Latest / 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories / Murder of an NFL Star
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- 0:13Discretion advice. This is ten minute murder. Thirty six year old professional football
- 0:47player Steve McNair enjoyed a successful and lucrative career in the NFL. The Houston
- 0:53Oilers drafted him third overall in nineteen ninety five, and two years later he
- 0:58was named their regular starting quarterback. When the team moved to Nashville and was
- 1:03renamed to the Tennessee Titans, he was given the nickname Air McNair and played
- 1:07a total of thirteen seasons in the NFL, eleven for the Titans and two
- 1:12more with the Baltimore Ravens before he announced his retirement from football in two thousand
- 1:18and seven. At the time of his retirement, Steve had been married to
- 1:22his wife, Michelle for a decade, and the two of them had two
- 1:26sons together. It's been a great ride, he said after his last game.
- 1:30It's a sad, emotional day for me. I'm trying to do the
- 1:33best I can to hold it in, but at the same time, I'm
- 1:37opening up a lot more doors for the future. I can become now the
- 1:41father I need to be to my kids. However, Steve struggled to cope
- 1:46with moving away from the fame and the sense of purpose that professional football had
- 1:49given him. So many pro athletes focused on sports so much from the time
- 1:53they are kids until the time they retire, that once they do retire,
- 1:59they can struggle to fit into the real world. One of his former teammates
- 2:02later told a media quote, what people fail to realize is that when you
- 2:07make a transition away from the game emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually,
- 2:12you go through something, you change, and you're constantly searching for something.
- 2:17Steve never got the chance to adjust to his retirement. Only two years later,
- 2:23on the fourth of July, Steve's dead body was found in the Nashville
- 2:27condo he rented. He had been shot to death, but he wasn't alone.
- 2:32Lying next to him, there was another dead body belonging to twenty year
- 2:37old Sahel Kazimi. Sahel, who went by the nickname Jenny, had lived
- 2:42a difficult life. When she was nine years old, her mother had been
- 2:46violently murdered. As a teenager, she and her family fled their home country
- 2:50of Iran and moved to Florida. Jenny moved away from her family, the
- 2:54only source of support in her life, to Nashville to live with her twenty
- 2:59year old boyfriend, Keith Norfleet. At the time, Jenny was only sixteen
- 3:04years old. In two thousand and nine, Jenny and Keith had recently broken
- 3:08up, but she was still living in Nashville, working as a waitress in
- 3:12a chain restaurant that Steve McNair often visited. It was Dave Embusters at Opry
- 3:17Mills, in case you were wondering. She had become familiar with Steve because
- 3:22he was such a frequent customer and always made an effort to talk to the
- 3:25staff there. Quote he was one of the nice guys who would talk to
- 3:30you, another coworker at the restaurant said, not like the other athletes.
- 3:34Jenny developed romantic feelings for Steve and ended up giving him her cell phone number.
- 3:39Despite having a wife and a family, Steve started texting Jenny and taking
- 3:45her on expensive dates. The nature of their relationship made their different lifestyles obvious.
- 3:51Jenny was a nineteen year old who worked a minimum wage job, and
- 3:54Steve was a famous athlete in his thirties who owned multiple properties and businesses.
- 4:00He took Jenny with him on luxurious vacations, and when she turned twenty,
- 4:05he bought her a new car, a Cadillac Escalade. Jenny was naturally excited
- 4:11to tell her family back in Florida that one day she and Steve would get
- 4:15married and buy a house together. While Jenny was smitten with Steve, her
- 4:19family didn't feel the same way. They were skeptical. None of her family
- 4:24members were fans of the NFL, so they weren't impressed with Steve's name,
- 4:28career, or status. Mostly, they were concerned about the fact that Steve
- 4:31was married, with a family of his own and didn't seem to plan on
- 4:35leaving his wife for Jenny. Steve's lack of commitment wasn't the only source of
- 4:41stress in Jenny's life. When Steve had gifted her the Cadillac, I'm using
- 4:46air quotes on gifted, he also had arranged for her to make monthly payments
- 4:50on the car, which was in both of their names. Jenny still hadn't
- 4:55sold her own car, and the costs kept piling up. Side note,
- 5:00if you give someone a gift and that gift is a huge car payment,
- 5:04are you really giving them a gift? Anyway? She had been living in
- 5:08an apartment with a roommate, splitting the one thousand dollars monthly rent between the
- 5:12two of them, but then the roommate moved out, leaving Jenny struggling to
- 5:15pay the whole sum herself. On the day that he died, Steve received
- 5:20a text from Jenny asking if he loved her, to which he responded,
- 5:25I love you baby. During that same conversation, Jenny confessed to Steve that
- 5:30she was stressed about money and couldn't afford paying for her cell phone bill.
- 5:34Steve responded by transferring Jenny a total of two thousand dollars and then went to
- 5:40visit her to check if she was okay. Despite Steve seeming to go out
- 5:44of his way to take care of Jenny, their relationship had not been easy.
- 5:47Throughout their affair, Steve had been struggling to keep Jenny a secret from
- 5:51his wife, Michelle. Jenny wanted to be in a serious, monogamous relationship
- 5:57with Steve, but he didn't feel the same way. In fact, she
- 6:00wasn't the only woman he was having an affair with. Jenny found used condoms
- 6:05in Steve's bedroom and started to stalk the other woman that she believed he was
- 6:10seeing. As she became more and more pushy, repeatedly calling Steve when he
- 6:15was spending time with his family. Steve became distant. He tried to pull
- 6:20back from the relationship, but he never stopped seeing her entirely. Only two
- 6:26days before Steve and Jenny died, Jenny had been pulled over by the Nashville
- 6:30police and arrested for drunk driving. She was driving a black Cadillac, the
- 6:35car that Steve bought for her twentieth birthday, and Steve was sitting in the
- 6:41passenger seat. As the officers arrested Jenny and escorted her to the police car.
- 6:46Jenny repeatedly begged for Steve to come to the police car to speak with
- 6:48her. However, Steve wasn't under arrest, so instead of talking to Jenny,
- 6:55he called a taxi and left the scene. Later that day, he
- 6:59paid Jenny's bad and immediately after she was released from jail, she went to
- 7:03buy a gun. Investigators were left with two dead bodies and no survivors to
- 7:10immediately tell them who had pulled the trigger and why. The murder weapon,
- 7:15a nine millimeter gun, was found underneath Jenny Kazimi's body, and forensic testing
- 7:20found gunpowder residue on the fingers and palm of her left hand. Unlike Jenny,
- 7:26who had been shot in the head at close range, Steve had been
- 7:30shot three times from a distance of more than three feet away, as well
- 7:33as one final shot at point blank range. Because of the positioning of his
- 7:39body and the gunshot wounds, Steve was believed to have been asleep when he
- 7:43was killed. The forensic evidence allowed the police to reach a conclusion the deaths
- 7:48were a murder suicide where Jenny shot Steve to death and then sat down on
- 7:54the couch next to his body and committed suicide with the same gun. It
- 8:00it appeared that she sat next to him and hoped that she would fall sideways
- 8:03and die lying in his lap, but instead she had fallen to the floor.
- 8:09The investigation into the case was studied by retired FBI Greg McCrary, who
- 8:15had more than ten years experience working in the Bureau's Behavioral Science unit. Greg
- 8:20came to the same conclusion as the police that Jenny killed Steve because of stress
- 8:24that came from their relationship and her financial situation. Greg didn't believe that Steve's
- 8:31murder had been spontaneous. From Jenny's cell phone records and her decision to buy
- 8:35a gun. It appeared that she had decided that she was going to kill
- 8:39Steve before she met up with him that night. She had also shot him
- 8:45a total of four times, even though every one of the wounds would have
- 8:48been fatal on its own. Quote to me, shooting him more than once
- 8:54is kind of that revenge thing. We have something like this when we deal
- 8:58with overkill. It's more emotion, it's more effective, more rage, more
- 9:03getting. Even whatever that motive may be, she hadn't just wanted to hurt
- 9:09Steve. She had shot him repeatedly, beginning when he was asleep on the
- 9:13couch, because she was determined to end his life. The rest of the
- 9:18crime scene details supported Greg mccrary's belief that the murder had been an act of
- 9:22revenge and possession. This certainly looks like an attempt at posing, he said,
- 9:28agreeing that Jenny had planned on dying in Steve's lap. Quote, She's
- 9:33dressed up in all this pink, which is very feminine, and trying to
- 9:37have her body on his. It's as though it's a symbolic kind of possession.
- 9:41The day before she killed Steve, Jenny had talked with a friend about
- 9:45the stress in her life quote I should just end it. That is ten
- 10:05Minute Murder for today brief and binge able true crime. I'm Joe, that's
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- 10:31comes out. On the next episode of ten Minute Murder, I'm going to
- 10:35tell you about three members of a wealthy family who were shot to death by
- 10:39a calculated, careful killer. Only the youngest child of the family, twenty
- 10:45one year old Dana Yule, survived. Was he behind the murders of his
- 10:50own family? Find out in the next episode of ten Minute Murder. So
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