- I'm Kate Snow,
and this is "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
- Samira was full of energy, very attractive girl.
She had that model look.
She did not do anything low key.
All of the strange twists this story took,
now you know somebody who's been murdered,
It was, like, nothing I'd ever expect to happen.
- Inside a gated community, a harrowing discovery.
I studied the crime scene, looking just for,
does anything stand out?
- The first focus: her sandal.
- Tucked right underneath the hose on the edge.
- It's very obvious this was staged.
- Was there someone who'd wanted Samira out of the way?
- He observed a Black female
standing outside of the Frasch's residence.
- And Mr. Frasch had multiple female acquaintances.
- They all had a common career.
And they were exotic dancers.
- Two critical clues, one chilling plot.
- We had an unknown DNA
on a robe that came off of the victim.
I literally looked at it for a minute.
I was like, seriously?
That was absolutely stunning.
- Behind the curtain was a very dark story.
**
- Hello and welcome to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
Samira Frasch was a success story.
She had her own clothing line,
a wealthy husband who lavished her with gifts,
and two beautiful daughters.
Then she was found dead in her backyard pool.
Was it a tragic accident or murder?
As secrets from her marriage bubbled to the surface,
the murky mystery behind Samira's death
was about to grow deeper.
Here's Keith Morrison with...
- It was a cold morning in February,
cold for Northern Florida that is,
crisp but sunny, when the call came in.
- Made no sense really, way too cold for a swim.
But the lady wasn't swimming,
wasn't even floating,
down at the bottom of the pool.
- She was lying face up,
her palms, too, as if in supplication,
her leopard print robe drifting in the water around her.
- The house with the backyard pool is located
in an exclusive gated community in Tallahassee, Florida
called Golden Eagle.
First responders went out there.
And pretty soon, Sheriff's Detective Tony Giraldi
got a call.
- Patrol deputies had found a body in a pool,
a woman in a pool.
And we were scrambling our investigative unit.
- Is that about as much as you knew
when you got that first call? - It was.
- He would discover the EMTs had been there by then,
tried CPR just in case,
given that the water was so cold.
- I didn't think they knew
how long she had been in the pool.
So, um, the thought process
was maybe that they could revive her.
- Because a person's metabolism slows down.
Sometimes they look like they're dead.
Maybe they're not dead.
Was there a serious thought
that maybe she would survive this?
- It wasn't the case.
- No. At the hospital,
the doctors tried to check her body temperature
to determine how long she'd been dead.
But she was too cold for their thermometer,
no way to calculate how long she been in the pool.
Of course by then, they'd figured out who she was.
Samira Frasch, unusual name.
They looked her up online, and...
Wow. - She was gorgeous.
- She was really va, va, voom.
- Samira Frasch was amazing.
Look at her.
Stunning, most certainly, and glamorous,
and very French.
- It's everything or nothing.
I'm French now. [laughs]
- Once upon a time, she turned heads in Paris,
a runway model, a sultry music video singer,
a shooting star, or so the stories went.
Such a shame what happened to Samira,
and such a mystery.
- When you think about all of the strange twists
that this story took.
- Joel Silver was a friend by the time it all ended.
- The story is very sad how it all ended up.
But it is still a wild story.
- The story, her story,
was not at all wild to begin with.
She was born far away in French-speaking Madagascar.
She was poor, dirt poor,
like the dirt floors in her family's little house.
And her story, frankly, would have ended there anonymously.
We'd have nothing to tell,
were it not for something in her,
some drive, some desire.
- She was full of energy, and determination.
And she always wanted to be doing something.
- Over here, we call it the American dream.
There, it was Paris.
It was her own hard work that won her a spot
in a Paris college.
It was her talent and her remarkable look
that got her a place on Paris fashion runways.
And still, there'd be no story for us
were it not for the night in 2006 in a trendy Paris nightclub
when she met him: Adam Frasch.
Jackie Watson, a French National herself,
was Samira's friend.
- He shower her with gift, and love, and flowers.
- It was that ultimate intoxicant, love at first sight.
She was brilliant, and tall, and incredibly beautiful.
And he was a prominent and successful Florida doctor,
a podiatrist, and surgeon,
and attractive, said Samira's friend, Jackie Watson.
- Very handsome man, tall, bright blue eyes,
very good looking.
They were making the perfect couple.
- And he was smitten.
She showed him a Paris he had seen before
but never like he saw it with Samira.
- Beautiful lady, beautiful spirit, huge smile.
Adam's friends saw it, too,
like the Reverend Larry Johnson.
- They were obviously in love with each other.
- The romance with Adam was right out of a book.
- She said actually it was like a fairy tale.
- So that's how it began.
And back and forth they went.
He'd fly to Paris,
she to Tallahassee, Florida, where he lived
just so they could see each other.
Adam couldn't stop talking about her,
couldn't believe his luck.
- He said, I'm in love with her
and I'm going to marry her.
- Mind you, Adam Frasch was a catch, too.
Bright? Oh, yes.
He'd flown through college in three years,
was the youngest graduate in his med school class,
a workaholic in school and out.
- When he was in college,
he had three part time jobs for a while.
And he'd never buy pop, because that costs too much.
He just drink water.
- But his medical practice,
said his dad Alvin, was amazing.
- It was very successful, and I'd go in the office,
and the waiting room would be full.
When I got there at 5:00, it'd still be full.
- And by the time Adam met Samira,
he was both a respected podiatrist
and a wealthy man with two practices in Georgia,
just over the Florida border near Tallahassee.
- I was impressed with his professionalism.
He was not in a hurry to do it fast, and get out,
you know, and go on to the next patient.
He had a big heart.
- Before they could marry, they had to wait,
Adam and Samira.
He was in the midst of a divorce.
And when it was final, they did not hesitate.
They married in Vegas,
and they made their home in Tallahassee.
Not many French nationals here.
- Yes, Tallahassee.
- Yeah, I mean, talk about a cultural shift.
- No kidding. You don't say.
- Annabelle Diaz became Samira's, what?
Sounding board? Soul mate?
"Culture shock" is an easy phrase to say.
But for French women like Annabelle and Samira,
getting used to Tallahassee was not so easy.
- All you have to do is open your mouth and--
- And that's pretty much it. - --you're different.
- Yes, yes.
- Annabelle, who emigrated years earlier,
had to give Samira a tutorial on the English language,
especially when it came to words
that began with the letter H.
- And remember, French people don't say their H's.
So imagine the amount of trouble you can get in
speaking English when H's are silent.
- It sounds like you speak from experience.
- I do. I do.
- So hate would come out as "ate,"
hurt as "irked," that sort of thing.
- And I used to have this with Samira.
I was like, no don't use "H" words.
they are not going to understand you.
- But here, she had friends like Jackie and Annabelle,
and Annabelle's mother who kind of adopted Samira.
A good life.
- So we were just trying to be a bunch of French girls,
drinking red wine and eating cheese.
- And eventually, for Adam and Samira,
there were babies.
First, came little Hyrah,
a baby who would have the childhood
Samira could only dream of.
- I think she was trying
to really provide this world for this baby
that she thought the baby deserved,
that she thought Hyrah deserved.
- Hyrah and then Skynaah.
- Can you say hi? Hi.
- I don't think that there is anything
that she wanted to do or be except for their mother.
Her whole world revolved around them.
- And then it was that February morning in 2014,
about 11:00 AM.
It was the handyman who called 911.
And here the story seemed to end,
the adventures of Samira Frasch,
dead at just 38,
though really, in a way, the story had just begun.
- What happened to Samira?
The tale told by a sandal--
- Tucked right underneath the hose on the edge.
**
- When handyman, Gerald Gardner, called 911
that chilly morning in February 2014...
...he told the operator he knew Samara Frasch had children,
two little girls, but he couldn't find them.
- Investigator Jason Newland searched for clues
at the place Samira Frasch's all-too-short life
came to its sudden end.
- I studied the crime scene a lot
looking just for, does anything stand out?
- And right away, what stood out
was evidence of one of
those bizarre Rube Goldberg tripping accidents
people tend to fall prey to.
This is police video.
The pool deck was kind of a mess.
And look at this.
One of Samira's sandals was caught under a garden hose
that ran across the deck and into the pool.
- Tucked right underneath the hose on the edge,
and then the other one was just down in the bottom of the pool.
- And Detective Tony Giraldi discovered
that Samira's little indoor dog, Bella,
had escaped to the pool deck, so...
- They have this small dog that is--
apparently runs around if it gets out.
- Oh, I figured she fell.
That stupid dog they had got out running around the pool.
- When he heard about Samira's death,
her father-in-law Alvin Frasch said the same thing
very nearly happened to him during a visit.
- I couldn't catch him out there around the pool.
And I about stumbled on that hose trying to catch him.
- So it seemed obvious.
Samira must have been chasing her little dog,
tripped on the hose, maybe hit her head,
and wound up in the pool, and, tragically,
the one thing Samira couldn't do was swim.
But one look at the web told the detectives
this was otherwise a very versatile woman.
- You can definitely Google search her, YouTube.
- And there she was,
about a half dozen music videos under the name Samira DS,
many made in her native Madagascar.
They did not go viral.
But once she became a mother,
Samira's ambitions shifted.
Now, she wanted her daughter-- eventually, daughters--
to be the center of attention.
- I said, but you're so young, so beautiful.
She said, let's be serious here.
Let's focus on the kids.
- The kids and the big idea.
And that's when she first met Joel Silver.
He's a producer.
In 2012, she called him out of the blue
and set up a meeting.
- Other mothers say, my baby is beautiful.
They should be on TV, on commercials, on this.
But Samira acted on this.
- Because, said Silver,
Samira instinctively seemed to understand
the power of social media.
- By that time we were starting to see
those kind of things on YouTube and Facebook.
- True. - Famous people, you know,
famous dogs on Facebook
that have thousands and millions of followers.
- Why not a famous baby?
- Why not a famous baby was her idea.
We just said let's go, so we can see how it works.
- You were in. - I was in.
- The idea was to create and market
a children's clothing line
based on the outfits she designed for Hyrah.
She would sell them from a website called hyrah.com.
The YouTube videos would push potential customers to her site.
If the Kardashians could do it, why not her?
- She said, I want to make videos of my baby,
and I want to travel and make sure everybody can see
how beautiful my baby is.
- It seemed to be a perfect formula,
that is using the online clothing business
based on little Hyrah,
so she could be close to her baby, and Adam,
and see the country, and have fun-- enviable.
- When I saw her,
and her husband, and that little girl,
I looked at them and I said,
"This is what I want one day."
- They took their road show all over the country:
Vegas, Disney World,
Hollywood,
the Kentucky Derby. - Look at that.
- --Washington D.C.,
New York's Times Square,
and everybody admired the baby.
- Oh, precious. - Oh, she's gorgeous.
- Even another TV celebrity,
the late Big Ang from "Mob Wives."
- Hyrah, you are so gorgeous.
- I don't know if she just thought,
this is how you do it in America.
- There's some evidence to suggest it is,
or something like that. - Yes.
So right, when you come to the U.S.,
this is what she thought, I guess,
was the best way to showcase Hyrah.
- Hi. Look at her.
- In the background, Adam, always a bit off camera,
quietly hovered, proud,
but worried a little, protective.
Of course, he financed the productions,
paid for her music videos, too.
- Hyrah was just always the perfect TV star.
She was always in a great mood,
always waving, smiling.
Any time you see any of these videos,
this baby was always happy.
- And Samira, over the top or not,
she was somehow genuine, said Silver.
And he rolled the camera as she, no fuss, no furs, no makeup,
doted on her baby girl.
This, thought Joel Silver, was true love.
- That's so Hyrah. Come in.
- And then there was the party,
Hyrah's first birthday party
and Samira's biggest promotion on social media.
She pulled out all the stops.
Tallahassee had never seen anything like this.
- With how much Samira loved this baby,
she was determined to make it the party of all parties.
This was like a LA, you know Hollywood birthday
of a celebrity baby.
- Samira played host and narrator.
- Okay, today is Hyrah's one year's birthday. Watch.
- Men dressed as Egyptian guards,
a sword wielding belly dancer,
and Samira dripping gold
and wearing a gown fit for a queen of the Nile.
Adam Frasch, her husband,
went for something a little more Elvis.
And there at the center of it all, their daughter Hyrah,
dressed in white feathers and fur.
As they sang happy birthday,
Samira and Adam were beaming,
not a hint in the world that in a little more than a year,
she'd be gone,
her babies just 2 and 10 months, without a mother.
Detectives had watched the videos
in something like amazement.
Then they heard from the coroner,
and remember that Rube Goldberg tripping thing?
maybe not an accident after all.
- What the medical examiner had to say...
- The ME's physical finding was foul play.
**
- There was one little thing here in the pool
where Samira Frasch met her end.
It was something about the sandal there in the water,
the one trapped under a garden hose.
It bothered investigator Jason Newland.
- These sandals that had a strap around the heel,
a lot of the females in the office would say
that doesn't just fall off your foot like that.
- That sandal looked,
well, almost looked like somebody had created
a little stage setting, like it was too perfect,
too obvious to be true.
And then Detective Tony Giraldi got a call
from the medical examiner.
Oh, my, what did the ME discover?
- The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head,
coupled with drowning.
- In such a way that it could have happened accidentally,
or did it seem to the ME as if it was homicide?
- With the ME's physical findings
that there was foul play and we were--
We were looking for somebody that caused this death.
- Here's what the medical examiner said.
One side of Samira's skull was fractured,
which certainly could have meant she hit her head
on the way into the pool.
But the other side of her head was damaged, too.
A simple slip and fall couldn't account for that.
But remember, the ME saw evidence
of both blunt force trauma and drowning,
which meant she was still alive when she hit the water.
So was it murder?
It looked like, yes.
The detectives went to work.
- We collect as much physical evidence as we could,
and we interviewed everybody that was--
saw Samira last or that was close to her.
- Like the man who found her in the pool,
the handyman, Gerald Gardner.
- He was a somebody we needed to talk to
and rule out as a suspect.
- Police thought there was something odd
about Mr. Gardner,
or at least what he said when he called 911.
The operator asked him to get into the pool
and pull Samira out.
- Gerald Gardner knew Samira had worked for her for years.
So why did he refuse the operator's request?
- When we talk to him later,
he's like, I wasn't going to touch her.
I didn't want my DNA on her.
I knew I'm going to be the first suspect.
I found her.
And he's like, I do not want to be involved in this.
- He was right.
Police would look at him and his story closely,
as well as someone else who was there with him that day,
his 14-year-old son, Gerald Jr.
At police headquarters, the boy was questioned
while his mother sat with the detectives.
We've blurred his face to protect his privacy.
- During a break in the interview,
the boy started to cry,
his mother telling him to calm down.
Police had to do their job.
- As for his father, Gerald Gardner,
some people were saying did more than just work for Samira.
- We interviewed a couple of people
about her relationship with them,
and some people suspected it.
Gerald swears, up and down, he has absolutely not, never.
- Were they friends? - They were friends.
He would do anything she needed.
- Were father and son telling them everything?
Maybe they'd find out from the security tapes.
The Frasch's place was in a gated community.
So there was arrival and departure video.
That's how the detectives confirmed that
the handyman and his son arrived at 10:51 AM,
10 minutes before phoning 911.
So could the Gardners have done something terrible
and so short of time and then sounded
the way Gardner Sr. did on that 911 call?
- He made some statements though on the 911 call
that I believe sound very credible and genuine.
And he was very adamant that he was worried
about the welfare of the children as well.
- Gerald Gardener and son, they decided,
did not kill Samira.
So who did?
The one person they wanted to ask, of course,
was Adam Frasch, except they couldn't find him.
Adam and the two little girls were
apparently away somewhere.
There was a friend who might know where,
a friend who the detective discovered did not like
the former French model now lying cold and dead
in the morgue,
not one tiny bit.
- And this friend doesn't care who knows it,
including the police.
His stunning admission is about to land him
at the top of the suspect list.
Coming up...
- When "Dateline Secrets Uncovered" continues.
Welcome back to "Dateline Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Kate Snow.
Samira Frasch was found lying face up
in her backyard pool.
An autopsy revealed the cause of death
was blunt force trauma combined with drowning.
Now, investigators were hunting for anyone
who might have wanted her dead.
One person would make no secret
of his contempt for Samira.
But detectives needed to find out
if that made him a killer.
Back to Keith Morrison with At the Bottom of the Pool.
- Around the big Frasch house and across his long driveway,
yellow crime scene tape was draped.
An Amber Alert went out for their two small children,
Hyrah and Skynaah.
And it was during that chaotic day
that one of Adam's closest friends in Tallahassee,
a man named Kendall Lindsey, got a phone call.
- A friend of mine called me and told me that
his exact words for Samira was on the other side.
- Sam was on the other side of what?
- That's what I said. What do you mean?
I said she's dead? He said, yeah, man.
Say they found at the bottom of the pool.
And I said, no, you got to be kidding.
Kendall confirmed it through a friend on the police force.
And then he steeled himself for the call he knew
he had to make.
Kendall always called Adam, Doc.
I immediately called Doc, and he picked up.
And I told him what I heard.
And I told him, yeah, she was found dead
in the pool.
And he took it quiet.
And I imagine, he was crying, because his daughter said,
daddy, why are you crying?
- In the background, you heard this?
- I heard it.
He must had her daughter in his arms or something.
- Adam told Kendall he was at their beach house
in Panama City, nearly three hours away.
He told them he took the kids for the weekend,
so Samira could rest.
- And I told him, I said, just bring the kids here,
just bring them here.
You need to come find out what's going on.
And he said he was on the way.
- Soon after he shared the news with Adam
about his wife, Kendall got another phone call,
his police contact.
He needed some help.
- My police friend asked me, do I know where he was.
And I said, yeah.
And he said, well, where was he?
I said, he was in Panama City's beach house
in Panama City, but he's on the way here.
- With Adam headed back to Tallahassee,
the officer asked Kendall for another favor.
He said, well, I got a detective,
but they want to ask you some question.
Are you at home? I said, I'm at home.
He can come on out.
Within 30 minutes, I had a detective at my door,
asking me questions.
- Kendall told the detectives his relationship with Adam
bordered on brotherhood.
Kendall is a car dealer, and Adam had a thing
for collecting cars.
- Maserati, Ferraris,
some very nice Mustangs,
top of the line Mercedes,
Tudor Coupes, convertibles,
you name it.
- In fact, Adam owned 80 cars,
at least maybe 100.
So at first, it was a business relationship.
But soon, they were fast friends.
They went to games together, shot pool,
traveled to Miami, Orlando, Vegas.
They especially like Vegas.
- Go to casinos and stuff like that,
just traveled a lot.
- At the casinos, Adam played in Texas Hold'em
poker tournaments.
And Kendall kept an eye on him, because Adam liked
carrying big wads of cash
and flaunted his expensive watches and jewelry.
- So did you find yourself becoming his protector,
his-- you watched out for him?
- Like we go to Casino, he'll have jewelry on
and flashing like a superstar.
Like you got all type of guys they're looking at this stuff.
And I talk to him all the time.
But it didn't matter him.
He was just naive to it.
- And then the detectives asked,
how did Kendall feel about Samira.
He said, you like her? No, I didn't like her at all.
- You didn't like her?
And you didn't make any secret of it.
- Right. I told him that.
- Samira didn't like her husband spending
so much time with Kendall, traveling with him,
going to casinos.
Kendall told Adam,
don't let your wife dictate your friendships.
- We continued our friendship,
yeah, under the radar from her.
She realized that I was the one that's encouraging him
to stand up for himself.
But he wouldn't say to her, look, he's my friend,
I'm going to see him whether you like it or not?
- No way, no way.
- Kendall said he tried to tell the detective all that.
But then it dawned on him.
He, Kendall, was a suspect.
- When he started asking me, where was I last night,
that's when I started thinking, wait, do I need a lawyer here?
- Police asked him for his phone
and if he'd go to the Sheriff's Office
to take a DNA test.
Questions continued there for hours.
- Hardly a surprise.
- Kendall told the detective about the time
he stepped between Adam and Samira during an argument,
mostly to protect Adam.
Samira wasn't happy.
- And then there was Kendall's last conversation
with Samira, the night before
she was found murdered.
Kendall said it started over a misunderstanding
and then escalated when Samira decided
he'd stolen some clothes that have been left
in one of Adam's cars.
Heated words, expletives exchanged.
- And then Kendall said something,
said something he maybe shouldn't have said.
- Did he just say that about his best friend's wife
found dead in a pool?
Now, that got the detectives attention.
Time they decided to take a hard look
at this guy's alibi.
Did he have one?
- Coming up...
- A lot of marble, gold,
a lot of exotic animals that were stuffed.
- Inside the jaw-dropping world
of Adam and Samira Frasch.
Did all that wealth provide a motive for murder?
When "Dateline, Secrets Uncovered" continues.
- Adam Frasch's good friend, Kendall Lindsey,
had just made an astonishing statement to detectives
investigating the death of the doctor's wife, Samira.
Kendall wasn't fond of Samira.
In fact, the two had argued vehemently
the night before she died.
- What a thing to say, even if it was a joke.
So next question, what, asked the detectives,
was Kendall up to the night before
and the morning Samira was found.
- After breakfast, said Kendall, his wife drove him to work.
That was 11:20.
- Samira was found at 11:00.
So Kendall had an alibi.
Detectives regrouped and went back
to the Frasch house.
Let it talk to them
and talk it did.
- Wow.
It was different--
different for most people's taste.
- Detective Tony Giraldi.
- A lot of marble, a lot of gold,
a lot of exotic animals that were stuffed--
- Oh, wow.
- Which was kind of new to us
for executing a search warrant.
- But it wasn't just the over-the-top house.
Everything that detectives learned about the Frasch's
practically screamed money.
Watches, jewelry, clothes, guns,
motorcycles, a fleet of cars.
- Mercedes, BMWs, Hummers,
Corvettes, even a Ferrari.
- Boats?
- He did have a boat that we discovered.
- The investigators asked Kendall Lindsey.
And he told them as he did us
that Adam Frasch would often buy a car
when the two men were on the road.
Then he'd leave it behind.
So he could go almost anywhere
and there would be a car there that he owned?
- That's right. - They'd sit there.
He's all about collecting.
I-I categorize Doc as, like, a hoarder in a way.
- A hoarder? - Yeah.
I know it's a strong word.
But in a way, from what I witnessed,
Doc could never get enough of buying things,
not just cars, a lot of nice things.
- So maybe buying things met some sort of
psychological need.
- We get in my office and look for a car
for a couple hours on the internet.
It could be 11:00, 1:00 in the morning.
And he sees it, if he's in Miami, Florida
or Nevada, we're on a plane,
or we are in the car, we're driving down
that night to be there.
- To buy it. - To buy.
And then as soon as he buy that car,
that rush is over.
It's like, "Okay, find me another car."
- The doctor liked to pay for these things.
In fact, most things in cash
like the time he took Samira and Jackie out to dinner.
- I just-- I noticed he had money
because when he paid the bill, he had that big stack of $100.
I was like, hmm. You know?
- And investigators quickly realized that
Samira seemed to share Adam's penchant
for buying things, expensive things.
- She ordered $1,500 pacifiers for the children,
the chandeliers, the statues.
I don't know that there's anything they wouldn't buy.
- So they figured, maybe money was the glue
in the Frasch marriage, and sometimes,
during rough patches, a peace offering.
- In text messages, he would send a picture of $100 bills
laid out on a bed and shaped of I love you.
- And that was the effective way, I gather?
- It worked.
- Dr. Frasch had seen was only too happy
to spend lavishly so that poor girl
from Madagascar could have her American dream.
Apparently, he could afford it.
- Was doing very well. - How well was he doing?
- Maybe one of the highest paid podiatrists in the state
or arguably the country. - It was true.
At the time, Dr. Frasch was one of
the leading practitioners of a cutting edge
skin graft procedure for diabetics
called dermal graft.
People poured into his clinics in Southern Georgia,
many of them on Medicare.
So in 2012, for example, a couple of years
before Samira died, the doctor received
more than $1,000,000 in Medicare payments.
- Adam, when he worked, he worked.
He'd start at 9:00 and work till whenever he got done.
A lot of times, it was 7:00 before he got done.
- Mind you, said Adam's father,
his son may have come by those stacks of bills
another way, too, at the gaming table.
- He got started in Texas Hold'em poker.
And when he got involved with something like that,
he'd want to go 'til he was the best.
- Didn't hoard his money, though.
Investigators also discovered the doctor was generous,
shared his good fortune with friends,
and family, and patients, too.
The Reverend Larry Johnson was the doctor's patient first
and then his friend.
- If you came through the door,
he was going to treat you regardless,
money or no money.
- If you needed $1,000 and you can show why you needed it,
you got it, with him a stranger.
- Could you just say,
"Give me $1,000 and he give it to you?"
- No, he wasn't an idiot.
It was just that his heart was, like, big.
- So the detectives had questions for the doctor,
many questions.
But first, they had to find him.
- Coming up, the doctor surfaces
but his behavior only raises more questions.
- There was a lot of factors
that made you look at him and go,
"What happened here?"
**
- Hours after Samira's body was discovered,
investigators tracked down Adam Frasch
at his beach house in Panama City Beach.
Kendall had already told Adam the devastating news
about Samira. And then the cops arrived.
- Looked like he was packing up the vehicle.
He'd already had the kids in the car.
- Heading for home, he told the officers,
instead he was taken to the local Sheriff's office.
Detectives drove from Tallahassee to meet him there
and recorded the conversation on audiotape.
The doctor was a mess.
- But the cops were all business.
What, they asked,
had Adam Frasch been doing the day before?
Errands mostly, he told them, with Samira and the babies.
They were all together, then a pleasant lunch
and an even better evening.
- Then, Adam told them, Samira asked him for a favor.
- So come morning, said Adam, he took the girls
to the beach house.
- The surveillance camera backed up Adam's story.
There's his car leaving Golden Eagle.
But what struck the cops conducting the interview
was how the doctor's emotions seemed...
how to put it?
Disconnected from his tear ducts.
Investigator Jason Newland wasn't in the room that night
but his colleagues were.
- I remember a lieutenant at the sheriff's office
telling Adam you've sat here telling me how sorry you are,
how bad you feel about your wife.
And you've yet to shed a single tear.
- Is that a true tell about whether somebody
is really grief stricken or not? - No.
There was a lot of other factors that made you look at Adam
and go, "What happened here?"
- Other factors, well, there was,
as investigators discovered, a whole different story
about the Frasch's, very different, very tumultuous.
In fact, they were in the middle of a divorce,
which would be divorce number three for Adam.
So yes, they were skeptical about Adam's story.
And they told him so.
- The history, it was complicated, all right.
For one thing, the doctor had a roving eye.
Infidelities, like what?
- He had, well, we could say multiple, um, affairs,
multiple girlfriends.
- While he was with Samira? - Yes.
- And, said Jackie Watson, Samira could not bear
her husband's cheating.
- I think it was the one millionth time
he cheated on her.
You know, it's so much a human being can take.
- So the marriage churned along in turmoil.
Sometimes, an angry wife would take it out on her husband
as investigators discovered
when they found this snippet of video on Samira's phone.
She's just locked him out of the car.
- What did you find out about that marriage
and about those two people at the heart of it?
- It was a marriage that lacked trust.
It was verbal abuse. There was physical abuse.
- And then six months before Samira died,
a particularly nasty fight, a call to the police.
And Samira was arrested for domestic battery.
- Samira was a volatile person, would attack Adam.
We know there was a domestic history between the two.
- She was charged a time or two. - She was.
She was charged and arrested for domestic violence.
- And that is how Samira met Annabelle Diaz,
her attorney.
- When we got her out of jail,
then we got served with an injunction.
- Adam's attorney told the judge he'd had enough.
And the judge granted the injunction.
Annabelle Diaz on the way to becoming Samira's friend
now thought that was awful.
- She cannot go back home. She cannot see her kids.
- This is what the injunction said.
- Mm-hmm.
- Didn't stay that way, mind you.
After Samira filed for divorce,
she managed to regain custody of the two little girls.
And she and Adam started living apart.
- Was that breakup particularly painful or--
- For him? Oh, man.
He did everything he can to keep coming back.
- Best friend Kendall watched as the doctor
tried to put the marriage back together again.
- He still bought her these cars for her.
He still tried to buy her $1,000 dresses
to buy her back.
She would take every bit of it and still--
- Hold him at bay. - Yeah.
- So was there a motive in all that?
A tumultuous marriage ending in violence,
a husband scorned
still deeply in love with his volatile wife.
Maybe he finally snapped, struck back.
That's what the investigators wondered
as they sat in the interview room
late that night.
- The doctor insisted he wasn't there,
didn't know what happened.
But he thought it was most likely an accident.
- Maybe or maybe not.
- Coming up, a bombshell from a neighbor
who tells police what he saw just minutes before
Samira was found dead.
- He observed a Black female standing outside of
the Frasch's residence.
- Was it Samira or possibly the killer?
**
Welcome back to Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
I'm Kate Snow.
Adam Frasch was a well-heeled podiatrist
who his wife Samira believed was having affairs
with other women.
Now, detectives suspected Adam was keeping secrets
about Samira's death.
But a neighbor was about to reveal a strange sighting
that would challenge their theory of the case.
Back to Keith Morrison with "At the Bottom of the Pool."
- Detectives had talked to Adam Frasch
for nearly two hours and listened when he said
he wouldn't harm a hair on her head,
not Samira, the love of his life.
But they weren't buying his accident story,
didn't buy any of it.
In fact, one detective said it sounded to him
like it was a fatal attraction.
- Police had heard enough.
- They arrested Adam Frasch but not for his wife's murder,
didn't have enough evidence for that.
So they found another way.
Because Adam and Samira were in the midst of a divorce
and by court order he had no right
to take the kids that morning,
they had a reason to hold him in jail.
- He was arrested because he violated an agreement
having custody of the children.
- And you can keep them in custody for a while that way?
- Sure. He stayed in custody.
We continued to work our death investigation.
- Adam, in his jail clothes,
was pale and needed a shave
when we caught up with him.
But he had a clear message.
He would never harm his wife.
He loved Samira from the night he met her in Paris,
almost 10 years before.
What did you see in her and she and you?
- Her beauty for one.
- Yeah, couldn't miss that. - Yeah.
And even though she didn't speak very good English
and I spoke no French,
and we just had a kind of a great romantic time together.
- Once they married and started a family,
Adam told us there wasn't a better mother on this earth.
- Hyrah.
- That hyrah.com clothing line?
Adam figured Samira was probably driven
by the deprivations of her own childhood.
- Her intentions were that they have the opportunities
that she didn't have.
- And the day Adam got the call from best friend Kendall
with the awful news about Samira
is still fresh in his mind.
What was it like to hear?
- Oh, it was just terrible.
I mean, it just destroyed my world.
I was just shocked, and crying, and broke down.
My little girl saying "daddy, why are you crying" and stuff.
- But wait, if Adam really was that loving husband,
then what about all the other women,
the stories of infidelity?
Didn't happen, he told us,
not while he was living with Samira,
not until they separated
and he thought his marriage was over.
- Probably under divorce number 3
and get out of this and to start on with my life.
I started dating.
And I didn't realize--
- They weren't relationships
all the way through your marriage with Sam?
- No, no. I never ever had-- - Because this is the allegation
that's out there. - That's not true.
- In fact, said Adam, he and Samira
were trying to reconcile.
During that last month,
he'd been staying over at the house
with her and the children.
And they agreed to try again.
She was going to call off the divorce, he said.
- And she said, she was sorry and she wanted me back.
- How did that feel?
- So wonderful that I got her back.
And then she admitted it was very difficult
raising the two girls by herself.
- And their final night ended, he said,
with them making love, nothing else.
Murder wasn't possible, said Adam.
And before long, he made bail on the child custody case.
And months passed,
if prosecutors were ever to charge Adam
with Samira's murder,
they'd have to get around a problem, a big one.
- A neighbor of Adam's
came forward with some information.
- What did he tell you?
- On the day that Adam left,
the morning of,
he believed he observed a Black female
standing outside of the Frasch's residence.
- He said she was tall and thin.
- Who did he think it was?
- He never really let on to say this is Samira Frasch.
He just said that he saw a Black female
standing outside of the Frasch's residence.
- But he thought it probably was her.
- I think he did. - Yeah. What time?
- He said that he and his daughter
were taking a walk in the neighborhood.
And this was in a time period about 20 minutes before
Gerald Garner had discovered her.
- So wait a minute, that would be like
10:30 or 10:20, or something like that.
- Correct.
- And he was very sure about the time, very sure.
No earlier than 10:25 AM.
So was it Samira?
The detectives were baffled.
Having checked the security gate cameras,
they knew Adam had, as he told them,
left the house with the two kids
around 8:00 that morning.
And if the woman the neighbor saw was Samira,
that meant she was still alive when Adam left
and for a couple of hours after.
- And if that person was telling the truth
or it was accurate,
your guy couldn't have done the crime.
- That's correct.
- And then there was another possibility
that the woman in the driveway wasn't Samira at all.
It was someone else entirely.
And if that was true,
the woman the neighbors saw
might have been the killer.
- So what did you do about it?
- For me, it was try to figure out who it is he saw.
Was he, one, was he in the right driveway?
Two, could it have been somebody else?
It was a tough, tough situation.
- Tough, yes.
The cops had their work cut out for them now,
how to track down the woman in the driveway.
- Despite Adam's denials,
investigators believe Adam cheated on his wife.
Could the mystery woman be someone the doctor was seeing?
- So tell me about these girlfriends,
what kind of people were they?
- Three of them were strippers.
- When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
**
- Detectives are paid to be skeptical.
And in this case, their suspicions lay
like a wet blanket on Adam Frasch's explanations.
One, in particular,
Adam's saying he only dated other women
after Samira filed for divorce.
Well, nothing could be further from the truth,
said the detectives.
- Mr. Frasch had multiple female acquaintances,
several of which looked very similar, stature.
- Yeah. So would these women be seen as suspects?
- I mean, they're persons of interest.
I wouldn't necessarily put them in the suspect category.
But if we were--
throughout this investigation, everybody's potential.
- And they could not ignore the possibility
that one of those other women
wanted to take Samira's place in Adam's life,
that one of them could be the woman
the neighbor saw in the driveway.
- So tell me about these girlfriends,
what kind of people were they?
- Three of them were strippers.
- So you actually find yourself
kind of traveling around the state
going to strip clubs and tracking people down?
- I did. I did. Not the best time.
- And for each one, a question--
- Had you been to Tallahassee?
When was the last time you were at Tallahassee?
- Chiquita was one of the women.
She fit the description of the woman the neighbor saw
on the driveway that morning.
- Then there was Erica,
also a possible match for the mystery woman.
- There was also a third woman,
not one of the strippers,
a woman whose story was a lot more complicated.
Her name, Martha Moore.
- It's somewhere between the engagement
and the marriage,
Adam had a relationship
with an individual named Martha Moore.
And they had a child as well.
- Awkward.
- Slightly.
- When Adam found out she was pregnant,
he did the decent thing.
- Put up in a place, got her a car,
always gave her money
- Samira found out about Martha when she moved to Florida
just before she married Adam.
But she went ahead with the wedding anyway,
except these things do have a way
of worming themselves into a marriage.
The issue didn't die
- She made him take a DNA to find out
if it was his child or not.
And when he did and it was, then she really got upset.
- Investigators naturally wanted to talk to Martha,
especially after they found out
Samira confronted her on the phone
a number of times
after she found out about the baby.
So what happened then?
- And so she did.
- Police let her go after the interview.
Like the other women, she had an alibi,
which detectives would have to check out of course.
But in the meantime, they had another way
to get at the truth, one a bit more foolproof.
- We had an unknown DNA on a robe that came off
of the victim in the pool.
- Samira's Leopard print robe.
If one of those women had thrown Samira into the pool,
she may have left a little of herself behind.
Newland got DNA samples from the women.
- We tried to eliminate all of them.
- No matches, not to the women,
and not to the handyman, or his son,
and not to Adam's friend, Kendall.
All of them were cleared.
Investigators couldn't figure out
who the woman in the driveway was.
Now, they were back to square one.
And they figured Adam Frasch was standing squarely in it,
had put himself there when he claimed Samira let him
take the children to the beach house.
- I know she would never give the kids.
This is for sure.
- And certainly not the way they were dressed,
wasn't Samira style.
- The date that Adam took the children
to go to Panama City to give Samira a break,
they were in pajamas.
- Which simply wouldn't happen if she had
anything to do with it. - Never gonna happen.
No. - I see.
Open to interpretation, of course,
like phone messages left by Adam on Samira's phone
after his friend Kendall told him she was dead.
What were they to make of this?
- He had called her throughout the day,
leaving voicemails,
"I'm getting worried about you,
why aren't you answering your phone?"
- Wouldn't that suggest more innocence than guilt?
- I believe it's just another attempt
at an alibi for Adam Frasch.
- And you know the story Adam told
of that last happy day with Samira?
Well, security camera tapes from late that night
told a very different story.
First, in an auto repair shop, Adam trying to talk to her.
Samira driving, backs up the car with the door open
and him in it like she doesn't seem to want any part of it.
Same kind of thing when they got home,
Adam tries to talk to her through the car door.
She slams it on him.
And if a lot of this wasn't hard evidence against Adam,
it did make for a pretty strong circumstantial case
or so prosecutor Georgia Cappleman believed.
So she convened a grand jury and put the case to them.
And this was unusual.
Adam testified.
- It didn't surprise me.
He's a talker. He's, you know, smooth.
He thinks he can talk his way out of things.
- Not this time, apparently.
Adam was indicted for first degree murder.
And so a jury would decide if, as one detective said,
Adam Frasch loved his wife to death.
- Coming up, damning testimony from an ear witness.
- During the time that Mr. Frasch was on speakerphone,
did he make any threats to harm Mrs. Frasch?
- He did. He said, "I will kill you."
**
- Adam Frasch was in a world of trouble,
charged with killing his wife and facing the possibility
of a life sentence.
And if that wasn't enough,
federal agents raided his medical office
on suspicion of Medicare fraud, which might explain
why the podiatrist seems so filthy rich.
Prosecutor Georgia Cappleman became aware of the raid
after she took on Frasch's murder case.
- He would have had to have been
seeing two patients simultaneously 24/7
to account for the amount of billing
that he was doing. So that was pretty flagrant.
- Busy guy. - Yeah.
- The feds investigated but did not press charges.
And then as Frasch's trial date for murder approached,
prosecutors offered him a deal to plead guilty to manslaughter
and serve a maximum of 15 years in prison.
Adam said, no, he was innocent and wanted his day in court.
- Adam, how are you feeling going today?
- Fine.
- And so almost three years after Samira
was found at the bottom of the family pool,
her husband went on trial for murder.
His father Alvin was there.
- It's a bad situation for the whole family
and for him, too, because it destroyed his life.
- Samira's family was thousands of miles away
in Madagascar and France.
But she did have an advocate in court,
a tough and experienced prosecutor.
- The cause of death as ruled by the medical examiner
was blunt force trauma and drowning.
He basically killed her twice.
He hit her and caused such massive injuries
that she probably would have died from that, very likely,
but then threw her in the pool while she was still alive.
Who would do such a thing to this beautiful young mother
of two small girls?
- Well, had to be Adam, said the prosecutor.
- Their history was probably the biggest clue
that it was a homicide.
- Yes, that history of excess, infidelity, and conflict,
which she said led to a fatal confrontation
at the swimming pool.
The ugly scene was described by the handyman
who discovered her body.
- There she was, laying in the pool.
- And when you say there she was, who was?
- Mrs. Frasch laying in the pool.
- All right.
- And how could the jury be sure she didn't trip
and fall by accident?
Here was the medical examiner.
- Do you have an opinion as to whether
she could have tripped and bumped her head
and fallen into the pool?
- I don't think that's what happened.
These are significant impacts that I don't think
she would generate herself by just falling.
- You imagine a scenario where she would have hit
both sides of her head
and then managed to get into the pool?
- I can't. No.
- Detective Tony Giraldi testified and told us that
when he first met Dr. Frasch--
- He had some scratches, some significant marks
that not a normal person would have.
- Well, how did he get them? Did he tell you?
- So he told investigators some of the marks
were from him and his wife, Samira,
having sexual intercourse the night before.
So they were love marks. - My goodness.
- The specific one under his eye,
he shared with us that his 10-month-old child
had scratched him.
- You're about to hear a recorded conversation.
- The prosecutor made sure the jury would hear
the detective's skepticism about those scratches
by playing recordings of the interrogation.
- The prosecutor argued that Adam killed Samira
before leaving for the beach at 8:00 AM.
On the stand, the ME testified that the time of death
was unknowable.
- There's no way of saying the exact time of death
or I should say when she's placed in the pool.
There's just no way to say.
- The prosecutor Cappleman not knowing when Samira died
simply meant Dr. Frasch could not be ruled out.
He must have killed her
before leaving the house at 8:00.
And the way he drove off with the girls that morning,
very suspicious.
- Really unusual that
he would depart with those kids at 8:00 AM
after getting in at midnight the night before
and to load up and pack up and take
the kids for the first time ever off on a trip somewhere.
And his wife happens to be discovered dead
a few hours later.
- And after, said the prosecutor,
the doctor sped away with the kids
toward a woman named Martha Moore,
the other woman, with whom he'd had a baby.
Martha was called to testify about a phone call
she got from Frasch that morning.
- What did he say on that call?
- He said he was on his way to my house.
- Why did you put Martha Moore on the stand?
- To establish that the defendant called her first
and he was headed in the direction of her home.
I believe to drop the kids off there,
it was probably his intention and then to flee.
- That was really only speculation, of course.
And Martha wasn't home that morning anyway.
But on the stand, she acknowledged
it seemed unusual the girls would be alone with Adam.
- You know, they were, um, going through the battle
of divorce.
And in the court orders, he shouldn't have had the kids.
- To prosecutor Cappleman,
it was a bad set of facts for Adam Frasch,
a scorned husband with ample time
to commit murder before hastily fleeing the scene
with kids who were not supposed to be in his care.
- Cappleman played more than an hour
of Frasch speaking to investigators,
homing in on his demeanor
in the hours after Samira's death.
- Frasch spoke with several law enforcement officers
in those early hours.
Lieutenant Chad King was one of them.
- He put his hands over his face.
- Were you able to observe, though, any actual tears?
- None that we saw, no.
- And then the prosecutor called a man
who could comment directly on Adam Frasch's state of mind,
a man named Steven Wilson who said he helped Samira
set up a website celebrating her daughter.
He recounted something he said he heard with his own ears
less than two weeks before Samira was killed.
- Did you have an opportunity to overhear an argument
between Mr. And Mrs. Frasch?
- Yes, on the phone. - And during the time
that Mr. Frasch was on speaker phone,
did he make any threats to harm Mrs. Frasch?
- He did.
- And what did he say? - He said, "I will kill you."
- "I will kill you," the words of a man
who looked guilty at every turn, said the prosecutor.
Of course, the evidence
was circumstantial, disputed,
but there was one more player waiting in the wings.
And what a story he would tell.
- Coming up, that tale would lead investigators
back to the Frasch house and a dramatic discovery.
- Bingo. - Yeah, bingo.
I literally looked at it for a minute.
I was like, seriously?
**
Welcome back.
Adam Frasch was on trial for the murder of his wife, Samira.
The prosecution argued that
the couple's extravagant lifestyle
and Adam's history of secret affairs
sparked the deadly confrontation.
A witness testified that he once overheard
Adam threaten Samira.
Now, the prosecution had another powerful card to play,
a surprise witness was about to take the stand.
Back to Keith Morrison with "At the Bottom of the Pool."
- There's a long tradition in American jurisprudence
condemned as often as it's used,
the jailhouse snitch,
the witness prosecutors hate to love.
But this one had a story just too good to pass up.
His name was Folsom-- yes, like the prison.
And he told his keepers he had something to say
about Adam Frasch.
- Did they, in fact, spend some time
in a jail cell together?
- They spent, uh, several months in a cell together.
They did in top bunk, bottom bunk.
- Prosecution investigator Jason Newland
talked to Folsom in the County lockup.
- I believe the information he provided me was credible.
And here was the story Folsom said he got
from Dr. Frasch.
On the day she died, Samira discovered
her husband had been texting another woman.
And she, hurt and angry, lost her temper,
started a fight, and ended up at the bottom of the pool.
Now, on day three of Adam Frasch's trial,
Dale Folsom raised his right hand,
and swore to tell the truth, and told that story to the jury.
- She started a fight that night and kicked him in the back.
- Folsom's testimony about the fight
between Adam and Samira was vivid and rich with detail.
- He defended himself pretty much.
He thought they were fighting.
And he hit her in the head w-with a club.
- What happened, he hit her in the head?
- With a club, golf club.
And he said he didn't mean to kill her.
It just happened.
And he got scared and ran,
so threw her in the pool and then ran.
- In a largely circumstantial case,
here was an account of exactly what happened, allegedly,
from the killer himself.
- What defendant with any sense
is going to tell somebody what happened when
he hasn't gone on trial yet?
- They do it all the time.
If they had any sense, they wouldn't be defendants.
- I suppose there's that.
- Got nothing to do all day but stare at those four walls.
I mean, you got to talk to somebody, right?
- Yeah.
- If it's a piece of evidence, I'm going to put it on.
And it's going to be up to the jury to decide
whether he's credible or not.
- It was up to investigator Newland
to vet Dale Folsom's story,
find evidence it was actually true.
And he came up with something,
came up with something almost too good to be true.
Newland testified that when Folsom was about
to be released from jail,
Dr. Frasch asked him to take care of something,
something in his house.
- I'll never forget Dale telling me, he said,
Adam told him to get rid of the golf clubs anyway, anyhow,
throw them in a lake, throw them in a river.
Do not give them to anyone, just make them go away.
- Make them go away?
Folsom said there was no mistaking
what Frasch meant that he wanted him
to get rid of those golf clubs
which would include, of course,
the one Frasch said he used to hit Samira,
the murder weapon.
- Did he tell you a specific golf club
that needed to be gotten?
- Yes, ma'am.
A big club like a driver, a big fat one.
- And now, in court-- - Yes, ma'am.
- --a real life Perry Mason moment.
- This is state's exhibit 121.
- Investigator Newland took a big fat golf club
out of an evidence box-- - Yes, I do.
- --so the jury could have a good look.
- This is-- this is the golf club.
- The one with the purple clubhead?
- Yes, ma'am.
- How did Newland get that club?
Well, Folsom never did make it to the house.
So Newland got a search warrant
and went for a little look around.
- I went into the Master bedroom.
And there's this golf club just sitting in the corner.
And part of me laughed inside.
- Bingo. - Yeah, bingo.
- It must have looked like a beautiful
big fat piece of evidence
that would help make the case into a slam dunk.
- I literally looked at it for a minute.
I was like, seriously?
When I actually went up to the golf club
and photographed it and collected it,
there was cobwebs on it.
It had been there for a little while.
It wasn't overnight.
- This was one for the books,
a jailhouse snitch supported by actual evidence.
And Cappleman had one more surprise.
She called crime lab analyst and DNA expert, Jo Ellen Brown.
- I received or was able to develop
a complete DNA profile
from the, uh, club portion that hits the ball.
And that DNA profile matches Samira Frasch.
And the frequency of occurrence was 1 in 510 quintillion.
- And there it was, the story of Sandra Frisch's murder
wrapped up for the jury in a tidy package,
thanks to Dale Folsom.
But did the doctor really confess?
This was after all still the story
coming from a jailhouse snitch?
- This is a golf club that was--
- And the golf club, was Samira's DNA on it?
Maybe not quite so obvious after all.
Defense attorneys we're about to take on Dale Folsom
and his story.
But they couldn't wait.
- Coming up...
The prosecutor's timeline on trial.
- The absence of wrinkling of the fingers or toes
speaks to the likelihood that she has been immersed
for a relatively short period of time.
- Testimony that Samira may have died later
than the prosecutor contends.
- The greatest probability is that she died after 8:00 AM.
- In other words, after Dr. Frasch had left the house.
- And now it was the defense's turn.
From the prosecution theory of how Samira died,
to the story of her husband's alleged confession,
to a jailhouse snitch
and the golf club found in their bedroom,
Adam Frasch was ready to fight back.
By his side, attorneys Clyde Taylor Jr.
and his son, Clyde III,
a high powered defense team reportedly paid by Frasch
in part from a life insurance payout
he received after Samira died.
- How did they pay for his defense in this trial?
- It's not relevant.
- Ah, is it?
Because insurance paid out, right,
which was very unusual in a case like this.
- He had-he had money.
You could see the pictures of his lifestyle.
He had money. He had assets.
- The Taylors started the defense with this moment
captured on video.
February 22, 2014, 8:00 AM,
Adam Frasch and his daughters leaving their gated community.
If Samira was killed after this,
Adam didn't do it.
- There's a huge problem with their timeline.
That's reasonable doubt.
- The timeline presented by the prosecution
was in fact quite vague.
The ME who did the autopsy testified
it was impossible to say, really,
how long Samira had been in the pool
before she was found.
That was a worry for prosecutor Georgia Cappleman.
- Usually, we get a window of maybe two to five hours
for a time of death.
So it's not a precise science. - Okay.
- But we weren't even able to do that in this case.
- The defense aggressively leaped into the void,
arguing that evidence could establish a time of death.
- Personally performed about 3,000 forensic autopsies.
- They brought in their own forensic pathologist
Dr. Jonathan Arden.
Dr. Arden focused on three things to show
when Samira died.
First, rigor mortis had not set in.
Next, there was none of the telltale skin discoloration
that occurs soon after death
when blood settles due to gravity.
- What was the last factor?
- It was the wrinkling of the fingers and toes.
- Finally, Samira's fingertips and toes were not wrinkled
when she was found, not even a little.
- The absence of any such wrinkling of the fingers or toes
speaks to the likelihood that she has been immersed
for a relatively short period of time.
- Even if you take a shower, or a bath,
or jump in a pool,
sometimes within 20 or 30 minutes,
you've got wrinkling of the fingers and the toes.
- Even if you're dead?
- Period.
- No rigor mortis, no settling of blood,
no wrinkled skin.
It all pointed to the same thing.
- In my opinion, she was dead for a relatively short time
before she was discovered and removed from the water.
Would you say Mrs. Frasch died before or after 8:00 AM?
- I would say that the greater--
the greatest probability is that she died after 8:00 AM.
- Do we know exactly what happened, who knows?
Um, the state really wasn't even very specific
with their theory.
- For the defense, this was a case of when, not what.
- It was after he left.
Therefore, everything else is irrelevant.
- But there was more.
After listening to the science,
the jury heard from an eyewitness.
- Decided to go for a little walk
around our neighborhood.
- Matt Christensen is the neighbor
who said he just happened to be walking
past the Frasch house that very morning.
He was a mild mannered measured witness,
but his testimony was explosive.
- What did you observe?
- I saw a woman, African-American,
tall, dark hair,
uh, thin.
- Is there any doubt in your mind
you saw a slender, tall, Black woman loading
something into a vehicle in that driveway?
- No. - Between 10:25 and 10:45
on the 22nd of February 2014?
- There's not.
- He was very specific on his time.
He and his daughter were walking by the house.
Uh, they often looked at the house because there were
all sorts of cars often parked there.
He looks down.
He sees a vehicle by the garage door.
And he sees a tall, slender Black female,
looked like a model, entering or exiting the car,
going toward the house.
- When they showed him a photo of Samira,
Christiansen couldn't say for sure
that was the woman he'd seen.
But if it was Samira in her driveway
around 10:30 that morning,
it would give Adam an airtight alibi.
- He couldn't specifically identify that person
as Mrs. Frasch.
But everything else about that description fits.
- This was a big deal.
And the prosecutors knew it.
This was a credible person, right?
- Yes... I think he was wrong.
I don't think he was lying.
- Of course, you think he's wrong.
But he-he thought he was right.
He was pretty certain of it. - He did, yes, he was.
- The neighbor had credibility,
not a quality, said the defense,
possessed by Adam Frasch's cellmate Dale Folsom,
the jailhouse snitch.
If his snitch is the witness the prosecutor hates to love,
he's also a witness the defense loves to hate.
- We love snitches, don't we?
Tell me what you know about this particular one.
- Well, he's a career criminal
started with his first convictions back in about 1990.
- In court, Attorney Taylor, the father,
went right after Folsom.
He did not spare the rod.
- It's my understanding we've got, was it 4 or 40,
prior felony convictions.
- 40. 4-0.
- 40? - Yes, sir.
- Do you have any pending charges?
- Have one.
- What is that pending charge?
- Possession of methamphetamine.
I've done almost every drug there is, sir.
I've been a drug addict since I was nine years old.
So I've done them all just about--
- Give me a break. - Hmm...
- This guy was outrageous.
- What was more,
Folsom had an arrangement with prosecutors.
He was released from jail on probation
in exchange for his testimony about Frasch.
And Taylor made sure the jury knew all about that.
- You can do anything to stay out
and keep yourself out of jail, isn't that true?
- Most people would.
- Mean anything to you to raise your right hand
and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth, so help you God.
- Of course, he does, have a degree in theology,
going to Bible college.
- And that's what you do you're a truthful guy, right?
- Most of the time, I try to be.
- When you're writing bad checks,
stealing from people and doing drugs?
- That's all I've got, Judge.
- The defense may have destroyed the messenger.
But they still had to deal with his message.
Folsom's story about that golf club
with Samira's DNA on it,
completely meaningless, said Taylor.
That golf club belonged to Samira.
Of course, her DNA would be on it.
- They say, well, she's got DNA on it.
Anybody that plays golf knows if you don't have head covers
you pull your club out of the bag with your hands.
And you grab the head--
- Is the blood, and hair, and things like on that?
- No, no, no, no.
- Just touch DNA. - Correct.
Correct.
How convenient was that?
- So convenient, according to the defense
that it was downright suspicious.
- Lo and behold, here comes Folsom.
He's got his story.
And the law enforcement guys go out there.
And what do they find?
They find this magic golf club.
- But you truly-- - Planted evidence,
no question in my mind.
- Investigators emphatically denied any wrongdoing
over the golf club.
But in the end, all that hoo-ha about the club
was quite possibly a total red herring,
because the state's own medical examiner
testified that Samira's injuries were not caused
by any golf club.
- Do you think that, that purple golf club
could have been responsible for the injuries
that Mrs. Frasch received?
- I don't think so.
The pattern that she had was more diffuse.
- And in your opinion,
are the injuries more consistent with a fist
than a golf club being the instrument
used to inflict them?
- Yes.
- So that was that.
The state's case had taken some very big hits.
So it was no time for grand gestures
like defendant testimony.
- You did not desire to testify, is that correct?
- Yes, sir.
- Dr. Frasch remained mum.
And it was with an air of confidence
that the defense rested.
- Judge, at this time,
the defense would announce rest.
- Unaware that in a case full of surprises,
there was one more to come.
- Coming up...
the first surprise, the speed of the verdict.
- When they came back quick,
I thought it was going to be good news.
- The second surprise,
a new revelation that could turn the case upside down.
- That was absolutely stunning.
And we were, "What are they talking about?"
- The trial of Adam Frasch
was a closely contested affair,
the verdict very much in the balance.
The lawyers had one more chance
to make their case in closing arguments.
Client Taylor III would take a seat
and let his father speak to the jury.
- He's one of those guys that thinks closing argument
is where you win or lose a case.
- We don't convict people,
because a crime was horrible.
We don't convict people because they have a lot of money.
We don't convict people on speculation.
- Taylor returned to the medical evidence,
his argument that Samira died after her husband left home.
- What proof do we have that she was in the pool
before 8:00 AM?
No competent evidence of that, none.
Scientific evidence says no.
The defendant has not been proven guilty in this case.
- It did check out.
- Prosecutor Georgia Cappleman had the last word.
- All of the evidence points not to a mystery killer
but to this defendant.
This was a personal crime,
and who had the motive to kill this woman?
Only one person.
- Cappleman spoke to the evidence
but passions were not far from the surface.
- And as she lay there on the concrete
fighting for her life,
the man that she trusted to make her dreams come true
put her body in that pool.
Please render a verdict of guilty as charged.
- Then there was nothing left to do but wait.
- It's always troublesome when the jury goes out.
It's a sick feeling until you get your answer.
- How worried was she?
- Pretty worried.
I-I mean, the neighbor
and the time of death bothered her.
Both sides settled in for a long wait.
But just 90 minutes into deliberations,
word of a verdict.
- I thought they would be out for a while.
Um, and when they came back quick,
I thought it was going to be good news.
- I thought just the opposite.
Well, I thought they'd be out for a while.
But when they came back that quick,
I figured it was bad news.
- As they all waited for the words,
faces were taut, anxious.
- State of Florida versus Adam Frasch,
we the jury find as follows as the indictment,
the defendant is guilty of first degree murder.
- Guilty.
Frasch stared blankly then dropped his head
under the weight of the verdict.
- How did Dr. Frasch take it?
- Hard.
- He was believing in the jury system.
- On the prosecution side, gratitude.
- I was really happy with the verdict,
was the culmination of a lot of hard work.
- Be seated.
- But was that the final word?
After the verdict, a surprise.
Before the judge delivered the mandatory sentence,
life in prison, no parole.
- For us, the Samira family--
- Cappleman read a letter from Samira's mother
written in Madagascar.
This was not a typical victim impact statement.
It included something that sounded a lot like evidence.
- According to Sam Frasch who had noticed
the presence of someone prowling in their home
nights before his death.
- A prowler?
The jury never heard about any prowler.
And said Defense Attorney Taylor, neither did he.
- That was absolutely stunning.
And we were, did she just read--
Was there something? What are they talking about?
Because the defense never had been advised
that there may have been a prowler in the home
within a day or two of the death.
It has to be disclosed under the law.
- I think that's the best we could do on the translation.
- Prosecutor Cappleman countered that
she didn't withhold anything.
The letter was written in French
and set out for translation.
She only learned what was in it
when she read the letter aloud in court.
As for Adam Frasch, he will spend
the rest of his days behind bars.
- When you understood that you were going away for life,
what is that like?
- I prayed to God, you know, you say you don't give
anything more than I can handle.
But this is almost more than I can handle.
- So, uh, let me just ask you directly,
did you kill your wife?
- No.
I would never harm my wife, never even, you know--
I loved her or anything in this world.
- You loved a lot of women in your life?
- Not really.
She was my first true love.
- Love of your life?
- Love of my life.
- Frasch is unwavering about that,
a convicted murderer who still sang
he is innocent and misunderstood.
- I'm not saying I'm perfect.
But, you know, I'm trying to live a good life,
and help people, and, um, and enjoy life.
- As for those two little girls who Samira pampered,
and promoted, and loved,
they went to live with Adam Frasch's brother
in a state far away,
an existence that was untroubled by conflict
and no longer over the top.
- Her children are her legacy.
And I hope one day to have the opportunity to tell them
that they had a great mother.
- See that mummy?
Look at that.
- Samira's YouTube videos are still online, of course,
unkillable artifacts of a broken dream
and a life that was passionate,
and beguiling, and brief.
- That's all for this edition of "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Kate Snow. Thank you for watching.