AMY DAY: Tasha was my best friend.
But then things changed.
She just seemed a little bit distant.
I kept trying to call her -- no answer.
GERALD BENTLEY: Tasha had some really strange stuff
that happened that gave me
a little bit of a chill down my spine.
I kind of got this weird kind of
a gut feeling, almost made me sick.
GERALD: As soon as I pulled in the driveway,
I knew something --
I could feel something was not right.
Yes.
That's why...
Everything she was doing from the word go
was a ruse, was a plan, was an act.
[sobbing]
AMY BENTLEY: Sometimes those monsters are people that we know
and we love and we care about.
[Kevin Day speaking]
[laughing]
NARRATOR: Tasha Bentley and her husband,
Gary, are on vacation
with their friends, Kevin...
...and Amy.
AMY DAY: Tasha was my best friend,
and Gary was Kevin's best friend,
and Tasha's idea was that we were going to do this little
best friends, um, vacation to Jamaica.
Tasha and Gary had sort of bought into this
little timeshare,
and so I told her that it was a great idea.
You know, we all worked really hard,
definitely earned our paychecks, and we just kind of
wanted, um, just some time away.
KEVIN: We went together, the four of us, and it was, uh,
it was a really great experience.
I mean, it was -- it was a wonderful time.
We're staying in this gorgeous,
gorgeous resort right on the beach.
We lived the high life as if, you know,
as if money didn't matter, because while you were there,
money doesn't matter.
[Amy Day speaking]
TASHA: Oh, my God.
I'm with my best friends, and I'm with my future wife,
you know, so I -- I couldn't be happier.
NARRATOR: Tasha and Gary first met in 2006.
AMY BENTLEY: Gary was about 23, and Tasha was a little bit older
than him, so she would have been 24.
She was a little bit more assertive, um,
than -- than Gary was.
He was a little bit more laid back.
LISA BENTLEY: She liked to dress up a little bit more,
and he was very just blue jeans
and a T-shirt, you know, kind of little country guy.
AMY BENTLEY: He loved being outdoors.
You know, he would go hunting,
he liked to collect guns and fishing equipment,
so he was a homebody.
GARY: Got ya.
NARRATOR: Gary's an electrician.
Tasha is a nurse.
After six years of dating,
the pair tie the knot in September 2012.
Their son, Connor is born
three months later.
LISA: They were both very attentive parents,
but she a lot of times let him take the lead.
I'm just gonna kinda sit back and talk to the girls and,
you know, you chase the little one around a little bit.
GERALD: Gary's son was his pride and joy.
I mean, he built his life
around a future for that little boy.
[indistinct conversations]
KEVIN: When Gary turned 30, he was achieving all
the things that he wanted to do in life.
He found the right woman. He was a great dad.
He had a nice house, nice cars, nice toys, nice guns.
Gary came out of himself in marriage, you know,
like, he found what he was looking for.
My brother was at a place in his life
where he was content, and he was happy.
KEVIN: Gary and Tasha, they had everything going for them.
You know, they were successful people, they had money,
they had the whole world at their fingertips.
NARRATOR: Despite all their success and money,
under the surface,
trouble is brewing in the Bentley marriage.
Before our trip to Jamaica,
Tasha had been having some
performance issues at her job.
I believe that Gary had his own suspicions based on
how Tasha was acting that maybe
Tasha's job was in jeopardy.
That was bothering him,
which was causing them to have conflict.
[Tasha speaking]
[screaming]
This is a clip of us on our day before our final day,
when we took the --
the private charter boat out for a fishing trip.
We were fishing, we were drinking.
Gary's only concern was to catch fish.
My only concern was to drink that bottle of rum.
Whoo! Right here.
KEVIN: And I offered Gary a drink.
I said, you know, come on, man, you know,
we're having a great time, don't sweat it.
He actually took the drink that I made him and --
and threw it in my face,
told me that I was selfish and obnoxious.
I felt that at the time, maybe due to what was happening with
Tasha and Gary, that I was
pretty much his excuse for the actions that had taken place
to be able to let those emotions out.
AMY DAY: That was very shocking.
I don't think any of us said anything else for
several minutes.
It felt a little bit awkward.
But after that, we just continued to do our vacation.
NARRATOR: Gary is right about Tasha's work problems.
Soon after Tasha arrives back from Jamaica,
her employer fires her.
AMY BENTLEY: Her losing a job definitely upset Gary.
He always wanted to be financially prepared.
You don't want that extra stress
because someone can't maintain a job.
But that's kind of her personality, where we're not
gonna cry about something that we can't undo,
we're just gonna keep going, and we'll probably find
something better, and she did.
NARRATOR: Tasha's new job seems to put the family back on track.
And things were going good.
You know, they were both working again.
You know, sometimes you and your partner veer off
a little bit, and you just have to find your way back.
Gary and Tasha were doing fairly well.
But at the same time, I noticed that
Tasha had some really strange stuff that happened.
NARRATOR: In 2016, Tasha calls her father-in-law,
Gerald, from a rest stop on the interstate.
She tells him that her car has broken down,
and she needs him to pick her up.
By the time we get to the gas station,
there's a hundred-foot plume of smoke in the air.
The car was on fire.
NARRATOR: It's not Tasha's first car fire.
Shortly after Tasha and Gary were dating,
she had her first car catch on fire.
The second one was a car that wasn't even running,
that was sitting in their driveway in the new house,
and it mysteriously caught on fire
and burned up in the driveway.
By the time a third car catches on fire,
um, a pretty new car,
you really start to question what the heck is going on.
The insurance paid out -- she carried gap coverage,
so, you know, she was able
to always move on to another vehicle.
I mean, what are the chances of that?
Like, literally -- maybe there's people
who've had it happen two times,
but I mean, really how many people
have ever had it happen three times?
GERALD: I had a suspicion at that point.
That gave me a little bit of a chill down my spine.
LISA: We went on a family trip, um, to Mexico.
It was just Gary,
Tasha, Gerald, myself, and our grandson,
We were all -- planned it for a long time.
We were all excited, but Tasha seemed to be more,
I don't know, um, standoffish.
She was just really moody the whole time.
Um, kind of grumpy,
would start arguments over little bitty things, you know?
Gary was just always like, "Oh, she's tired,
and everything's good," you know.
NARRATOR: Gary's father spends quality time fishing with him.
GERALD: We took a charter boat out to catch red snappers.
I could tell during that trip that --
that something was off and bothering him.
At the resort,
you couldn't use your cell phone.
You had to go use the landline.
Tasha, she just kept disappearing.
"Oh, I'll be right back.
Uh, I gotta go," or "I'm going to the room,"
which she wasn't going to the room.
She was going to make calls.
LISA: She would just be real evasive about it,
not wanting you to hear what she was talking about,
and it made Gary mad.
GERALD: On the boat, I had approached Gary,
and "Hey, is everything okay?"
But he would never open up to me about any of it.
He I was like, "I'll handle it."
Definitely, when we came back from our trip, um,
noticed, um, Tasha was gone a lot.
Um, she was working a lot of hours,
and then every weekend, she was just never home.
Tasha said she had a work conference
in Knoxville, Tennessee,
but she only found out the day before it was happening.
So she tells Gary that she has to go and that it's mandatory.
So she disappears.
And at that point, I approached Gary
and said, "Gary, what's going on here?
"Something's not right.
"She's acting weird.
There's no way she's working all these hours,"
and Gary was just so,
you know, laid back, quiet,
that he was gonna deal with it himself.
AMY BENTLEY: She just seemed a little bit more distant,
you know, like family functions and stuff,
she would be on her phone
the whole time that she was around us.
She started working overtime all the time, you know,
when she wasn't able to get off work and pick their son up
from the daycare,
my brother Gary had to start kind of picking up the slack.
He seemed a little distant and a little tired to me.
GERALD: At that point,
we would be getting ready for deer season.
We would put out feeders, we would put out cameras.
And Gary was in heaven, because he could take his son.
That was one of Gary's big dreams, to take his boy hunting.
He had put, um, like a -- they called it a deer condo,
a deer stand up, um, in the woods.
And, uh, he was starting to take his little guy out there.
GERALD: This was the year that Gary was gonna
let his son sit in the stand with him.
LISA: They would talk about looking out the windows
and seeing the animals and seeing a deer.
[gunshot pops]
Just a really good, uh, fun father-son bonding moment.
Thanksgiving of 2017.
Black Friday is the next day, and Tasha,
she was very eager to get out of my house that day to
go shopping.
She was out really, really late into the night
and came home with really no gifts,
just excuses that she really couldn't find anything.
AMY BENTLEY: I think Gary wanted to believe it.
But I think in the back of his mind,
he knew she was up to something.
GERALD: On Thanksgiving,
Gary and I went out, and Gary bought
a large gun safe to keep his guns in.
NARRATOR: Gerald helps to install it in a bedroom closet.
GERALD: When we installed the safe,
Gary and I put the guns in there.
I could tell by my son's demeanor that something was
wrong and that's -- you know,
I approached Gary, and he kind of brushed me off.
LISA: The week after Thanksgiving,
I had gone to their house.
She would still cut our hair sometimes.
And, um, you know, we were just talking and chatting,
and Tasha says,
"I'm afraid to stay at home by myself."
And I said, "Why, what -- what? What's going on?"
And she's like, "Yeah, I'm --
"I'm just nervous to be here by myself.
I'm afraid somebody's out to -- out to hurt Gary."
You know, I looked at him.
I said, "Did you make somebody mad?
Why would somebody be mad at you or after you?"
And he's like, "She's just crazy, mom."
And I kind of laughed it off.
I kind of, you know, went about the rest of
our evening and conversation, but it just didn't sit right.
Never in our wildest dreams,
you know, would we ever think that
it would have ended the way it did.
[phone ringing]
GERALD: On December 10, 2017,
[phone ringing]
I received a call from Tasha stating that
she had driven home,
and that she pulled in the driveway,
and that the garage door was open,
and she was scared to go in, because it didn't look right.
So I drove over there,
and I went in through the garage,
and I was yelling for Gary.
I entered the house through the open garage door.
The dogs came running to me.
[distant dogs barking]
Proceeded through the house to the kitchen.
I turned the corner to Gary's bedroom...
[music climbing]
and found him.
[suspenseful chord strike]
Gary was gone.
I think at the point when I found
my son laying there that I went into shock.
LISA: Gerald called, and he said, "Where are you at?"
And I said, "Um, on my way to Amy's,"
and he said, "Just turn your car
around and come to Gary's right now," um...
So I asked him, "Is something wrong with my baby?"
Um, and he said, "He's dead."
I started just screaming, oh, my God, you know,
not my baby. Not my baby. What on Earth?
You know, why, God, why my baby?
And, uh, then my -- my daughter calls me.
I just remember, like,
it seemed like, um...
my legs kind of got wobbly, um...
you know, my...
heart was in my stomach.
It's like you can't even believe this is real.
This is your life.
It's shocking, you know, just...
how our lives just changed.
DETECTIVE ENDRE SAMU: On December 10, 2017,
at approximately 7:56 p.m. is when the Kentucky State
Police Post Five received a phone call from Gerald Bentley.
When Gerald called, he identified that his son was
lying in his bed
with a bullet in the back of his head.
[distant sirens wailing]
When I arrived on the scene, I go inside the bedroom.
I'm focusing on Gary, who's lying in his bed
with his face turned away from the doorway.
He's covered up with the blanket.
Gary was in his bed, sleeping.
He was not disturbed by something, yet
somebody came in and killed him.
COURTNEY BAXTER: There was the shell casing
recovered in the bed,
and they found an open gun safe,
which appeared to have missing guns.
It had a keypad alarm system on it, and it was standing open.
DET. SAMU: No electronics were stolen.
Nothing was damaged inside the house as it was ransacked.
None of the other big tools were stolen.
So my thought was somebody may have come in
and stolen the guns just
for the sake of getting the guns alone and not worry
about the other items.
COURTNEY: But if someone's in his house
who's not supposed to be there,
you would think that the dogs would have alerted him to that,
and he wouldn't have been executed in his bed.
That is not consistent with what you would
think of a type of home invasion robbery.
DET. SAMU: That's telling me somebody who is very acquainted
with the family and the dogs killed Gary.
NARRATOR: Detective Samu
interviews Tasha in a patrol car.
She claims that she last saw Gary alive
that morning before he left to hunt deer.
[Det. Samu speaking]
[Tasha speaking]
She shows me that she's sending a text message saying,
"How's the hunting going?"
Something to that effect.
"I hope you got something good."
[Det. Samu speaking]
[Tasha speaking]
[Det. Samu speaking]
[Tasha speaking]
[Det. Samu speaking]
[Tasha speaking]
Tasha informed me that there was
a male friend of theirs named Kevin.
So is there something going on
that Kevin is an interest for me?
[Det. Samu speaking]
[Tasha speaking]
[Det. Samu speaking]
[Tasha speaking]
DET. SAMU: My question is, is Kevin involved in all this?
Is there an argument between Kevin and Gary?
DET. SAMU: Do I need to investigate him?
I had another detective follow up on a check.
Kevin was there when Tasha arrived, but he had left
around noonish to go play volleyball.
There was no information whatsoever that
Kevin was involved in Gary's murder.
Tasha identified Kevin,
distancing herself from the situation.
That's an issue for me. Why is that?
She also tried to contact Gerald to check on Gary.
[Tasha speaking]
[sniffles]
Gerald had answered the phone at one time and said that, well,
maybe he's still out hunting, maybe he's sleeping, whatever.
Obviously, as a hunter, he's going to have his cellphone
either turned off, muted, not available,
yet now all of a sudden, she's starting up some concerns.
[Det. Samu speaking]
[Tasha speaking]
You ask yourself the question, why didn't she go home?
What's so -- what's so wrong about going to
check on your husband if there's an issue?
[Det. Samu speaking]
[Tasha speaking]
[Det. Samu speaking]
[Tasha sobbing]
NARRATOR: Kevin's wife, Amy, reaches out to Tasha
when she learns that Gary has been murdered.
I called her immediately.
I kept trying to call her.
Um, no answer.
I'm thinking she is so upset that she just can't talk.
But then she did end up calling me.
I asked her about the funeral.
I said, you know, "Do you -- what do you need from me?
Do you need any help?"
And she said, "I don't know, I'm just not gonna go."
I was very shocked at that,
and I kind of got this weird kind of
a gut feeling, almost made me sick.
I got a little scared.
I received a phone call from my supervisors to say
that Gerald Bentley has wanted me to call him back.
NARRATOR: Gerald tells detective Samu
that Tasha's friend Amy has information to share.
[Gerald speaking]
[Det. Samu speaking]
[Gerald speaking]
[Det. Samu speaking]
So I vaguely remember
being at Gerald and Lisa's house,
and I was on the phone
with the detective that I had never met on
the other end.
[Det. Samu speaking]
[Amy speaking]
[Det. Samu speaking]
[Amy speaking]
She had told me that at work,
she met this guy that worked there, Anthony.
Tasha had expressed to me that her plan for
leaving Gary to go be with Anthony was in January.
She had made that decision to leave.
So I felt like, why am I the only one that she's telling
all of these things to, um,
I think that she just knew I was loyal and that I wasn't
gonna judge her for it.
Tasha was my best friend.
But, you know, at that point,
my loyalty was not to her anymore.
It's to Gary's family.
DET. SAMU: So my focus now became that
I think Tasha either did the killing,
or is Anthony involved in this, is Anthony my shooter?
NARRATOR: Amy and Gerald also reveal on
the call that Tasha and Gary researched life insurance.
GERALD: I knew about them wanting to get life insurance,
and I knew Gary was totally
against it, because Tasha wasn't being realistic on
the amount that they were wanting to get.
Gary was looking at getting like $250,
$350,000,
and she wanted the million.
NARRATOR: Detective Samu secures recordings of the calls
that Tasha made to her insurance company.
[Tasha speaking]
[agent speaking]
[Tasha speaking]
Tasha was approved on the application for
Gary to have a million-dollar policy.
I believe that policy was taken out
like five days before the murder took place.
When Tasha gets on the phone and talks to AIG again and says...
[Tasha speaking]
[agent speaking]
Det. SAMU: It didn't get approved.
But $1 million was approved.
Also come to find out that, in regards to
the insurance company,
Tasha had set up the authorization by signature
of the insurance policy based
on an electronic signature, not a personal signature
that somebody would hand write in.
So, that added a new dimension to this investigation.
Why do we have this insurance policy?
What's behind that?
Gerald had told me that Tasha had
experience in dealing with insurance companies,
her car being damaged,
another car being on fire, so she had,
what I would determine,
a very experienced level in communicating with
insurance companies, how to collect monies.
I already know that she's already having an affair,
so something's not wonderful.
The things that Amy was telling me guided me to
now I feel very confident that Tasha
has done something to make this happen.
NARRATOR: Later that afternoon,
Detective Samu invites Tasha to an interview at the station.
I need to secure some more information about
Anthony and Tasha and also about the insurance.
And you can tell by her expression, she's like, well,
how did you figure that one out?
But she knew that I knew.
Tasha started then unwinding a little bit.
[sniffles]
DET. SAMU: What's going through my mind is to say,
you done your crying because you're worried
about you're gonna get caught.
And then I confronted Tasha about the million-dollar policy.
You got a boyfriend, you're gonna leave
your husband,
and you want to have financial stability
in case something happens.
You get this large insurance policy,
a million dollars worth.
You killed him because you wanted the money,
you're greedy.
I have money now to go and go have my affair
and go live another happy life that I'm not happy with
that I've got right now.
I think Tasha either did the killing,
or she hired somebody.
I'm very secure about what I'm saying.
Yes...
That's why...
DET. SAMU: She just wouldn't accept it, kept denying it.
And so I was hoping she was going to just
take that extra leap to say "Yes, I did this."
I told her, I said, "I'm going to walk out of this room,"
but I knew what the truth is.
NARRATOR: Two hours into the interview with Tasha Bentley,
Detective Samu
hands over to Lieutenant Kevin Johnson.
[speaks indistinctly]
DET. SAMU: My approach to Tasha's interview was that
I pressed her and I pressed her and I pressed her.
Lieutenant Johnson portrayed a different tactic in that
he was not as aggressive as I was in the interview.
[sobbing]
[sobbing continues]
[sniffles]
DET. SAMU: There was a key element that changed when
Lieutenant Johnson identified
how things are going to affect Connor.
DET. SAMU: And she finally admits the fact
that she did kill her husband.
And so Lieutenant Johnson tried to expose
the rationale of what Tasha's motives were.
She starts identifying that
the reason why Gary is dead was to protect Connor,
that her son Connor was being abused.
[sobbing]
COURTNEY: Her story now is that Gary has been abusive
and that their son had angered Gary, and that he had physically
taken Connor
and thrown him back into the bed, and that Tasha was in
there trying to protect him.
[sobbing loudly]
COURTNEY: And she gets her gun out of her purse,
which was a handgun with purple grips,
and goes in the master bedroom.
[sobbing]
COURTNEY: She's confessed to the murder.
She's made allegations that it was in response
to some domestic violence situation
in their home, that he had been abusive to their son.
We had to explore those allegations of abuse,
to interview any and all people
that were closely associated with them --
her friends, her family, his family,
the daycare workers.
We were able to determine that there
was no evidence of any abuse on Connor.
And it really solidified for me as a prosecutor,
what kind of person we were dealing with
and to see how heartless she is, so cold and calculating.
NARRATOR: Tasha admits to the police
that she emptied the gun safe to make
the scene look like a robbery gone bad.
[sniffles]
[exhales]
NARRATOR: Tasha says that she packed the guns into
boxes and stashed them at her boyfriend's sister's house.
DET. SAMU: We went straight to Louisville
to the address, and we found all
the guns that was removed from the house.
The murder weapon was a silver gun,
and it had a purple grip to it --
that was Tasha's gun.
I was able to interview Anthony
personally around December 12th.
COURTNEY: He acknowledged that he had
an intimate relationship with Tasha.
Said it was around 2 to 3 months,
and he understood that she was gonna leave Gary.
COURTNEY: Anthony was not involved in killing Gary.
His alibi was solid.
So that's how we were able to rule him out.
DET. SAMU: I felt very secure that Anthony
and his sister was not involved in this murder.
It was strictly Tasha.
NARRATOR: Investigators piece together
the lead-up to Gary's murder.
COURTNEY: It's textbook, from my perspective,
of what her motive was, which was money,
and I -- I guess love, too, because she said she loved
Anthony, so...
I suppose she didn't feel like
she could be secure financially with Anthony,
so she was gonna take care of that by killing
her husband and getting the life insurance policy to
support their lifestyle.
She gets confirmation that there's life insurance in place
December the 6th, four days before the murder.
And I think that she got out of bed while Gary was sleeping.
-She shot him. -[gunshot blasts]
Simple as that -- she executed him.
After she stages the robbery, she takes the weapons.
She leaves the garage door open,
puts the weapons in the trunk of her car,
and then she spends several hours at Amy's house.
Everything that she did, she planned it out.
Uh, she had her alibi all structured out.
She told Amy she was gonna go shopping,
but she meets up with her boyfriend, Anthony, at 5:54 at
his sister's home, where she brought the weapons
to be stored.
At 6:54, she calls Gerald, and she tells him that she's
actually at their home in Henry County,
that the garage door's open, and she's concerned that something
is wrong -- with the cellphone records,
we were able to discern that she was
not there when she made that phone call.
I think she thought she was gonna get away with it,
that she had set the stage,
that she was smarter than everybody else involved.
I think she's extremely manipulative.
NARRATOR: On July 20, 2021,
Tasha pleads guilty to murder,
and a judge later sentences her to 55 years behind bars.
AMY BENTLEY: We tell our kids to watch out
for strangers and watch out for these monsters,
but sometimes those monsters are people that we know
and we love and we care about.
[Kevin speaking]
AMY BENTLEY: To me, Gary is always gonna be
my little brother.
We spent our whole life together, um...
I want him to know how much I love him
and how much I miss him.
Nothing's ever gonna change the fact that our son is gone.
I wish every day that he was here with us.
We've really stuck together.
We have a great support system.
There's still some struggles.
We will do everything in our power
to take good care of his baby boy.
-Turn around and smile at me. -I caught a shark.
GERALD: I see so much of Gary in that little boy.
He'll be sitting around, and I'll just look over,
and it's like, oh, my goodness,
it looks like nine-year-old Gary sitting over there.
and if he grows up to be three-quarters of the man
that his father was, then we will be happy.