 43:30
  The staging ground was the thirty three foot gap at
• 43:32
  the lake. The DA finally has all the pieces on
• 43:36
  the board. They just need to put them together in
• 43:39
  a chronological sequence that a jury cannot deny.
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: Armed with the context of the diaries, the history of abuse,
• 43:45
  and the botanical evidence, the investigators returned to doctor Terzian.
• 43:49
  They asked him to re examine the medical data with
• 43:52
  a new lens. They know she was murdered in the yard,
• 43:54
  but they need to know the exact anatomical mechanism of
• 43:57
  her death. Doctor Terzian performs a secondary review of his findings.
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: I found this part fascinating because initial assumptions in autosies
• 44:05
  can change when new context arrives. For instance, he initially
• 44:09
  noted some bleeding under her breastbone. At first, you might
• 44:12
  attribute that to the massive trauma of the EMTs doing
• 44:14
  aggressive CPR in the boat.
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: In the ambulance right, CPR frequently cracks ribs and causes
• 44:19
  internal bruising. But doctor Terzian reconsiders the timeline. If Patty's
• 44:24
  heart had stopped beating in the backyard long before Peter
• 44:26
  ever put her in the truck and drove her to
• 44:28
  the lake, her circulatory system would have been completely halted.
• 44:32
  It is highly unusual to see significant deep hemorrhaging on
• 44:36
  the undersurface of a breastplate in a body where blood
• 44:39
  pressure has already dropped. His zero that specific internal bleeding
• 44:43
  had to have occurred while her heart was still pumping.
• 44:46
  She was alive when her chest was crushed.
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: He also looks closely at her neck. In intimate partner homicides,
• 44:52
  manual's trigulation is incredibly common. The killer uses their hands
• 44:56
  to crush the windpipe.
• 44:58
  Speaker 2: A pathologist looking for manual strangular will search for distinct markers,
• 45:02
  fingerpad bruising on the external skin of the neck, deep
• 45:04
  hemorrhaging within the internal strap muscles of the throat, and
• 45:08
  most definitively, a fracture of the hy ode bone, a
• 45:11
  small U shaped fragile bone at the base of the
• 45:13
  tongue that often snaps under the pressure of throttling hands.
• 45:17
  But doctor Terzian finds none of that. Her neck is
• 45:20
  entirely pristine. The hyoid bone is intact.
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: So if he didn't choke her, how did he stop
• 45:25
  her breathing?
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: Doctor Terzian synthesizes the remaining injuries. He looks at the
• 45:30
  deep abrasions on her chin. He looks at the microscopic
• 45:33
  lacerations on the inside of her upper lip where the
• 45:35
  soft tissue was pressed violently against her own teeth. He
• 45:39
  looks at the fractured breastplate with the internal hemorrhage, and
• 45:42
  he looks at the.
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: Potechiac what exactly our protechia.
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: Potekiakr tiny pin point microhemorrhages. They occur when the capillaries
• 45:50
  the smallest blood vessels, burst due to severe vascular congestion
• 45:54
  and rapid hypoxia, which is the sudden deprivation of oxygen.
• 45:58
  Doctor Terzian found these patekia in her lungs and her esophagus.
• 46:02
  When you combine the internal lipcuts, the crushed chest, and
• 46:04
  the potakia, the conclusion is horrifyingly absolute asphyxiation by smothering.
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: He didn't choker, he covered her mouth and nose.
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: The injuries tell a brutal, mechanical story. Peter, a large man,
• 46:16
  tackled Patty, who was only five foot seven and one
• 46:18
  hundred and twenty pounds, into the dirt and the burdock bushes.
• 46:22
  He threw his full body weight on top of her chest,
• 46:25
  kneeling or laying on her so violently that he fractured
• 46:27
  her breastplate. Then he clamped his hand with immense, unyielding
• 46:31
  force over her nose and mouth, pressing down so hard
• 46:34
  that her lips bled against her teeth.
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: The documentary takes a moment to dwell on the sheer
• 46:38
  horror of smothering as a method of death, and it's
• 46:41
  deeply unsettling. It's not like the movies where someone struggles
• 46:44
  for ten seconds and passes out.
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: Doctor Tercian explicitly noted that asphyxiation by smothering is a
• 46:49
  protracted process. It takes a full minute, perhaps two minutes
• 46:53
  of total oxygen deprivation before the brain becomes sufficiently hypoxic
• 46:56
  to lose consciousness. That means Patty Wosick endured one to
• 47:00
  two minutes of absolute, agonizing terror. She was fully awake,
• 47:04
  fully aware that her husband was crushing her chest and
• 47:06
  suffocating her in their own backyard, and completely powerless to
• 47:09
  stop him.
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: It is a profoundly intimate, terrifying way to murder the
• 47:13
  mother of your children. With the mechanism of death definitively established,
• 47:18
  the DA can now construct the true minute by minute
• 47:21
  timeline of the murder for the jury. Let's walk through
• 47:24
  exactly what happened that night.
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: At eleven pm, Patty finishes her shift at the er
• 47:29
  and drives home. Peter had deliberately left the children at
• 47:32
  Joyce's house. He wanted the property entirely empty. When Patty
• 47:36
  walks in the door, the trap is sprung. He likely
• 47:38
  offers her a drink. Playing the supportive husband. She consumes
• 47:41
  enough alcohol to hit that point zero five to five BAC.
• 47:45
  The foundation for the fake DWY is laid.
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: An argument ensues, or maybe he just attacks her. They
• 47:50
  end up outside on the side of the house. He
• 47:52
  wrestles her to the ground. They crash into the burdock bush.
• 47:55
  The spiny birds latch onto her sweater and hair. He
• 47:58
  kneels on her chest, covers her mouth, and smothers the
• 48:00
  life out of her.
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: Once she is dead, the physical struggle ends and the
• 48:04
  theatrical performance begins. He picks up her lifeless body and
• 48:08
  places it into the open bed of the dual wheeled
• 48:11
  pickup truck. He gets behind the wheel and drives the
• 48:13
  short distance to Guilford Lake. He waits in the dark
• 48:16
  until he is certain the road is entirely empty. He
• 48:19
  aligns the massive truck perfectly with the single thirty three
• 48:22
  foot opening in the guide rails. He puts the truck
• 48:25
  in gear, steps out, and lets it roll gently at
• 48:28
  roughly thirty miles per hour down the embankment and into
• 48:31
  the black water.
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: He isn't even in the cab. He just watches his
• 48:33
  truck sink.
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: Because Patty's body was placed in the open bed of
• 48:36
  the truck rather than inside the cab. As the vehicle submerges,
• 48:40
  the water simply lifts her out. She floats free, which
• 48:44
  perfectly explains why the police diver found her body ten
• 48:47
  feet behind the sunken truck. Peter waits for the truck
• 48:50
  to disappear. He wades into the freezing water, perhaps up
• 48:53
  to his waist, just enough to soak his clothes for
• 48:55
  the visual effect, but careful to keep his core and
• 48:57
  his hair completely dry to avoid actual high bothermia. Then
• 49:01
  he runs to the neighboring cabins and starts screaming about
• 49:04
  a deer, a sudden swerve, and a forty second underwater
• 49:07
  rescue attempt.
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: The arrogance required to pull this office staggering. He genuinely
• 49:12
  believed he was the smartest person in the room. He
• 49:14
  thought he could hand the rural police Department a neat
• 49:16
  little package, a woman with a history of duys alcohol
• 49:19
  in her system, a crash truck, and they would just
• 49:22
  rubber stamp the paperwork, declared a tragedy, and hand him
• 49:25
  a two hundred thousand dollars check.
• 49:26
  Speaker 2: But he profoundly underestimated the rigor of the scientific method.
• 49:31
  He didn't anticipate doctor Terzian looking closely at the inside
• 49:34
  of a lip. He didn't anticipate Lt. Cob measuring the
• 49:37
  radius of a tire track in the dirt. He certainly
• 49:40
  didn't anticipate a botanist mapping weeds, and he underestimated District
• 49:44
  Attorney Joseph McBride.
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: When Peter is finally arrested and brought to trial, his
• 49:50
  arrogance doesn't waiver. He realizes his first story about the
• 49:53
  deer and the forty second rescue has been completely obliterated
• 49:57
  by the physics, so he pivots one last time. He
• 49:59
  tried to play the ultimate victim card. In front of
• 50:01
  the jury.
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: His defense team argues a completely new narrative. They claim
• 50:06
  that Patty discovered his ongoing affair with Joyce the babysitter,
• 50:09
  flew into a homicidal rage, tried to attack him, and
• 50:12
  then intentionally drove the truck into the lake with him inside,
• 50:16
  in a desperate act of murder suicide.
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: It's an insulting defense. How do you explain the burdocks?
• 50:21
  How do you explain the thirty mile ar hour rolling
• 50:23
  curve if she was in a homicidal rage? How did
• 50:25
  the DA dismantle this in court?
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: DA McBride employed a brilliant strategy often used in financially
• 50:31
  motivated intimate partner homicides. When the defense tries to spin
• 50:36
  a chaotic highly emotional narrative. The prosecution must counter with
• 50:40
  a dispassionate, methodical injection of undeniable facts. McBride didn't argue
• 50:45
  with Peter's emotions. He just pointed to the physical world.
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: You claim you were trapped in the cab with her.
• 50:50
  Here is the photograph of the window rolled down exactly
• 50:53
  ten inches. Show the jury how you squeeze through that exactly.
• 50:57
  Speaker 2: You claim she drove violently into the lake in a rage.
• 51:00
  Here is the math proving the truck was coasting at
• 51:02
  thirty miles per hour. You claim she died drowning in
• 51:05
  the lake. Here is doctor Terzian to explain why her
• 51:07
  lungs were dry and her breastplate was fractured. And then
• 51:11
  McBride brought out the burdocks. He presented fourteen distinct pieces
• 51:15
  of physical and historical evidence, including the diaries and the
• 51:18
  neighbor's testimony, proving Peter's intent and violence long before the
• 51:22
  truck ever got wet.
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: The jury didn't buy the murder suicide narrative for a second.
• 51:27
  They saw entirely through the web of shifting lies. Peter
• 51:30
  Wassick was convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty five
• 51:33
  years to life in a New York State prison. There's
• 51:36
  a moment in the documentary where Patty's sister Wendy finally
• 51:39
  exhales outside the courtroom and says, we got him. That
• 51:42
  son of a bitch did he killed my sister. The
• 51:45
  relief of finally having the truth validated by a jury.
• 51:48
  Speaker 2: It is a profound victory for the scientific process. This
• 51:52
  case is a masterclass in how different disciplines must communicate.
• 51:56
  The police diver's spatial awareness, the accident reconstructors physics, the
• 52:01
  pathologist's anatomical expertise, and the botanist's ecological mapping all interlocked
• 52:06
  perfectly to give a voice to a woman who had
• 52:08
  tried to warn the world through her hidden diaries.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: It's incredible. But as we wrap up this deep dive,
• 52:13
  I keep thinking about something you mentioned right the very
• 52:15
  beginning of our conversation. We talked about the mammalian diving reflex,
• 52:19
  the body's biological emergency break.
• 52:21
  Speaker 2: It is the most chilling irony of this entire tragedy.
• 52:24
  We established that the EMTs did CPR for over an
• 52:27
  hour because the freezing water of Guilford Lake could have
• 52:31
  triggered Patty's Brady cardia slowed her metabolism and preserved her
• 52:35
  brain function while submerged.
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: If Peter's story had actually been true, if Patty had
• 52:40
  simply been driving, hit a patch of black ice, and
• 52:43
  plunged into that freezing lake alive, her body would have
• 52:46
  fought for her. The freezing water hitting her face would
• 52:49
  have engaged that reflex. Given how quickly the local fire
• 52:52
  department responded and how fast the police diver located her
• 52:56
  body outside the truck, she very well might have survived
• 52:59
  a genuine accident.
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: But Peter Wessig didn't just stage a crime scene by
• 53:03
  choosing to pin her to the dirt in their backyard
• 53:05
  and crush the oxygen out of her lungs before he
• 53:07
  ever put her in the water. He actively strict his
• 53:10
  wife of the very biological reflex that could have saved
• 53:12
  her life. He stole her body's ultimate evolutionary defense mechanism,
• 53:17
  ensuring she was dead long before the freezing water ever
• 53:20
  touched her face.
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: He took away her last possible chance to go back
• 53:23
  to her children. It is a deeply bleak realization, but
• 53:26
  it perfectly underscores why the relentless multidisciplinary pursuit of the
• 53:30
  truth by these forensic scientists is so vital. They are
• 53:34
  the ones who speak for the victims whose defenses have
• 53:36
  been stolen. Thank you for joining us on this deep
• 53:39
  dive into the PATTYWASA case. We hope this exploration encourages
• 53:43
  you to look a little closer at the seemingly obvious
• 53:46
  narratives in the world around you, to question the physics
• 53:48
  of a story, and to remember that sometimes the ultimate
• 53:51
  truth of a tragedy is found clinging to a single
• 53:53
  spiny weed. Keep asking questions and we will catch you
• 53:56
  on the next deep dive.