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Thanksgiving Dinner: The Husband Was the Meal · Creepy Horror Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: There are crimes that the mind resists, processing all at once.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is one of them. Thanksgiving weekend, 1991. Costa Mesa, California.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: A quiet residential street in Orange County, the kind of
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: neighborhood where people put out pilgrim decorations and the smell
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: of turkey drifts through screen doors. A neighbor noticed something odd.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: A woman he recognized, acting strangely near a red Corvette.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: parked outside her house. She wasn't carrying groceries. She wasn't decorating.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: She was moving bags. Heavy ones. He called 911. When
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: officers arrived and opened the trunk area of that Corvette,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: what they found stopped the investigation before it even had
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: a name. Two black garbage bags on the floor of
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: the car. One officer cut the first one open. Inside,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: human organs. Blood soaked. The second bag held more. No identification,
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: no context, just the organic, irrefutable fact of what had
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: once been a person. The woman standing nearby, 23 years old, calm, composed,
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: told the officers she had no idea what was in
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: the bags. Her name was Omima Arie Nelson. She had
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: been married for exactly one month. This is the story
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: of what was found inside that house, and it is
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: one of the most disturbing things I have ever had
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: to sit with while preparing an episode. Bill Nelson was
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: not a simple man, and he would be the first
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: to admit it. He was around 50 years old, Texas born,
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: six feet tall, and built like someone who had spent
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: decades doing physical work. Close to 230 pounds of ex-military,
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: cowboy hat wearing, corporate pilot life. People who knew him
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: used words like gentle giant. He had a laugh that
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: filled a room. He had children. He had grandchildren. He
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: had made real mistakes. In 1985, in Texas, he was
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: arrested on charges of aerial smuggling, conspiracy, and tax evasion.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: He served his time. He didn't run from it. He
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: moved to Costa Mesa in Orange County, California, to start over.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: That detail matters, not because it makes him guilty, of
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: anything that followed. But because it becomes the center of
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: a theory that almost derailed the entire investigation, he was rebuilding.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: That was the word people used, rebuilding. He met Omima
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: Ari at a bar in Costa Mesa sometime in the
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: fall of 1991. She was 23, Egyptian born, raised in Cairo.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: She had come to the United States in 1986. By
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: the time she met Bill, she was working as a
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: model at a department store in Costa Mesa. She was
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: striking enough that people noticed her. She was also, as
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: investigators would later piece together, carrying a history that nobody
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: in that bar could have seen. They dated for approximately
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: one month. Then, in November of 1991, they drove to
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: Arizona together and got married in a civil ceremony, a
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: road trip wedding, spontaneous. and small. No large reception. No
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: extended family gathered around them, just the two of them,
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: and a courthouse. After that, they kept driving. East toward Arkansas,
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: then south toward Texas. Bill wanted to introduce his new
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: wife to his family in Batesville, Arkansas. He wanted them
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: to meet her. By all accounts, the visit went smoothly.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: Omima charmed the people who loved Bill. Someone who was
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: there later recalled that at the celebration dinner, Bill raised
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: his glass and made a toast. He said he and
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Omima were going to gobble each other up. It was Thanksgiving.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: Everyone laughed. They drove back to Costa Mesa. The honeymoon
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: was over. And then, within days of returning home, Bill
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: Nelson vanished from every record that wasn't a crime scene.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: The house on the residential street in Costa Mesa looked
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: like every other house on the block. Single-family home. Attached garage.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: the kind of Southern California architecture that blends into its
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: surroundings without asking to be noticed. From the street, on
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: Thanksgiving weekend, there was nothing to suggest that anything had
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: gone wrong inside. The neighbor who called 911 had known
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: Omama by sight. When she came to his door, after
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: the bags were in the Corvette, after whatever had happened
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: inside was already finished, she did something that no dispatcher's
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: protocol could have prepared him for. She took off her clothes.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: She showed him marks on her body, and she told him, plainly,
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: that she had killed her husband. She asked him to
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: help her get rid of what was left. He told
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: her he would. Then he went inside and called the police.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: When officers arrived, Omima was still near the Corvette. She
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: told them she didn't know what was in the bags.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: That was her first story. It would not be her last.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: The officers entered the house. What they found inside transformed
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: the initial call, suspicious bags, possible domestic incident, internet, into
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: something that required a different category of response entirely. The
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: living room held boxes. Inside the boxes, human legs intact
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: from the knee down, feet still attached. A second set
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: of boxes held arms. The arms had no hands. The
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: absence of the hands was not accidental. The investigators understood
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: that immediately. They moved to the kitchen. The freezer was closed.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: One officer opened it. Inside, wrapped in aluminum foil, was
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: a human head. It had been cooked. Next to it,
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: also wrapped in foil, were male genitalia. The cooking was
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: not incidental. The cooking was the point. What the investigators
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: did not yet know, standing in that kitchen, processing what
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: they were looking at, was whose head it was. Bill
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: Nelson had not been reported missing. There was no open file.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: There was no frantic family member on the phone. There
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: was just a woman outside who had said she killed
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: her husband and a house that appeared to confirm it
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: in the most extreme possible terms. They went back to
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: the bedroom. The bed was made. The room looked, at
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: a surface glance, almost ordinary. Then they ran the luminol.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: The chemical lit up the entire room. Not just the mattress, though.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: The mattress was soaked through from one side to the other.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: The luminol-traced blood spatters from the height of the bed
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: all the way up to the ceiling. The headboard had
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: been broken into three separate pieces. The investigators later described
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: the room as looking under the luminol, like Las Vegas
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: at night. That image is not a metaphor. The volume
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: of blood in that room made an hours-long process physically necessary.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: Whatever Omaima would later claim about a brief, panicked act
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: of self-defense was answered silently by that ceiling. In a
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: drawer in the bedroom, investigators found two passports. Both belonged
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: to women. Neither woman was Omaima. Neither woman's name appeared
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: anywhere else in the investigation. Not in connection with Bill.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: Not in connection with Omaima. Not in any record linking
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: them to Costa Mesa. The passports had been stolen in
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: New York. Both women were alive. Both had solid alibis
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: and no knowledge of the Nelsons. How those documents ended
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: up in that drawer was never explained, and it has
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: never been explained since. Bill's red Corvette, two bags of organs,
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: a freezer with a cooked head, a bedroom ceiling lit
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: up like a skyline, and two passports belonging to women
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: who didn't know they were there. The question of who
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: was in those bags was about to be answered. What
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: came after that answer was worse. The officers who responded
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: to the 911, called the Thanksgiving weekend, were not prepared
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: for what was inside that Corvette. Two black garbage bags
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: sat on the floor, behind the front seats. One officer
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: cut the first bag open, expecting refuse. What came out
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: was not refuse. There were organs. There was blood. and
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: there was the immediate, undeniable recognition that these were not
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: animal remains. The neighbor who had called 911 was standing nearby,
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: visibly shaken. Omima was there too, composed enough to tell
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: officers she had no idea what was in those bags.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: She had simply found them in the car. She did
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: not know who they belonged to. That story lasted about
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: four minutes. The officers moved from the Corvette to the house.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: and the house told a different story entirely. In the
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: living room, there were boxes. Not small boxes, boxes large
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: enough to contain a person's legs, with feet still attached.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: Another box held arms. The hands were not there. That
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: detail was not an oversight. The kitchen offered its own revelation.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: Inside the freezer, wrapped in aluminum foil, was a human head.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: It had been cooked. Beside it, also wrapped in foil,
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: were male genitalia. The investigators who opened that freezer did
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: not speak for a moment. There is a point. past
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: which professional training stops working as a buffer, and this
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: was that point. Back in the master bedroom, the mattress
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: looked wrong before anyone touched it. The surface was saturated, dark, stiff, wrong.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: But the mattress was only the beginning when investigators used
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: luminol to check the room The entire space lit up.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Blood had traveled from the surface of the bed, upward,
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: up the wall, all the way to the ceiling. One
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: investigator later said, the room looked like Las Vegas. He
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: did not mean it as a compliment. That detail dismantled
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: the first version of events before Omama had even offered one.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: A person acting in sudden panic, grabbing whatever was available.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: and striking once or twice in a desperate moment does
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: not produce a room where blood reaches the ceiling. That
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: is a room where something sustained happened, something that took time.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: The rational explanation that this was chaotic and reactive stopped
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: working here. Investigators also found the tools, scissors, a broken
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: steam iron recovered from the bedroom closet, a shattered ceramic lamp,
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: kitchen knives, the headboard of the bed was broken into
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: three pieces three not cracked, not chipped, in three separate
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: pieces as though enormous sustained force had been applied to
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: it repeatedly. And then there were the two passports in
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: the bedroom drawer. They belonged to women whose photographs appeared
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: on the identity pages, women who were not Bill Nelson,
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: not Omima, and not anyone investigators could immediately place. The
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: discovery suggested something potentially larger and darker, two women, two passports,
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: a man with a criminal past, a wife who had
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: been in the country less than six years. The theory
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: arrived almost immediately in the minds of investigators. What if
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: this was not a domestic killing at all? What if
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: Bill Nelson had brought something dangerous home with him? The head, fake,
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: had real structure. Bill Nelson's past was documented and verifiable.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: In 1985, he had been arrested in Texas on charges
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: of aerial smuggling, conspiracy, tax evasion. He had served time.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: He had come to Costa Mesa specifically to start over,
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: which meant there was a version of events where Costa
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: Mesa was simply where the past caught up with him.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: The two stolen passports could support that version. A man
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: with cartel connections, women who had moved through his world
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: under false identities. a wife who, perhaps, stumbled into something
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: she did not understand, and survived. It was plausible. Investigators
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: ran it seriously. They traced the passports. Both women were alive.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Both had solid, independently verified alibis. Neither had ever met
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: Omima or Bill. The passports had been stolen in New York,
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: not in California, not in Texas, not in any geography
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: that connected Omima to Bill's past. There was no thread.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: The passports were a dead end that had come from
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: nowhere and led nowhere. And whatever they were doing in
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: that bedroom drawer, they had nothing to do with the
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: cartel theory or Bill's 1985 conviction. That theory was gone.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: What replaced it arrived from an unexpected direction. An ex-boyfriend
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: of Omima's came forward. His account did not require interpretation.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: He described a night When Omima had invited him over
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: with a promise of sex, he had complied. She had
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: used that compliance to restrain him, tied him, he said,
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: using the intimacy of the moment to remove, his ability
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: to resist. Then she had produced a firearm and demanded
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: his valuables. He had managed to free himself before she
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: could complete what she had started. He had not reported
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: it at the time. The pattern was not similar to
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: what happened to Bill Nelson. It was identical. Omaima had
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: now been transported to a hospital for a forensic sexual
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: assault examination. Her version of events, two hours of assault
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: before she broke free, required physical evidence to support it.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: The examination found none. No evidence of sexual violence. The
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: injuries she had presented to her neighbor, the marks she
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: had shown while removing her clothes at his door, were real.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: But the medical assessment was clear. Those injuries were consistent
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: with Bill having defended himself, not with Omema having been
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: held and assaulted for two hours. One more thing. The
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: forensic pathologists who examined Bill's remains confirmed ligature marks on
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: both of his ankles. Restaurants had been used. The restraints
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: had been on Bill, not on Omema. The version of
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: events where Omema was the one who could not move
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: collapsed completely. There is no version of this story where
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: everything makes sense, not because the evidence is unclear, the
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: evidence is overwhelming, but because the human mind resists assembling
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: what the evidence describes. A woman of 23 who had
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: spent time in a department store in Costa Mesa, who
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: had shared a road trip with a man through the
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: American Southwest, who had sat at a dinner table with
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: his family in Batesville, Arkansas, and listened to them welcome her.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: That same woman had done something to forensic record documents
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: in precise and unbearable detail. She told a psychiatrist afterward,
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: not under duress. She spoke about what the blood looked like.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: She described the color with a kind of wonder that
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: the psychiatrist found difficult to categorize. Before she continued, she
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: had changed her clothes. She put on red lipstick, a
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: red hat, red stilettos. She said the color matched. Then
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: she described cooking Bill's ribs. She had used barbecue sauce.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: She said the meat was sweet. She used the word tender.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: She said she found it delicious. Those statements became the
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: foundation of the prosecution's case and the permanent obstacle to
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: every defense argument. The defense had argued domestic violence. They
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: argued self-defense. They argued that a woman with a history
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: of childhood abuse in Egypt with documented trauma had been
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: pushed to an extreme and acted from terror. The jury
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: considered this. They waited against the luminol, against the ex-boyfriend's account,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: against the restraints on Bill's ankles, against the psychiatrist's notes.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: The jury came back with second-degree murder. Twenty-seven years to life.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: What remains unresolved is not the verdict. It is the
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: question the passports leave open. Two documents stolen in New
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: York belonging to women who never knew this address existed,
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: sitting in a drawer in a bedroom in Costa Mesa.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: No explanation was ever produced. The investigation closed around the
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: crime itself, and those two rectangles of stolen identity sat
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: at the edge of the record, explained by no one,
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: connected to nothing, filed away. Omima Nelson later denied that
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: she had eaten the meat. That denial now sits beside
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: everything else, she said to the psychiatrist, and there is
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: no way to reconcile them. Both statements exist. One of
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: them is a lie. The question of which one, and
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: the question of why it mattered enough to her to
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: say it, is the part of this case that does
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: not resolve cleanly. No matter how many times you return
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: to the evidence, the toast at Bill's family dinner in
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: Arkansas had been about devouring each other. It had been
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: said with laughter. with warmth, in a room full of
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: people who were glad to meet her. The family drove
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: home that night, thinking they had gained someone. They had,
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: in fact, already lost Bill. They just did not know
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: it yet. The jury deliberated for less than a day.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: They rejected the self-defense argument entirely. In December of 1992, entirely, entirely,
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Omaima Ari Nelson was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: to 27 years to life in California State Prison. The
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: judge did not linger over the sentence. There was nothing
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: left to explain. Bill's children and grandchildren, the ones who
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: had welcomed Omama into their home in Batesville, Arkansas, just
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: weeks before his death, learned to live with a particular
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: kind of grief, not the kind that has a story
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: attached to it that people can hold and understand. The kind...
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: that has no clean shape. Bill had been rebuilding. He
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: had served his time in Texas, moved west, and was
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: flying again. He had been, by every account from people
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: who knew him, a man trying to become something better
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: than his worst chapter. He never got to finish. The
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: comparison to Jeffrey Dahmer arrived in the press almost immediately
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: after the arrest, Orange County's female Dahmer. The label stuck
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: to Omema through the trial. and beyond. What the label did,
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: what labels always do, was flatten everything into a category,
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: and stop the harder questions from being asked, because the
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: harder question was not whether Omi was a monster. The
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: harder question was what the forensic record showed. That a
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: woman with a documented history of predatory behavior used a
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: rehearsed pattern. And a man who trusted her paid for
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: that trust in the most final way imaginable. There is
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: one detail the forensic record does not answer. The two
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: passports found in the bedroom drawer, stolen in New York,
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: belonging to women who had never heard of Bill or Omaima,
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: were never explained. Not by investigators. Not by Omaima. Not
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: by the trial. They were there, and then the case closed,
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: and they remain unexplained to this day. Some open things
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: stay open. After her conviction... Omima denied having consumed any
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: of Bill's flesh. The psychiatrist's account of what she said
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: in the days after the arrest remained in the record regardless.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: What she told that psychiatrist, the wonder at the color
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: of the blood, the deliberate choice of red, the taste
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: she described, was introduced at trial. The jury heard it.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: They made their decision. There is a moment from the
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: Arkansas visit that the people who were there remember the
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: honeymoon road trip had stopped at the family home in Batesville.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: Bill and Omema sat at the table with his relatives,
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: people who had not seen Bill happy in years, and
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: someone raised a glass, a toast. The exact words differ
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: depending on who tells the story, but the shape of
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: it is the same, something about devouring each other, gobbling
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: each other up. The kind of joke you make at
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: a new couple's table because it seems harmless and warm
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: and slightly funny. Everyone laughed. Bill laughed. That toast happened
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: approximately three weeks before Thanksgiving of 1991. The red Corvette
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: still belonged to Bill Nelson when the officers cut open
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: those bags in the driveway of a quiet Costa Mesa
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: neighborhood on a Thanksgiving things weekend. His name was still
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: on the registration. His family was still expecting to hear
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: from him. The people at that Arkansas table had no
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: way of knowing that the joke they had laughed at
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: would become, in the forensic record of Orange County Superior Court,
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: something that no one in that room could have survived knowing.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: Omima Ari Nelson remains in the California correctional system under
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: the terms of her sentence. No version of her story
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: The one she told the neighbor. The ones she told
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: investigators across more than eight hours. The self-defense account she
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: gave the court. Survived contact with the physical evidence. The
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: luminol said otherwise. The ligature said otherwise. The ex-boyfriend's account
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: said otherwise. The forensic pathologists who determined that Bill was
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: likely still alive when the dismemberment began said otherwise. What
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: remains at the end of All of it is the
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: family in Batesville, Arkansas, who raised a glass and made
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: a joke and never got to say goodbye. This show
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: is made by Oba Media.