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The Fatal Affair of Stacy Feldman · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: I want you to just close your eyes for a second.
0:04
Picture the ultimate facade of a perfect life.
0:07
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the kind of picture perfect existence that almost
0:09
makes you jealous just looking at it.
0:11
Speaker 1: Exactly. I mean, think back to this stunning two thousand
0:14
and five wedding at the Ritz Carlton in Montreal. The
0:16
happy couple eventually packs up, they move out to Denver, Colorado,
0:20
and they just build this beautiful life. Right. They have
0:23
two wonderful children, and right at the absolute center of
0:27
it all is a forty four year old mother named
0:30
Stacy Feldman.
0:31
Speaker 2: And you know, if you ask anyone who knew Stacy,
0:34
the descriptions are universally glowing.
0:36
Speaker 1: Oh, universally. She is incredibly kind, fiercely loyal, outgoing, and
0:42
just hysterically funny.
0:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're talking about the kind of person who would
0:45
drop absolutely everything to move across the country just to
0:49
be a live in nanny for her sister's newborn.
0:51
Speaker 1: Right. She was the glue holding her community together. So
0:53
I want you to hold that vibrant, beautiful image in
0:56
your mind, and then I just need you to abruptly
0:58
shatter it, because we have to contrast that life with
1:01
the grim reality of Saturday, March first, twenty fifteen. On
1:06
that afternoon, Stacey Feldman was pulled completely lifeless from a
1:10
cold bathtub in her own home.
1:12
Speaker 2: It's just this jarring psychological whiplash. I mean, you go
1:15
from the pinnacle of a life fully lived, this woman
1:18
at the center of her community, to a scene that
1:20
has just steeped in profound confusion and tragedy. When first
1:24
responders crossed the threshold of that Denver home, they walked
1:27
into a situation that defied immediate explanation and frankly, it
1:30
basically defied the laws of physics.
1:32
Speaker 1: Which is exactly the mission for our deep dive today.
1:35
We are going to unpack a case that started out
1:38
as a completely undetermined medical mystery.
1:41
Speaker 2: I did true mystery.
1:43
Speaker 1: This was a case where the initial physical evidence was
1:45
so murky, so seemingly contradictory, that for years, literally years,
1:50
no one could say with absolute legal certainty what actually
1:54
happened to Stacy.
1:55
Speaker 2: But over seven agonizing years, this so called medical mystery
1:59
evolved into first degree murder conviction.
2:01
Speaker 1: It did. We are exploring staged crime scenes, shifting timelines,
2:06
and how the tiniest, almost invisible digital breadcrumbs can completely undo,
2:11
what a killer thought was? You know, a perfect crime. Absolutely,
2:14
you are going to want to pay very close attention
2:17
to the timeline today and put yourself right in the
2:19
shoes of the detectives because I'm telling you, nothing you
2:22
see on the surface here is real. So okay, let's
2:25
unpack this.
2:26
Speaker 2: To truly comprehend how the truth was ultimately extracted from
2:30
this situation, we have to bypass the eventual conviction for
2:34
a minute and look closely at the initial incredibly suspicious accident.
2:38
Speaker 1: Itself, right, the quote unquote accident exactly.
2:41
Speaker 2: We have to look at the narrative that was constructed
2:43
on day one and the day Stacy died. The timeline
2:47
of events was established almost entirely by a single.
2:50
Speaker 1: Narrator, her husband, Bob Feldman.
2:52
Speaker 2: Her husband.
2:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, let's look at the mechanics of that morning
2:54
through his eyes. So, according to Bob, Stacey wakes up
2:58
not feeling one hundred percent. She decides to just go
3:01
back to bed to rest. So Bob takes on the
3:04
morning parental duties. At eight thirty am, he drops their
3:08
two kids. And keep in mind, the oldest is just
3:10
eight years old, so young, yeah, very young. He drops
3:13
them at temple sinized new religious school. Now, the agreed
3:17
upon plan is for Stacy to rest up, pick the
3:20
kids up at noon, and then take them to a
3:22
local carnival for the afternoon, which.
3:24
Speaker 2: Sounds like a very standard, mundane weekend compromise for a
3:28
busy family.
3:28
Speaker 1: It really does like your rest, I'll take the morning shift.
3:31
Speaker 2: It does, which is why the deviations from that plan
3:34
stand out so sharply. Noon arrives and Stacy just doesn't
3:38
show up at the synagogue. Yeah, the teachers at the
3:40
religious school do what any responsible educators would do, right.
3:44
They're calling her phone, no answer, nothing, They keep trying.
3:47
Eventually they're forced to track down Bob, so he has
3:50
to be the one to retrieve the kids and he
3:52
actually takes them to the carnival himself.
3:54
Speaker 1: And we're going to dive deep into his behavior at
3:57
that synagogue later because it's wild, But for now, let's
4:00
fast forward a few hours. It's just after three zero pm.
4:04
Bob returns home with the kids from the carnival. The
4:06
narrative he gives police is that as soon as he
4:09
unlocks the door and steps into the house, he immediately
4:12
hears water running upstairs. He tells his young kids to
4:15
go over to the neighbor's house right away because there's
4:18
an emergency. He dials nine to one one and he
4:21
tells the dispatcher, in this state of supposed panic, that
4:24
he just ran upstairs, found his web Stacy in a
4:27
running shower, completely unresponsive, and pulled her out of the tub.
4:30
Speaker 2: And EMTs arrived swiftly, as they always do for a
4:33
drowning or a cardiac code. Yeah, they attempt aggressive resuscitation protocols,
4:38
but the reality is it's far too late. Stacey is
4:42
pronounced dead at three point five six pm in the
4:45
master bedroom that adjoins that bathroom. Now, if you are
4:48
a patrol officer walking into that house, on the surface,
4:51
this sounds like a horrific sudden.
4:53
Speaker 1: Medical event, an accidental drowning caused by a fainting spell
4:56
or a heart issue, right exactly.
4:58
Speaker 2: But when Detective Randall Dennison and the initial first responders
5:01
actually look at the physical space of that bathroom, the
5:04
narrative doesn't just fracture, It completely disintegrates.
5:07
Speaker 1: Disintegrates is the perfect word. Let's look at the physical space,
5:11
starting with the first massive anomaly, which is the floor. Oh,
5:14
the floor, Detective Denison notes that there is absolutely no
5:18
water on the bathroom floor. None. Right, I mean, think
5:21
about the mechanics of this. It's like a magician executing
5:24
a daring underwater escape, but forgetting to actually get wet.
5:29
If Bob dragged a heavy, lifeless, completely soaked human body
5:34
out of a running shower while simultaneously trying to manage
5:37
a phone call with a nine to one one dispatcher,
5:40
how on earth is the tile floor bone dry?
5:42
Speaker 2: The geometry in the physics simply do not align with
5:44
his story at all. Yeah, let's really break down what
5:47
actually happens when you move a human body out of
5:49
a running shower. Yeah, please, we are talking about a
5:52
cascade of water.
5:53
Speaker 1: Yeah.
5:53
Speaker 2: Hair holds water, clothing holds water. Human skin displaces water.
5:57
If you are panicking struggling with dead weight, which by
6:00
the way, is incredibly difficult to maneuver.
6:02
Speaker 1: It's so heavy, it really is.
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Speaker 2: You were not carefully dripped drying the person before moving
6:08
them to the bedroom, there would be massive water displacement.
6:12
We should be seeing puddles, a clear, wide trail of
6:16
moisture leading from the tubs straight to the bedroom carpet exactly.
6:20
The floor should have been saturated or at the very
6:23
least highly slippery and damp.
6:25
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just the miraculous dry floor. The staging
6:28
of the rest of the room felt profoundly unnatural. There
6:32
was a towel hanging perfectly neatly folded on the rack
6:35
right next to the tub.
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Speaker 2: Which contradicts the chaos of a life or death rescue.
6:39
I mean, you don't take the time to smooth out
6:41
a towel when your spouse is literally dying on the floor. Right. Furthermore,
6:45
there was a damp washcloth just resting on the base
6:48
of the tub, alongside this very specific, almost theatrical scattering
6:53
of shampoo and conditioner bottles.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so weird.
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Speaker 2: It looked like someone had intentionally swept a hand across
6:58
a shower caddy to simulate the struggle, but then left
7:01
the rest of the room absolutely pristine.
7:03
Speaker 1: But the detail that really stops me in my tracks,
7:06
the thing that just screams fake to me, is Stacy herself.
7:10
She was found still wearing her watch, a silver and
7:13
gold dress watch. Yeah, who on Earth gets into their
7:17
own home shower wearing a heavy metallic dress watch.
7:21
Speaker 2: Almost nobody, unless they are in a state of severe dementia,
7:24
which stacy was absolutely not what you were observing. Here
7:28
is a classic failure of criminal staging. Okay, what's fascinating
7:33
here is how the perpetrator's own attempts to make a
7:35
scene look like an accident often become the exact evidence
7:39
that points to foul play. When perpetrators attempt to manufacture
7:42
a crime scene to look like a suicide or an accident,
7:45
they almost always fall victim to severe cognitive overload.
7:49
Speaker 1: Let's break that down, because I hear cognitive overload used
7:51
a lot in true crime. But what is actually happening
7:53
in the brain when someone is staging a scene like this.
7:56
Speaker 2: It's essentially a neurochemical hijacking. When a perpetrator has just
7:59
come out a homicide, their body dumps a massive amount
8:02
of adrenaline and cortisol into their system. The amygdala, which
8:05
is the fear and survival center of the brain, just
8:08
takes over and it essentially shuts down the prefrontal cortex,
8:11
the part responsible for logic, reason and meticulous planning. Under
8:16
this immense stress, their visual and cognitive field narrows dramatically.
8:21
They can only focus on the macro elements of the narrative.
8:24
They are trying to.
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Speaker 1: Sell the macro being like, I need the police to
8:27
think Stacy drowned, So the big picture is getting her
8:30
body into the tub and turning the water on.
8:32
Speaker 2: That is the big picture. Yes, they complete the primary objective,
8:35
but because their prefrontal cortex is offline, their brains literally
8:40
do not have the bandwidth to process the micro details
8:43
that make up reality. Wow, they are blind to the periphery.
8:47
They forget that dragging a wet body requires a trail
8:49
of water. They forget the humans don't shower in expensive jewelry.
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They place a towel neatly back on a rack because
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their brains default ingrained habit is to tidy of a bathroom,
8:59
and they just don't have the cognitive presence to realize
9:01
that tidying up contradicts the narrative of a chaotic, desperate
9:05
medical emergency.
9:07
Speaker 1: It's fascinating. The staging is meant to be their absolute shield,
9:10
but because of how the human brain fails under pressure,
9:13
the staging becomes the precise weapon that detectives use against them.
9:17
Exactly so, a dry floor and a neatly folded towel
9:20
are highly suspicious, but if physical evidence wasn't giving them
9:23
the full picture. Detectives had to look at behavioral evidence
9:27
and Bob's behavior in the immediate aftermath of this quote
9:31
unquote accident turns that suspicion into a blaring siren. Let's
9:35
listen closely to the audio clues from the nine to
9:37
one one call.
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Speaker 2: The acoustic environment of that nine to one one call
9:41
is just a treasure trove of red flags for investigators.
9:45
Dispatchers are trained to listen to the background of a
9:48
call just as closely as the caller's voice. First, while
9:52
Bob is on the phone, supposedly in the midst of
9:54
this catastrophic time sensitive emergency, detectives can clearly hear a
9:58
toilet flushing in the back.
10:00
Speaker 1: Which immediately brings to mind evidence disposal. I mean, put
10:02
yourself in that moment. Your wife is supposedly dying on
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the floor. What possible reason do you have to step away,
10:07
use the toilet and flush it? What are you getting
10:09
rid of?
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Speaker 2: It defines all logic of a rescue operation. And then
10:13
there's the CPR itself. The nine to one to one
10:15
dispatcher is doing a phenomenal job. They are guiding Bob
10:20
through the rhythms, counting out loud for him to set
10:23
the pace like one, two, three, four, five six. Yeah,
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they're trying to orchestrate a life saving measure. But when
10:29
you isolate the audio of Bob's voice and his breathing,
10:32
his respiration never changes. There is absolutely no physical exertion
10:37
audible on his end of the line.
10:39
Speaker 1: Which is physically impossible if you are actually doing CPR.
10:43
Compressing a human chest requires you to push down roughly
10:45
two inches at a rate of one hundred to one
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hundred and twenty beats per minute. You are using your
10:50
entire upper body weight to manually pump a human heart. Yes,
10:53
the lactic acid build up is intense. You should be panting,
10:57
out of breath and physically exhausted within the first four seconds.
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Speaker 2: Yet Bob's voice remains completely steady, without the gasping or
11:04
strain that always accompanies chest compressions. The auditory evidence strongly
11:08
suggests he was just holding the phone, listening to the
11:10
dispatcher count and perhaps lightly tapping the floor, but he
11:13
was certainly not performing CPR. But if his inaction on
11:17
the phone was suspicious, his active interference when the paramedics
11:21
arrived took things to a whole new level. Oh. In
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any medical emergency, first responders operate on a core principle.
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Speaker 1: Time is tissue wait unpack. Time is tissue for us
11:32
because that sounds like a critical medical threshold.
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Speaker 2: It refers to the eschemic cascade. When a body stops
11:38
breeding or a heart stops beating, oxygen stops flowing to
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the organs. Every single minute that passes without oxygen, irreversible
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cellular death occurs. Tissue dies, particularly in the brain and
11:51
the heart muscle. Paramedics have a tiny window to intervene,
11:54
which is why they need immediate, accurate information. They need
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to know exactly what they're dealing with, an overdose, a
12:00
heart attack, a drowning, so they can push the right
12:03
drugs and perform the right interventions instantly.
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Speaker 1: But when firefighters and paramedics rush into that room and
12:08
start rapidly firing questions at Bob about Stacy's medical history,
12:12
he refuses to answer them. He just shuts down the
12:15
flow of information.
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Speaker 2: He creates a bottleneck during the most critical window of survival.
12:21
Responders described him as highly over dramatic. He is wailing loudly,
12:26
physically walking away from them when they ask questions and
12:29
then swinging back to hover so erratically over Stacy's body
12:34
that the paramedics are physically hindered from doing chest compressions.
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Speaker 1: It's insane.
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Speaker 2: He is literally taking up the physical space they need
12:42
to save her. It got so bad that the medics
12:45
actually had to radio for police backup just to manage Bob,
12:48
to literally get him out of the way so they
12:50
could work.
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Speaker 1: Wait, hold on a second. Finding your wife lifeless in
12:53
a bathtub is unimaginably traumatic. Couldn't his weird behavior with
12:57
the paramedics, the wailing, the hovering, the inner ability to
13:00
answer questions, couldn't that just be genuine raw shock. It's
13:04
a fair question, because grief does bizarre things to the
13:06
human brain. We see people laugh at funerals, we see
13:09
people go catatonic. Is it fair to call it interference
13:12
when he might just be having a psychological breakdown.
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Speaker 2: You're hitting on the core forensic problem investigator's face. Every
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single day. Trauma responses are wildly unpredictable. Some people freeze,
13:24
some become hysterical, some become hyper competent and detached. But
13:28
seasoned investigators and paramedics look for the subtle difference between
13:32
a genuine psychological breakdown and strategic calculated interference. Okay, genuine
13:39
shock usually manifests profound confusion, a desperate begging plea for
13:44
the medics to do something, or a hyper focus on
13:47
the victim's survival.
13:48
Speaker 1: We Bob did next shifted his behavior firmly into the
13:51
strategic category.
13:52
Speaker 2: Right, because, once he finally decides to speak, he doesn't
13:54
just give them a medical history. He preemptively offers this
13:58
highly structured alibi for her day.
14:00
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly, he volunteers to the police that the night
14:02
before they had been at a party. He explicitly claims
14:05
Stacy consumed marijuana edibles, that she had been drinking alcohol heavily,
14:10
and then he just lists a whole host of severe
14:12
medical issues like.
14:13
Speaker 2: An enlarged heart, cardiovascular disease, nerve pain, arthritis. Right, and
14:17
he makes a very specific point to tell them she
14:19
was wearing two fentanyl patches for her pain management.
14:22
Speaker 1: He's not acting like a confused, grieving husband. He's acting
14:25
like a defense attorney handing the police a completed multiple
14:28
choice test where every single answer points to accidental overdose
14:34
due to a tragic cocktail of drugs and bad health.
14:36
Speaker 2: He is attempting to control the narrative before the investigation
14:40
even begins. But the absolute most damning piece of that
14:43
control strategy, the thing that really cemented detectives suspicions, was
14:47
his explicit, forceful request to the coroner's office.
14:51
Speaker 1: This part is wild.
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Speaker 2: Before Stacy's body is even fully processed, Bob explicitly demands
14:56
that no autopsy be performed on his wife.
14:59
Speaker 1: Which is just a Think about this from a human perspective.
15:02
Your young, vibrant, forty four year old wife drops dead
15:05
mysteriously in the middle of Saturday afternoon, and your immediate
15:09
reaction is that you don't want to know why.
15:11
Speaker 2: If you are an innocent, grieving spouse, the sudden death
15:13
of your partner is a terrifying mystery. You want answers.
15:17
You demand a thorough investigation to understand if it was
15:20
an aneurysm, a hidden genetic defect, something that might even
15:24
affect your children. Absolutely, requesting no autopsy is perhaps the
15:28
clearest signal a suspect can send to law enforcement that
15:31
they are terrified of what a medical examiner will uncover
15:34
under the microscope.
15:35
Speaker 1: Well Bub tried his absolute hardest to write the final
15:38
chapter of this story right there in the bedroom. He
15:40
wanted the book close that day, but thankfully, the coroner's
15:44
office in Colorado doesn't take orders from husbands.
15:46
Speaker 2: Thank goodness.
15:47
Speaker 1: They proceeded with the autopsy, and that's where the medical examiner,
15:51
combined with Bob's own inability to keep his lies straight,
15:55
really began to complicate his perfect crime.
15:57
Speaker 2: The following day, doctor Kelly Kalan, a forensic pathologist, performed
16:02
the autopsy, and what she found, or more accurately, the
16:07
definitive proof she failed to find, created a massive, almost
16:10
insurmountable investigative hurdle for the police. What do you mean,
16:14
doctor Kolanski found no internal fatal injuries that would definitively
16:19
scientifically explain how Stacy died.
16:21
Speaker 1: But wait, earlier you mentioned the first responders noted bruising.
16:24
Didn't they see abrasions on Stacy's body when they arrived?
16:27
Speaker 2: They did, there were visible hemorrhages and abrasions on her body,
16:31
But a forensic pathologist has to operate on absolute scientific certainty.
16:36
Doctor Keolnsky concluded that those specific bruises and marks could
16:40
have been the result of the aggressive, forceful CPR attempts
16:43
by the paramedics, or from the physical scraping of being
16:47
dragged out of a hard porcelain bathtub.
16:49
Speaker 1: Oh I see.
16:50
Speaker 2: As for drowning, it is notoriously difficult to prove definitively
16:54
in an autopsy.
16:54
Speaker 1: Why is that you would think water in the lungs
16:56
is a clear indicator.
16:57
Speaker 2: It's not that simple. Actually, times victims die of dry
17:01
drowning where the airway spasm shut. Sometimes the fluid found
17:05
in the lungs post mortem can be attributed to natural
17:08
bodily decomposition processes rather than inhaled bathwater. Without specific microscopic
17:13
markers like items from natural bodies of water which wouldn't
17:17
be present in a tapwater shower, drowning often becomes a
17:20
diagnosis of exclusion. So because doctor Kelansky couldn't definitively point
17:26
to a fatal internal injury, she had to make a
17:28
highly frustrating ruling for the detectives. The official cause of
17:32
death on Stacy's death certificate was categorized as undetermined.
17:36
Speaker 1: So Bob breathes a huge sigh of relief. The body
17:40
didn't betray him, but the toxicology report is a completely
17:43
different story. So Bob has just confidently handed the police,
17:47
this perfectly packaged accidental overdose narrative. He's practically tied it
17:51
with a bow. She ate edibles at a party, she drank,
17:54
she had fentanyl patches, Her heart just gave out. If
17:56
I'm sitting at that detective's desk, my very first move
17:59
is pulling that toxicology report to see if the internal
18:02
chemistry actually matches the story he told he did. It
18:05
blew his story entirely out of the water.
18:06
Speaker 2: I knew to understand why. You have to look at
18:09
how the human body metabolizes THHC. The active ingredient in marijuana.
18:14
THHC is highly lepiphilic, meaning it binds tightly to fat
18:18
cells in the body. Because of this, it stays in
18:21
your system for a remarkably long time compared to water
18:24
soluble substances like alcohol. It doesn't just vanish in a
18:27
few hours.
18:28
Speaker 1: Right, which is exactly why employment drug tests can catch
18:31
marijuana use weeks after the fact, even if the person
18:34
isn't high at the time of the test.
18:36
Speaker 2: That's the mechanism. So when doctor Kolanski runs the comprehensive
18:39
talk screen on Stacy's blood and tissue, she absolutely finds
18:43
the prescription medication Stacy was known to take for her
18:46
nerve pain. The fentanyl was there, but the DC levels
18:50
absolute zero.
18:51
Speaker 1: Wait, not even a trace him. If she had eaten
18:52
a marijuana edible the night before, like Bob explicitly told
18:56
the paramedics, her blood should have been swimming in cannabinoids.
18:59
Speaker 2: Not a single microscopic trace. You have to understand this
19:02
isn't just a minor inconsistency in a grieving man's memory.
19:05
This is a provable, scientifically irrefutable lie. When criminals craft
19:09
an alibi, they often borrow heavily from reality, but tweaked
19:13
the variables to suit their needs. Bob knew she took
19:16
heavy prescription medication, so he leaned into that truth, but
19:20
he fabricated the edibles to ensure the overdose theory held
19:23
enough weight to explain a sudden collapse.
19:26
Speaker 1: He just completely underestimated the absolute, unforgiving precision of modern
19:30
forensic toxicology completely, and suddenly, if you're the detective, the
19:35
paradigm shifts. You're looking at Bob not as a confused widower,
19:39
but as a man who is actively, meticulously lying about
19:42
the last twelve hours of his wife's life. And it
19:45
turns out the edibles weren't his only lie.
19:48
Speaker 2: Far from it.
19:49
Speaker 1: Let's go back to the religious school at the synagogue.
19:51
When Bum finally showed up to get the kids at
19:53
one point zero five PM, the teachers noted his behavior
19:57
was completely bizarre. He was wearing shorts and a tear
20:00
shirt in the middle of a snowy Colorado day, which
20:02
makes no sense, right, and he's looking completely disheveled, sweaty,
20:06
and highly irritable. And he lied to the teachers right
20:09
to their faces. He told them that a friend was
20:11
supposed to pick the kids up at noon, and that
20:13
Stacy was never supposed to be the one to do it.
20:15
Speaker 2: Detectives obviously followed up on that detail. They tracked down
20:19
and contacted that specific friend Bob named. The friend confirmed
20:24
unequivocally that no such plan had ever existed.
20:28
Speaker 1: Made it up.
20:28
Speaker 2: Bob entirely fabricated the story on the spot to explain
20:32
why no one showed up for the kids. But the
20:34
most critical, devastating slip up came directly from Bob's own
20:38
mouth during a recorded police interrogation.
20:41
Speaker 1: This is the moment the timeline shatters. Initially, Bob's rigid
20:46
story was that he dropped the kids off at eight
20:48
thirty am, and he did not return to the house
20:50
until three zero zero pm after the carnival. That was
20:53
his rock solid alibi he wasn't even there.
20:55
Speaker 2: But during a subsequent recorded phone call with Detective Dennison,
20:59
Bob inexplained changes his own timeline. He admissed to the
21:02
detective that he actually did come home around noon.
21:05
Speaker 1: Why would he do that? Like, why change your story
21:07
if it's working.
21:08
Speaker 2: It's the psychological weight of a lie. Criminals often feel
21:11
the urge to incorporate slivers of truth into their alibis
21:14
to make them feel more authentic, or because they fear
21:17
a neighbor might have seen their car in the driveway
21:19
and they want to get ahead of it.
21:20
Speaker 1: Uh, that makes sense.
21:21
Speaker 2: Bob claims he'd been working out at a local park,
21:23
got sweaty, and popped home for about ten minutes just
21:27
to change clothes. But crucially, he explicitly tells the detective
21:32
that during those ten minutes at noon, he didn't see Stacy,
21:35
he didn't speak to her, and he emphatically states he
21:37
did not hear any water running in the upstairs bathroom.
21:40
Speaker 1: So, if we look at this from a legal perspective.
21:43
We have a mountain of suspicious behavior, but an undetermined
21:47
autopsy is a nightmare for the prosecution. Asn't ep.
21:50
Speaker 2: It is arguably the highest, most impenetrable hurdle a homicide
21:53
detective can face in the eyes of the American legal system.
21:57
You cannot charge someone with murder. The state's own medical
22:01
examiner cannot conclusively say a homicide even occurred. You have
22:04
all this circumstantial evidence, the physics defying dry floor, the
22:09
fake CPR with no exertion, the provable scientific lie about
22:12
the thc edibles, the fabricated friend at the synagogue, and
22:16
now a shifting timeline that places Bob in the house
22:19
at the exact hour Stacy failed to pick up her kids.
22:22
Speaker 1: It's incredibly suspicious. Every investigator knows in their gut he
22:25
is lying and that he killed her exactly.
22:27
Speaker 2: But without a definitive homicide ruling on that death certificate,
22:31
it is simply not enough for a district attorney to
22:34
sign off on an arrest warrant. The investigation just gets
22:38
stuck in the mud.
22:39
Speaker 1: It's completely frozen. For months, Bob Feldman is walking around
22:42
Denver a freeman, having successfully muddied the medical waters. The
22:46
police know Bob is lying, but they lack a trigger.
22:49
They lack the why the motive, Why did he kill
22:52
her on that specific day, why that specific morning? And
22:56
then four months later, a total stranger provides the missing
23:00
puzzle piece that breaks this case wide open. If physical
23:03
evidence couldn't tell the story, detectives had to look at
23:05
the only other thing in that house that could, the
23:07
digital footprint.
23:08
Speaker 2: And that digital footprint was anchored by a woman named
23:11
Susan McBride. Her introduction into this narrative changes absolutely everything
23:15
it really does. In early twenty fifteen, Susan was leam
23:18
and Denver and using the dating app Tender, she matched
23:21
with a man who called himself Robert Wolfe. He claimed
23:24
to be a successful meat wholesaler living in the area,
23:27
and he told her a very common lie on dating apps.
23:30
He was separated from his wife and navigating a divorce.
23:33
Speaker 1: But Robert Wolfe, as you can guess, was actually Bob
23:36
Feldman right.
23:37
Speaker 2: They hit it off, initially went on a date, but
23:39
eventually Bob blows off weekend plans with Susan at the
23:42
very last minute with a flimsy excuse goy Susan being cautious, observant,
23:48
and frankly a little suspicious of his demeanor, decides to
23:51
do some digital digging of her own. She googles the
23:54
limited information she has, discovers his real identity as Bob Feldman,
23:58
realizes he is very much still married, and remarkably, she
24:02
manages to track down Stacey Feldman's personal email address.
24:05
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting. Susan decides to reach
24:08
out to Stacy, and the time stamps on this digital
24:11
communication become the smoking gun of the entire homicide case.
24:15
Speaker 2: It becomes the absolute anchor of the timeline. On Saturday,
24:18
March First, the exact morning Stacy died, Susan sends an
24:22
email to Stacy at six to two.
24:23
Speaker 1: In the morning, six twenty am.
24:25
Speaker 2: Stacy wakes up, sees the email, and the two women
24:27
start exchanging messages. This digital conversation quickly escalates and leads
24:32
to a real time phone call between Susan and Stacy.
24:34
Just before nine zero zero, air.
24:36
Speaker 1: I want you to really think about that timeline for
24:38
a second. Bob dropped the kids off at the synagogue
24:42
at eight thirty am. Stacy is now home alone, and
24:46
just before nine zero am, she is on a phone
24:48
call with a woman her husband met on Tinder, and
24:52
during that.
24:52
Speaker 2: Call, Susan reveals something deeply hurtful, something that shatters Stacy's reality.
25:00
Tell Stacy that Bob had referred to her on their
25:02
date as an absentee mother.
25:05
Speaker 1: Oh that is brutal.
25:06
Speaker 2: Stacy's response to Susan was swift and definitive. She said,
25:10
I'm done with him. Stacy indicated during the call that
25:13
they had dealt with infidelity in the past. She thought
25:15
the cheating was over and this new revelation was the
25:18
absolute final straw the marriage was over.
25:21
Speaker 1: Following that call, Stacey sends her last text message ever
25:24
at nine five nine a m. She has never heard
25:26
from again, and.
25:27
Speaker 2: Susan McBride had absolutely no idea what happened next. She
25:30
went on with her life. It wasn't until three months later,
25:32
after another bad Internet date prompted her to think about
25:35
that dramatic morning, that Susan randomly decided to google the
25:38
Feldman's to see if they had ended up getting a divorce.
25:40
Instead of a divorce filing, she found Stacy's obituary. Susan
25:44
immediately picked up the phone and called Denver.
25:47
Speaker 1: Homicide Susan wasn't just a tip for the police. She
25:50
was the exact time stamp for the motive. Bob didn't
25:54
just want out of the marriage eventually. He didn't just
25:56
want the seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars life insurance
25:58
policy of which she was veniently the sole beneficiary. He
26:02
was backed into a corner that exact morning.
26:05
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture of criminal psychology,
26:08
this perfectly illustrates the profound danger of domestic confrontations, particularly
26:13
when a spouse's secret double life is suddenly and completely exposed.
26:17
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
26:18
Speaker 2: The discovery of infidelity often transforms a premeditated, perhaps slow
26:22
moving plot into an immediate, highly volatile, and violent confrontation.
26:26
Bob comes home, likely during that ten minute window at
26:29
noon he admitted to and faces a wife who now
26:32
knows everything everything, a wife who says she has done
26:35
with him, and who is now actively standing between him
26:37
and his community reputation, his assets, and three quarters of
26:41
a million dollars in life insurance. Susan's phone call provided
26:44
the exact spark of rage that investigators were missing.
26:47
Speaker 1: So now armed with a clear financial and emotional motive
26:51
and a razor sharp digital timeline. The police finally have
26:55
a coherent narrative, but they still face that massive looming hurdle,
27:01
the undetermined autopsy.
27:02
Speaker 2: Yep, they still have to deal with this.
27:04
Speaker 1: The law doesn't care about a compelling narrative if the
27:06
science doesn't back it up. They need medical proof to
27:09
override doctor Kolanski's initial.
27:10
Speaker 2: Ruling, which brings us to October twenty seventeen. The Denver
27:14
Police Department makes a highly strategic, specialized move. They bring
27:18
in an external medical expert, doctor William Smoke. Okay, now
27:22
it's vital to understand that doctor Smoke is not just
27:24
a general forensic pathologist. He's a highly specialized, international, renowned
27:28
expert specifically focus on the biomechanics of strangulation and suffocation.
27:33
Speaker 1: Detectives hand over all the raw data, the original autopsy photographs,
27:37
the tissue sample reports, the crime scene data, everything. Doctor
27:40
Smoke reviews it all and comes back with a definitive,
27:43
uncompromising conclusion. He stays without a doubt that Stacy's death
27:47
was a homicide by strangulation or suffocation, and that it
27:51
occurred specifically in that window between nine point five nine am,
27:55
the time of her last text in noon when she
27:58
failed to pick.
27:58
Speaker 2: Up the kids. Heavily on that specialized expert medical opinion,
28:03
which provided the necessary grounds to override the initial undetermined ruling.
28:07
Police finally have what they need. In February twenty eighteen,
28:10
nearly three agonizing years after Stacy's death, Bob Seldman is
28:15
arrested and charged with first degree murder.
28:17
Speaker 1: But I want to pause here and really examine the
28:19
defense's argument, because it's a fascinating legal strategy that attacks
28:22
the very nature of expert testimony.
28:24
Speaker 2: It really is.
28:25
Speaker 1: The defense points out a glaring fact. Doctor Smoke is
28:28
an expert whose primary research focuses on living people who
28:31
have survived strangulation. He didn't perform the actual autopsy on Stacy.
28:35
He never touched her body. In fact, he doesn't even
28:38
hold the legal authority to sign a death certificate in
28:40
the state of Colorado. So, looking at this objectively, is
28:44
it fair in our judicial system to base a first
28:47
degree murder charge and a potential life sentence on a
28:51
secondary review of photographs by someone who never physically examined
28:55
the victim.
28:56
Speaker 2: It is a highly contentious area of criminal law speaks
29:00
directly to the rapid necessary evolution of forensic science. General
29:05
pathologists like the one who performed the initial autopsy are
29:08
trained to look for a massive, wide variety of causes
29:11
of death, everything from aneurysms to poison to blood force trauma.
29:14
Speaker 1: They're looking at the whole board exactly.
29:17
Speaker 2: But speculized experts like doctor Smoke are trained to see
29:20
the microscopic, incredibly subtle signs that a generalist might easily
29:24
miss or misinterpret.
29:25
Speaker 1: Give me an example of what a specialist sees that
29:27
a generalist doesn't.
29:29
Speaker 2: A perfect example is potechual hemorrhaging. These are tiny, pinpoint
29:32
red gots caused by bursts of capillaries, usually in the
29:35
eyes or on the face. A generalist might see pateechy
29:38
and attribute it to the aggressive CPR, which can occasionally
29:41
cause it.
29:41
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes.
29:42
Speaker 2: Sense, But a strangulation specialist understands the precise biomechanics of
29:47
venus obstruction. It only takes about four point four pounds
29:50
of pressure to block the jugular veins in the neck,
29:53
preventing blood from draining down from the head, but it
29:56
takes eleven pounds of pressure to block the carotid arteries,
29:59
which pump blood up into the head.
30:01
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, so there's a pressure gap exactly.
30:04
Speaker 2: So during a manual strangulation, blood continues to pump up
30:07
into the head, but it can't drain back down. The
30:10
vascular pressure builds instantly until those tiny capillaries burst. A
30:14
specialist like doctor Smoke can look at the specific pattern
30:18
and clustering of those ptechie in the photographs and differentiate
30:21
between CPR trauma and the distinct vascular pressure of strangulation.
30:25
Speaker 1: That is fascinating.
30:26
Speaker 2: The law allows for this kind of expert testimony because
30:29
medical science has become so incredibly specialized that a fresh,
30:32
highly trained set of eyes reviewing the raw objective data
30:36
can legitimately uncover biological truths that were previously obscure.
30:40
Speaker 1: And Bob was prepared to fight this specialized science tooth
30:44
and nail, and he had the resources to mount an
30:47
incredible defense because of what might be one of the
30:49
most enraging legal loopholes in this entire story.
30:52
Speaker 2: Oh, this part is awful.
30:54
Speaker 1: Remember that seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars life insurance
30:56
policy Bob received the payout. He took five hundred and
31:00
fifty thousand dollars of his murdered wife's money and used
31:03
it to hire a high end, extremely expensive criminal defense
31:07
firm to protect him from going to prison for her murder.
31:10
Speaker 2: The probate court understandably tried to intervene immediately. Stacy's family
31:15
fought desperately to freeze those assets. They invoked what is
31:19
commonly known as a slayer.
31:20
Speaker 1: Statute, which is what exactly.
31:22
Speaker 2: The underlying principle of a slayer statute in common law
31:25
is simple and deeply moral. A person should not be
31:29
allowed to financially profit from a murder they committed. You
31:31
shouldn't be able to inherit the wealth of the person
31:33
whose life you took.
31:34
Speaker 1: It seems like the most basic common sense. You kill someone,
31:37
you don't get their money. But the State Supreme Court
31:40
got involved and blew that common sense out of the water.
31:43
Speaker 2: Yes, and they issued a highly controversial ruling that hinged
31:47
entirely on a timeline technicality. The State Supreme Court ruled
31:52
that because the life insurance company had paid Bob Out
31:54
legally before he was officially charged with the murder, during
31:58
that three year window when the death was still officially undetermined,
32:02
the court had no statutory power to retroactively freeze or
32:06
seize those funds in civil court before a criminal conviction
32:09
was secured.
32:10
Speaker 1: It's unbelievable.
32:11
Speaker 2: The money was legally recognized as his personal property at
32:13
the time of the transfer, so Bob was allowed to
32:16
keep the half million dollars, and he used it to
32:19
hire the pricey Kaplan law firm to orchestrate his defense.
32:22
Speaker 1: It is a profoundly bitter pill to swallow. With top
32:25
tier lawyers fully funded by Stacy's life insurance, Bob manages
32:28
to delay his trial for years, and his behavior during
32:31
this massive delay, the sheer audacity of how he lived
32:34
his life is genuinely chilling.
32:36
Speaker 2: The legal delays were staggering. The trial was delayed six
32:39
separate times for arraignment alone, then it was delayed five
32:43
more times for the actual trial due to a complex
32:46
combination of aggressive legal maneuvering by his expensive defense team,
32:50
the unprecedented backlog caused by the COVID nineteen pandemic, and
32:54
various witness availability issues. So long in total, it took
32:58
seven years from the day Stacy died to bring Bob
33:01
to trial.
33:01
Speaker 1: During those seven years, Bob is placed on supervised house arrest.
33:05
He posts a one million dollar bond. Now, the rules
33:08
of his house. Arrest are theoretically strict. He's fitted with
33:12
a GPS ankle monitor and allowed out of his house
33:14
only for absolute court approved necessities. We're talking buying basic groceries,
33:20
attending medical doctor's appointments, and meeting with his legal team
33:22
to prepare for trial.
33:24
Speaker 2: But Bob exploited the vulnerabilities of this pre trial supervision
33:27
system flagrantly. He was somehow permitted to ride his bicycle
33:31
for thousands of miles all of the Denver area, logging
33:34
massive distances on biking apps, while supposedly confined to his home.
33:37
Speaker 1: But the biking isn't even the worst part. This is
33:40
the part that truly makes my blood boil. While awaiting
33:43
trial for the brutal intimate partner murder of his wife,
33:47
a murder fundamentally sparked by his deceptive use of dating apps,
33:52
Bob goes right back on the dating apps.
33:54
Speaker 2: It's unreal. He creates multiple new profiles using a variety
33:58
of aliases. On some app apps, he goes by the
34:00
name Bob White, depending on which demographic he is targeting.
34:04
On which app, he lists himself as a conservative Jew
34:06
in his mid fifties, or he alters his age and
34:09
lists himself as a reformed Jew in his mid forties. Sickening,
34:13
he is actively seeking out vulnerable women, completely lying about
34:17
his identity as background and his current legal status, and
34:20
manipulating them into meeting him, all while wearing a GPS
34:23
ankle monitor strapped to his leg. Investigators confirmed he met
34:26
at least five different women during this pre trial period.
34:29
Speaker 1: And one of those encounters turn absolutely terrifying. He connects
34:32
with a woman online and eventually lures her to his home.
34:35
He tells her that his community has a nice pool,
34:37
suggesting a very casual, safe daytime date, but when she
34:40
arrives at the address, she discovers the pool isn't a
34:43
shared community pool at all. It's located in his private,
34:46
highly enclosed backyard. She later reported to journalists that the
34:50
moment she walked back there, she instantly sensed something was
34:55
deeply fundamentally wrong.
34:57
Speaker 2: Her instincts kicked in.
34:58
Speaker 1: Her intuition was screw dreaming at her, but she rationalized it,
35:02
thinking she was just being paranoid or overreacting, and tragically,
35:06
she stayed.
35:07
Speaker 2: And he allegedly assaulted her. Because of the profound trauma
35:11
of the event, the manipulation involved and the confusing circumstances,
35:15
she chose not to file criminal charges at the time.
35:18
It wasn't until weeks later that she was watching a
35:20
local news report and saw his face flash across the screen.
35:23
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
35:24
Speaker 2: That was a moment she realized the man who had
35:25
assaulted her in that backyard was currently on house arrest,
35:29
awaiting trial for the brutal murder of his wife.
35:31
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? I want you, the listener,
35:35
to ask yourself. How does the justice system allow an
35:38
accused murderer to casually log thousands of miles on a bike,
35:43
date multiple women under false identities, and allegedly commit a
35:47
sexual assault, all while on what is legally defined as
35:50
strict supervised house arrest.
35:52
Speaker 2: It exposes massive systemic vulnerabilities in how we handle pre
35:56
trial supervision. Absolutely, the system is overburdened, and those with
36:00
financial resources often find ways to stretch the boundaries of
36:03
their confinement. But more importantly, for this case, it gives
36:06
us a terrifying, unobstructed window into Bob Feldman's psychological makeup.
36:11
What we are witnessing is extreme compartmentalization and profound malignant narcissism.
36:16
Bob's actions over those seven years demonstrate a complete and
36:19
total lack of remorse for Stacy's death. He operates with
36:22
a chilling sense of hubris, a deeply ingrained belief that
36:25
he is simply untouchable. He believes he is smarter than
36:28
the detectives, smarter than the judge, and smarter than the
36:31
women he manipulates. It is the exact same hubris that
36:36
made him think he could fake a drowning in a
36:38
bone dry bathroom and walk away a rich man. He
36:41
fundamentally believes the rules of society and physics simply do
36:44
not apply to him.
36:45
Speaker 1: Well, after seven grueling years of delays of living this bizarre,
36:50
arrogant double life on house arrest, that Hubris finally met
36:54
a jury of his peers. In April twenty twenty two,
36:57
the trial finally begins.
36:59
Speaker 2: The prosecution, led by Assistant District Attorney Maggie Conboy, delivered
37:03
an incredibly powerful strategic argument. She knew she didn't have
37:06
a video of the murder or a confession, so she
37:09
didn't shy away from the circumstantial nature of the case.
37:11
She leaned into it and embraced it.
37:13
Speaker 1: What did she say?
37:13
Speaker 2: She stood before the jury and told them Stacey Feldman
37:16
can't tell you what occurred that day, but her body can.
37:19
This is evidence of a vicious beatdown.
37:21
Speaker 1: The defense, fueled by that five hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
37:25
stuck to their guns. They argued it was all just
37:27
a tragic, monumental series of coincidences. They laid out a
37:32
narrative for the jury that went like this. Stacy had
37:35
a pre existing enlarged heart. She found out about the
37:39
affair that morning from the phone call with Susan McBride.
37:42
The immense emotional stress of that sudden revelation caused a
37:45
cardiac event, and she just coincidentally dropped dead in the
37:48
shower a few hours later, while Bob was conveniently out
37:50
at the park.
37:51
Speaker 2: The problem with the defensive strategy is that when you
37:54
pile coincidences that high, they inevitably collapse under their own weight.
37:59
A jury's job is to weigh the probability of the evidence.
38:02
They had to weigh the defense's theory of a spontaneous
38:05
stress induced heart attack against a mountain of contradictory physical
38:08
and behavioral facts. Right had to wait against the bone
38:11
dry floor, the neatly folded towel, the lack of audible
38:14
exertion during the nine to eleven CPR, the outright, scientifically
38:17
disproven lie about the THC edibles, the fabricated story about
38:21
the friend of the synagogue, and the incredibly damning shifting
38:24
timeline where Bob admitted he was home at noon.
38:26
Speaker 1: And the jury simply didn't buy the coincidence theory. After
38:30
a tense nine day trial filled with complex, specialized medical
38:33
testimony and incredibly detailed digital timelines, it took the jury
38:37
less than three hours to.
38:38
Speaker 2: Deliberate wow three hours.
38:41
Speaker 1: Less than three hours to review seven years of evidence.
38:44
They found Bob Feldman guilty of first degree murder. He
38:47
received a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole.
38:51
Speaker 2: It is a profound testament to why circumstantial evidence often
38:55
gets a bad rap in popular culture, where people think
38:58
you need a smoking gun or DNA, but in reality,
39:01
circumstantial evidence is incredibly powerful in a courtroom. A single
39:04
piece of circumstantial evidence, like a dry towel, is just
39:07
a thread. It can be easily snapped or explained away,
39:10
but hundreds of pieces of circumstantial evids woven together over time,
39:13
form an unbreakable rope. The jury relied on basic human
39:17
common sense. The physics of the dry floor and the
39:19
exact digital timing and the tender revelation were simply incompatible
39:23
with a spontaneous, accidental death.
39:25
Speaker 1: It's an incredible triumphant arc for the justice system, even
39:28
though it took a grueling seven years of fighting for
39:30
Stacy's family to see it happen. What began as a
39:34
medically undetermined tragedy, a case that looked like it might
39:37
be filed away and closed on day one, was slowly,
39:40
meticulously dismantled. Dedicated detectives refused to let the inconsistencies go,
39:45
and ultimately the unavoidable biological truth written on Stacy's own
39:50
body spoke louder than all of Bob's lies.
39:53
Speaker 2: This raises an important question about how society and law
39:56
enforcement view seemingly natural or accidental deaths when they occur
40:00
within the context of domestic friction. For a very long time,
40:04
the benefit of doubt was often given in domestic situations
40:07
unless there was overwhelming, bloody, obvious evidence to the contrary.
40:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.
40:12
Speaker 2: This case proves that extreme emotional volatility and calculated financial
40:16
motives can perfectly masquerade as sudden medical events if investigators
40:20
aren't willing to look past the surface staging and dig
40:23
into the microscopic science.
40:25
Speaker 1: And that leads me to a final thought for you
40:26
to mull over as we wrap up today's deep dive.
40:30
I want you to consider the absolute fragility of the
40:33
perfect crime in our modern digital age. Bob Feldman thought
40:37
he had controlled every physical variable in that house.
40:40
Speaker 2: You really did.
40:41
Speaker 1: He managed the scene, he managed the nine one one call.
40:44
He even managed the initial medical narrative with his lies
40:47
about edibles and heart conditions. But he couldn't control the
40:50
digital footprint. If a total stranger Susan McBride hadn't trusted
40:55
her gut after a bad tender date, if she hadn't
40:57
typed Robert wolf Denver into a search engine, if she
41:00
hadn't hit send on an email at exactly six twenty.
41:03
Speaker 2: In the morning, everything would be different.
41:05
Speaker 1: Bob Feldman might have walked away with seven hundred and
41:07
fifty thousand dollars, a clean slate, and a literal get
41:10
out a jail free card. It makes you wonder what
41:12
other dark, hidden truths are sitting right now in the
41:15
digital breadcrumbs of our lives, just waiting for someone curious
41:18
enough to look. Thank you for joining us on this
41:20
deep dive and helping us instract the truth from the
41:22
sources today