Up next,
this investigation is off to a shaky start.
This is a whole different type of autopsy
because of the condition of his body.
A lot of valuable time and clues have been lost.
As time goes on, you can lose DNA evidence,
you can lose witnesses.
Detectives fear a killer won't be caught
until his own words seal his fate.
In 26 years, I've never had the killer's voice
basically admitting what he did right there on audio.
Founded in 1642, Warwick, Rhode Island,
is one of the oldest cities in America--
a place long defined by its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean.
We have so much coastline
that water-life is inherent to everybody who lives here.
I know so many people that have a boat.
So obviously in the summer,
that's when people are out on their boats
and they're parked at marinas, dinghies,
all sorts of, you know, apparatus related to the boats.
Countless boats and lives have been lost
to the sea over the decades,
many falling victim to volatile weather.
From the West Bay mobile newsroom,
iWitness News moves to West Warwick,
where we're getting a great look at the storm
that we've never seen before.
On August 4, 2015,
a weather phenomenon known as a macroburst
devastated the area.
This was an unusual event.
My guess is there were in the range
of 90- to 120-mile-an-hour winds.
The only way that I can think of describing it--
sort of a mini tornado.
A storm with this kind of power
wreaked havoc on many boats along the coast.
It was chaotic.
The microburst had everything out of sorts.
It wasn't uncommon for boats to be pulled off their mooring
or taken off their anchor.
So when in the aftermath of the storm,
the local harbormaster
saw a 26-foot sailboat called the Star Capella
floating off the shore, he didn't think much of it.
The boat was dragging anchor.
Of course, he called out before he boarded the boat.
Nobody answered.
So, he took the boat, put it onto one of the city moorings.
Before he did that, he checked the boat, looked in,
saw a lot of debris, cushions, no signs of anybody in the boat.
The harbormaster towed the boat
to a mooring for safe keeping.
No one claimed it.
When he came back 11 days later,
he noticed something unusual.
There was a very foul odor coming from the boat.
So he boarded it to see if he can find out
where that smell was coming from.
The smell was coming
from a badly decomposed human body
covered up with a jumble of material from inside the boat.
The body wasn't found during the initial search
because the harbormaster hadn't expected to find
anyone on board.
And also because the body was covered with debris.
We could not tell if the body was a male or female, age, race.
The prior two weeks to that point
had been in the mid 80s to lower 90s,
so the weather and the conditions did not help
in our investigation.
The body was so decomposed,
detectives couldn't even tell how or when the victim died.
Was the death something that was completely accidental
or was this the result of some other act,
possibly even a homicide?
The medical examiner was presented with a body
nearly devoid of identifying features.
Our number-one challenge in this case
is "I don't know who this is."
After we undressed the body,
we could tell it had male features,
and that's basically all we can say.
We don't know the age.
We don't know the race.
And obviously fingerprints are no longer there.
They had decomposed away. They'd melted away.
A full autopsy showed the victim had broken ribs.
Despite the decomposition,
bruising was found deep in the victim's skull.
But these findings didn't necessarily indicate foul play.
After all, the macroburst storm was unusually powerful.
Could it have been that the boat was knocked around
so much that the person could have slipped and fallen,
hit their head, and then things landed on them?
Was he murdered and then covered up?
Or was it just an accident in really bad weather?
A key finding put the accident theory to rest.
The victim's hyoid bone--
a floating bone located in the neck-- was broken.
That would not have happened accidentally.
It was a true fracture.
This one little bone will tell me
that there was significant pressure applied to the neck,
and he was basically strangled.
Doctors and detectives
now knew their victim had been murdered.
The problem was days had passed
and they still had no idea who he was.
About the only thing detectives knew
about their murder victim
was that he was a male and not young.
They combed area missing person's records
and found no one who fit this admittedly broad description.
Even worse, a lot of time had passed
since the murder,
a significant setback for any investigation.
They knew they had already been at least 10 days removed
from when this murder may have occurred.
So, they knew the clock was ticking.
So, there was a lot of catch-up to do
in order to find out some of these things
to figure out exactly what it is that happened.
The boat belonged with 70-year-old man
named Fernando Silva.
Police contacted his brother,
who hadn't heard from him for days
but was able to provide valuable information.
We were able to actually pinpoint a date
and a time that his boat was docked at a marina
and we began our investigation at that location.
Now that detectives knew where the boat was docked
before the macroburst storm, they had a starting point.
They questioned a man who worked security at that marina.
He was able to confirm
that the boat in question
was entered several times by two young males
at very odd hours, being very early in the morning,
and he stated that he questioned them
on about three different occasions.
These two men--
the security man didn't know them--
said they were helping a man who identified himself
as Freddy install a new engine.
They came back repeatedly in the days
before the macroburst storm to continue their work.
They came back
with what appeared to be a new motor,
but they weren't too mechanically savvy
and were unable to get the boat started.
Detectives needed to identify these two men.
But first they had to see if the dead man in the morgue
was Fernando Silva.
Many people recognized the name.
They knew a Navy veteran nicknamed Captain Freddy
who was a regular on the docks.
Freddy, where are you headed?
Captain Freddy was sort of a maritime vagabond,
I would say.
He had no experience with boats.
He fell in love with boats and wasn't really sure
what to do with them other than to be on them.
He lived on his boat.
Freddy chronicled his feelings in a book
he was writing called "The Blessed Voyage."
He was such a character that even local filmmakers
got him to tell his story.
I bought it because it was actually bigger than the car.
The car was falling apart.
But I just abandoned it in the parking lot
and I walked all the way back to the boat
and it was the end of that.
Dental records were found
and matched dental X-rays from the victim.
A DNA comparison with a known relative confirmed his identity.
It was Mr. Fernando Silva, sometimes called Captain Freddy
to his friends at the marina.
We have a definite forensic method for identifying him.
Now that police knew who Captain Freddy was,
they backtracked him in the days leading to the macroburst storm
that sent his boat out to sea.
Four nights before that storm,
Captain Freddy won several hundred dollars
playing Keno, a legal computer-gambling game
found all over the region.
He was known as being very lucky
and in the establishments that he frequented,
they all knew him as playing that very often.
Shortly before the storm,
Captain Freddy hit it big playing Keno,
and he let a lot of people know it.
He didn't have very much money,
so when he struck it, in his mind, he hit the jackpot.
This was a big, big win for him.
And he was excited about it.
But when Captain Freddy was found dead,
that money was gone.
It wasn't in his boat or with his body.
The captain didn't have much, but it appeared
what little he had may have led to his murder.
A couple people saw that he won and ultimately,
their knowledge of him winning that money
might have led to the crime.
After Captain Freddy Silva's boat
was found at sea during a severe summer storm,
it was towed back to a local marina.
Detectives traced the boat
back to where it was originally docked and discovered
that two unknown men had spent a lot of time
on the captain's boat in the days after he went missing.
In a crucial break for investigators,
these men were recorded by surveillance cameras.
I was going through basically two weeks of video,
24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
which was about 20,000 video files.
You really have to look at everything,
because we don't know what happened,
how it happened and that necessarily
these two were necessarily the ones involved.
People at the marina told detectives
that one of these men might be Troy Gunderway,
a local man, a petty criminal,
almost instantly recognizable
because of the large eye tattooed on his skull.
Troy Gunderway was a resident of Warwick
who had been in and out of prison.
He had worked odds-and-end jobs when he wasn't incarcerated.
And further investigation learned that Troy Gunderway
had known Fernando Silva prior to the murder.
And that he, in fact, had assisted Fernando
in attempting to get a motor for that boat on a previous date.
Detectives asked Troy Gunderway
about the other man who was seen working with him
on Captain Freddy's boat.
Mr. Gunderway said that he was with a friend
that he called Big Red,
and he believes his real name was Rich.
After a little digging, detectives came up
with a name-- Richard Baribault.
Richard Baribault had had several run-ins
with the police.
He had served approximately a quarter of his life behind bars.
Most of it was drug-related, alcohol-related,
and domestic-abuse related.
A further background check showed Baribault
had a suspended driver's license.
And he was driving a pickup truck that might or might not
be the one in this surveillance video
shot near the marina where the Captain docked his boat.
On the night that we believe Captain Freddy was killed,
a maroon pickup truck with the same sticker pattern
as found on Mr. Baribault's pickup truck
left the marina at pretty much the time
that we thought the incident had occurred.
Now that detectives knew who Baribault was,
they simply waited until he got
behind the wheel and pulled him over.
At which point, he was arrested
for operating on a suspended license
and operating a motor vehicle without registration.
In one of Baribault's pockets,
they found a knife with a blade over 3 inches--
in itself, a violation of state law.
Even worse for Baribault,
the knife appeared to have blood on it.
I asked Mr. Baribault if there would be any reason
for blood to be on the knife.
He stated the only reasons would be his own blood,
which he might have cut himself,
or the blood of fish when he has gone fishing.
The knife was sent out for testing.
Baribault admitted to police that he saw Freddy
the night he died, but said Troy Gunderway
had murdered the captain, not him.
But what Baribault didn't know was that investigators
had a surprise piece of evidence--
his own voice trying to get information
on how to cover up a murder.
So in the search warrant, when they search with Google
through a voice search on the phone,
it actually records your voice in your exact words.
Troy Gunderway told police
he and Richard Baribault
knew Captain Freddy was flush with cash
after his wins at Keno
and their plan was to steal that money.
So they decided that due to his age
and the fact that he was on a boat,
and there probably wouldn't be anybody else around,
they thought he'd be an easy target to rob.
Baribault and Gunderway
pointed fingers at each other as Captain Freddy's killer.
Detectives thought both men were involved,
but they needed evidence to prove it.
So they confiscated and examined both men's cellphones.
Typically, when we get a phone,
we go through an extraction process
where we hook the phone up to a forensic computer
and we extract the information
from the hard drive of that phone.
That's going to include something
as simple as user settings to things like location history,
telephone calls, chats, apps that you've used.
There's a myriad of information that you can get from that.
In fact, a lot of information
vital to any murder investigation--
where the suspect was, what time he was there,
who he was talking to--
can be gleaned from a forensic examination
of a cellphone.
And Baribault's phone
was a potential gold mine of evidence.
We were able to determine the location of the cellphone
prior to the murder, the night of the murder,
during the murder and after the murder.
And therefore, we can link the cellphone location
with Mr. Baribault.
The examination showed both suspects' phones
were on Captain Freddy's boat early on the morning
of August 1st just hours after the captain
won big playing Keno.
And those phones were also at the boat
many times in the days that followed.
But some questions remained.
Who's holding the phone? Who's making the call?
A lot of that stuff, you could come up with a defense,
you could come up with an excuse or an alibi.
A combination of evidence
solved that problem.
The locations provided by both suspects' phones matched up
to the second with surveillance images
of two previously unknown men
getting on and off Captain Freddy's boat.
Over the course of four days,
I saw them come and go from the boat a minimum of 10 times.
Even though Richard Baribault maintained his innocence,
the most damning clue against him
came straight from his own mouth
through a voice search he did on his Google search engine.
Between August 1st and August 4th,
we were able to find from Google several audio recordings
in Mr. Baribault's voice.
That was very telling due to the fact
that we found a gallon full of bleach
where Mr. Silva was located.
The evidence was overwhelming.
There were many questions which he was asking Google
to see if the answers would be right there for him.
By now the results from the forensic examination
of Baribault's knife had come in and confirmed
what investigators already suspected.
The blood was Captain Freddy's.
There's really no other reason for his blood
to be on that knife, except that he was there
at the time when Mr. Silva was murdered.
Prosecutors believe Gunderway and Baribault
knew Captain Freddy had won a couple hundred dollars
playing Keno.
They snuck on to the captain's boat,
expecting to overpower him and steal his money.
On board, Baribault held Captain Freddy at knifepoint,
drawing the blood that remained on the weapon
even weeks after the attack.
When Freddy fought back, he was beaten, strangled,
and left for dead.
For the next four days, Baribault and Gunderway
tried to clean up the scene,
doing Google searches on Baribault's phone
to see how they could best do the job.
At every moment in the attempted coverup,
their phones and surveillance video
documented their locations.
In an attempt to hide the evidence, they drove
Captain Freddy's boat out to sea and abandoned it,
hoping this floating crime scene would never be found.
But the macroburst storm just days after the murder
did something they hadn't counted on--
it caused the boat to float back towards the shoreline,
where it was later found by the harbormaster.
Ultimately, Captain Freddy's decomposing body
exposed the crime and tied Baribault and Gunderway
to his boat, to his corpse, and to his murder.
But it was Baribault's own voice,
looking for information on how to conceal the crime
that sealed his fate.
A Google search has a date, a timestamp,
and a GPS coordinate location of that exact search.
There was no denying.
It was his voice asking that question
at that specific time in that specific location.
In 2017,
Troy Gunderway pled guilty to second-degree murder
and got 55 years in prison.
Richard "Big Red" Baribault,
who elected, despite the evidence against him,
to go to trial, got life plus 10 years
all for a murder that came down to just a few hundred dollars.
Captain Freddy had a large and loving family.
They were very supportive of him and everything that he did.
It was very emotional.
Those wounds are very much real and very much still fresh,
and to have to hear the evidence and what happened that night,
and how these people just went on with their regular lives
and didn't really give it much thought
after they got rid of the boat, that's tough.
It's always good to catch the bad guy,
but in this particular case,
that satisfaction is multiplied when you can go to the family
and say, "Hey, listen, unfortunate circumstances,
but we are able to find the person responsible
and they're going to pay for what they did."
The electronic evidence that we were able
to get definitely sealed the deal with the jury's eyes.
A lot of juries want these CSI fingerprints.
They want that undeniable evidence.
And it just so happens that we were able to get that.