- [call ringing]
- EARL: It looked like she had been strangled, stabbed,
and beat in the head. To me, that's definite overkill.
- SUSANNE: I see my mother laying there,
I assume she was hurt, there was a knife stickin' out,
I mean, I figured she fell.
- RICHARD: Whenever someone of considerable wealth
is murdered, we look at who has a motive.
- SUSANNE: They were already trying to focus in on me.
"Where was I? What was I doing?"
- DARCY: It was all about greed and money...
who has access to the house.
- MALE NARRATOR: Five unique perspectives.
Five points of view. One murder.
- SUSANNE: I'm Peggy Nadell's daughter.
- EARL: I was the lead detective.
- DARCY: I am a longtime friend of Susanne.
- ANNE: I was a close friend of Peggy Nadell.
- RICHARD: --and I was the prosecutor.
- ♪♪
- ♪
- SUSANNE: My name is Susanne Nadell-Scaccio
and I'm Peggy Nadell's daughter.
My relationship with Peggy was very close, as I would say
most daughters and mothers' relationships are.
My mother and father made a very, very handsome couple.
They were striking.
My mother used to like to go to the city and to the museum
and to theater and movies.
They loved to travel.
They traveled all over the world together.
When I was three...
my brother, Jimmy, came into the world.
- ♪
- I think my brother developed--
it's--it's hard to put my finger on.
I think he was a strange adolescent, and he developed
into a strange adult.
His differences... spoke volumes.
Uh, he was not social.
He was very cerebral.
He went away to school.
Moved to Florida.
Never came home to see my family,
never came home to see my parents.
My father passed away in 2003 very unexpectedly.
And it was devastating.
I knew that my mother would want me to be strong.
And I didn't wanna let her down,
I wanted to be as strong as she was.
My relationship with my mother was very close.
I would speak to her probably two or three times a day.
Not a day ever went by that I didn't either see--
physically see, visit--
or have phone conversation with my mother.
- ♪
- SUSANNE: Saturday morning, I always call between,
I don't know 7:30, 8 o'clock,
8, 8:30 on the weekends.
I tried the house phone, it was ringing, ringing, ringing...
the answering machine never kicked on.
I called the cell, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing,
I said, uh, "You know, maybe she went out
"to the end of the driveway to get the newspaper
or to put something in the mailbox."
I musta called a dozen times to each number
and she was not picking it up.
So, I told my husband Bobby, "I'm going down there.
"My mother's not answering the phone,
I wanna make sure everything's okay."
I open the door, and I realize the alarm wasn't on.
I'm like, "Gee, why wasn't the alarm on?"
I walked in and I found her.
And I immediately ran over, and the first thing I noticed,
she was...bashed in the head and she was bleeding.
And I saw blood coming out around her eyes and her nose
and the side of her mouth.
I said, "Oh, my God, she fell down the stairs."
Once I got in and got close...
I saw it was more than a fall down the stairs.
The knife was stuck in Peggy's chest,
and I'm like, "Oh my God, she stabbed herself,"
and I pulled the knife out.
And I was gonna do CPR, and I checked for a pulse.
And she was cold, I'm like--
and then I realize I could-- I--you know, I mean--
everybody says, "What'd you do that for?
What are you thinking?" It-- - [fingers snap]
- --you just react, I mean, you don't--
you don't think about what you're doing.
I ran outside. I call 911.
- [call ringing]
- [sirens blaring]
- SUSANNE: When the police showed up,
they kept me outside, and they were asking me questions.
And at that point, they wanted to take both myself
and my husband, Bobby, down to the police station,
so I had no choice but to go.
- ♪
- SUSANNE: When I was in the police station
being interviewed that Saturday, they came in to me and said,
"This was not an accident.
"Your mother did not fall.
Your mother was murdered."
I was shocked, and I could not possibly conceive
who would do this to my mother.
And that's when they started asking questions.
I told them that I pulled the knife.
I said I was trying to do CPR on her and then I realized
it was past that point.
I also told them, "My fingerprints will
"definitely be on the knife,
"as my DNA will be all over this house,
"I'm here two, three times a week.
"My hair'll be here,
my fingerprints'll be on every doorknob."
I think at this point they were already trying to focus in on me
being that they had me in the police station for several hours
and were asking me questions.
I'm like, "Why are you asking me that question?"
- SUSANNE: The following day, which was Sunday,
the detectives called me and asked me to come down
to the police station to talk to them.
And at that point, I felt it was being directed at me.
And I'm like, "Well, wait a second.
I don't wanna talk to you now," and I hired an attorney.
They didn't like that.
- ♪
- EARL: My name is Earl Lorence.
I was the lead detective
working the murder of Peggy Nadell.
The morning of January 25, 2014,
I was the assigned detective working that weekend.
So, at around 8 o'clock that morning,
I was at the local bagel store.
That's where I received the phone call.
The desk sergeant said that there was a death
of an elderly woman inside her residence,
and that she had slipped and fallen on a knife.
- [sirens blaring]
- EARL: The house, uh, is in an upper middle-class
neighborhood in Valley Cottage, New York.
Very tidy, very well-kept.
The daughter of the victim, Susanne Nadell-Scaccio,
she was, um, in a frantic state,
um, panicked, yelling, screaming.
Upon entering the home, uh, the victim was just inside
the threshold of the doorway,
uh, at the base of the stairwell.
You try not to harden yourself too much to each situation,
so, um, at this moment, it really did kind of hit--
hit home because this was an 80-year-old woman
at home alone.
My mother is 80 years old, she lives alone.
That does have a personal connection there,
so you wanna do all you can.
My first instinct, uh, obviously was that
it was a homicide.
There was no way she accidentally fell
down the stairs and stabbed herself in the chest
three times.
We saw the knife, which was very obvious,
a few feet away from the victim.
She had obvious trauma to her head.
She also had what appeared to be a least
one or two stab wounds to her chest.
Her neck, uh, appeared to be quite bruised,
black and blue.
Now, it looked like she possibly was strangled,
it looked like she was stabbed,
and she looked like she was beat in the head.
Now, uh, to me, that's definite overkill.
The first thing I want to determine is:
is there a break-in?
I looked at the front door and there was no apparent, uh,
force used to get into the house.
I walked upstairs and went to the master bedroom.
There was drawers pulled out and placed on the floor,
totally out of place because you don't put them on the ground
like that, so it looked like a staged burglary.
- ♪
- At that time, uh, Susanne, understandably,
was, um, stressed out.
She wanted us out of there.
She wanted us to be-- clean up the scene,
get her mother in an ambulance and take her to the hospital.
There were red flags immediately with this investigation.
One of the very first things she says
within the first couple minutes of us arriving is that
her mother is worth high seven figures.
"Oh, and my DNA and my fingerprints are gonna be
all over that house and that knife."
It just seemed like an odd, uh, thing to focus in on.
Um, it struck me as odd.
Because she was so, um, erratic, um,
it took a long time to kind of settle her down
and to get her to go back to the station and just talk
about who may or may not have done this thing.
Susanne, she said she came to the home--her mother's home--
and when she opened the door, obviously she saw that
her mother had the knife in her chest,
and she pulled the knife out.
- EARL: That was, uh, a big concern for us.
Why would you touch the murder weapon?
- EARL: With Susanne, we basically just wanted
to go back the last couple of days.
Um, we wanted to know what she was doing,
where she was going, um, where she had been.
We spoke to her for a number of hours,
but these investigations take time,
we might have to revisit the same witness
over and over again.
So, we made an appointment for the following day.
The next day, she hired an attorney
and stopped talking to us.
She refused to cooperate.
To me, the biggest red flag of all
is when you hire an attorney
and refuse to help law enforcement
when your own mother is the murder victim.
So, if you don't wanna help the people who are trying
to find the people who killed your mother,
who are you going to help?
After Susanne, um, told us that
she wasn't going to cooperate any further,
we had to re-focus our energies.
As it turns out, there was no DNA evidence.
There was no fingerprints, there was no hair, saliva.
Nothing.
We were beyond frustrated.
But, obviously, we didn't stop, uh,
we kept--we kept digging.
We had to keep moving forward. We go back to basics.
We take a look at the phone records for Peggy.
At--at the same time, we're getting, uh,
her son's phone records and, uh,
her daughter-in-law's phone records, as well.
I was parsing through each individual phone call.
I got to, like, the sixth number,
and we discover a phone call
at approximately 1:30 in the morning
the night of the homicide, coming from a throw phone.
The burner phone-- I was ecstatic.
We also get a notification from the alarm company
that she had spoken to the alarm company,
because the alarm went off around the same time.
So, we actually have Peggy's voice speaking
to the alarm company, telling the alarm, uh, dispatcher
that everything is okay.
- [call ringing]
- EARL: It was about a, uh, 20-second phone call,
and in conjunction with that, the alarm going off,
and no forced entry at the front door,
at that point, we were positive this was not a stranger
lurking around the neighborhood killing old ladies.
This was somebody that Peggy knew.
- ♪♪
- ♪
- ANNE: I'm Anne Martin and I was a close friend
of Peggy Nadell.
When I found out that Peggy was murdered,
I mean, I just...I-- I just couldn't believe it.
It was Sunday morning.
I remember picking up the phone and Susie's hysterical,
and she's saying, "My mother's gone,
my mother's gone."
- ANNE: She just didn't even know what to do.
The police were questioning her.
I think she was just in a state of shock.
It was unbelievable.
People were saying, "Oh, well, she could've done it.
Why did she pull the knife out?"
Well, I'm sure if I saw my mother,
her lying there, I would think,
"My goodness, maybe this hurts," I don't know.
You don't know what you would do if you're in that situation.
- ♪
- ANNE: The detectives came to my home
probably one or two days right after that.
You know, asking me all kinds of questions,
and of course, they--they did ask me
what kind of a relationship she had with her children.
Jimmy and Susie, they were both--I'd say different.
Susie was, uh, strong minded, she knew what she wanted.
She could take care of herself.
Peggy was more protective of Jimmy.
- ♪
- ANNE: I think Peggy probably worried about Jimmy
a little more because he was far away,
and he did march to a different drummer.
After he graduated college, when he went to live in Florida.
He started to work for a hospital as a psychologist
and that's where he met Diana.
They went together for several years before, uh,
they had any intentions of getting married.
When Peggy found out that Diana was pregnant,
she was delighted.
She was besides herself.
Uh, Peggy would fly to Florida to help.
When Peggy would talk about her grandchildren,
her--her whole face would just light up.
She just thought the world of them.
Diana, she liked to have designer clothes,
she liked nice jewelry,
they couldn't really afford all these things,
and then she would depend on Peggy.
I think the issues started to come up between Peggy and Diana
when Diana started to become a little too demanding.
Peggy was always sending them money.
Peggy said, "You know, Diana, this is just a little bit
too much, uh, you know, I won't go along with this."
Diana says, "Well, if you won't come across
with the money," she says, "I just won't let you
see the children."
Well, that just absolutely devastated Peggy.
I mean, not be able to see or talk to her grandchildren
was horrible, it was a terrible thing to do.
Peggy did mention to me that they were having problems--
Diana and Jimmy-- and that they might separate.
And of course, Peggy was concerned.
I mean, she was concerned about her son,
his happiness, and how this was gonna affect him.
Peggy was very astute when it came to finances.
She had her will and her trust, everything was in order,
and everything was divided equally
between her son and her daughter.
They were to get the bulk of her estate.
She made it clear that if they ever separated
or divorced that, you know, Jimmy was to get the money
and that Diana was not to get any of Peggy's estate,
none--none whatsoever.
So, Diana, when she found out that this was so,
of course, was not very happy.
After Peggy died, she came in, she's putting her name
on everything she wanted.
She wanted Peggy's jewelry, she wanted Peggy's purses.
Peggy had a lot of nice handbags.
Uh, she wanted the furniture from the house.
You start thinking and putting two and two together,
and you're thinking, "Oh, she has a good motive.
It's very possible that she would do something like this."
- ♪
- DARCY: My name is Darcy Greenberg
and I am a longtime friend of Susanne.
After Susanne got out of the police station,
I was waiting for her at her home,
and we were treating it as an accident.
We were, you know, comforting her,
'cause her mother fell with a knife.
It's--it's a different feeling when you're comforting someone
for a--a tragic loss like that,
and then you get accused of being the one that did it.
That changes everything.
Sometimes I think the authorities say,
"Who has access to the house?
And 95% of the time, its family. Oh, it must be her."
Every day I was at her home,
we would wave to the undercover cop
sitting in front of her house.
They watched every move she made.
They had to become more intimate with the family,
with Susanne, with Peggy,
to really know who could have done this to her.
I had been speaking with the investigator
since the beginning.
You take the information that...
there's a lot of money involved,
and you also take the information of...
a knife being put through someone's heart,
and they tell you that it's most likely a family person.
Somebody that had something to gain.
I looked at them and I'm like, "Everything you're saying
"and the reasons why you think somebody would do this,
"I agree with you,
but you're looking at the wrong person."
I told them Susanne didn't need the money,
she had her own.
Susanne was a laid-back jeans girl
with the same kitchen from the 1960s,
the same furniture her dad picked out when she moved in.
Knowing that it wasn't Susanne...100%,
knowing that they felt it was family,
my instincts was for them to follow the greed,
follow the money, follow Diana.
Anyone who didn't really know Peggy would not know her wealth,
because she was not a flaunter.
She was very smart about how she spent her money,
who she spent it on.
Peggy was always financially providing
whatever Diana needed because it was important to her
to have a good relationship with Diana,
to be able to have that good relationship
with her grandchildren.
Most of the money would just go directly to Diana.
She was in charge of the household, the bills,
the money, all of that. Jimmy trusted her.
From what the police told me, when they spoke to her,
she was at her cousin's wedding in Maryland
and her phone pinged in Maryland.
And as far as they were concerned,
that's where she was.
I don't know, maybe I watch too much TV.
Something just didn't sit right with me.
Just because a phone is somewhere
doesn't mean a person is there, too.
Eventually they notice that the phone was not used,
it was just there.
She wasn't anywhere near the area of Maryland
where the wedding was.
And that was just the beginning of...
everything just exploding and unraveling
and getting to the truth.
Shortly after that,
I started getting phone calls at my house,
and, um, Diana started calling me.
And she was, you know, very upset.
She was calling me almost every morning,
and it would be from different phone numbers,
and she seemed very rattled and very off and very--
asking me a lot of questions
where it seemed like she was getting nervous,
like the police may be looking at her,
which, I said, "They have to look at everybody.
"They have to look at you.
They have to follow their leads and don't worry about it."
And as each day went on,
it felt like it was getting worse
and she was getting more nervous and more upset
about her being questioned or her being thought of
as a possible suspect.
Then, one morning, she called me,
and she thanked me for listening and said
she's leaving and taking one of the kids
and she's moving back to Jamaica.
I got off the phone and I'm thinking to myself,
"She's leaving the country. That's it."
Whether she's guilty or innocent, that's it.
Once she's gone, she's gone. They can't bring her back.
So, I called the police and I said, "Listen, she's leaving.
"She's got her tickets, she's getting on a plane.
And if you think she did this, you need to go get her."
- ♪
- RICHARD: My name is Richard Moran,
and I was the prosecutor handling this matter.
- ♪
- RICHARD: When Diana Nadell called her friend and said,
"I'm leaving Jim, and we're going to Jamaica,"
it was at that point we decided,
"You know what? We gotta go to Florida."
- ♪
- RICHARD: You've got to be very careful
when you investigate these cases because one wrong move
and your target knows you're looking at them.
When you first start investigating a case,
it's her daughter-in-law, your thought really isn't
that she's gonna be the one that did this.
Diana, she had an alibi that she was at a wedding
in Washington D.C.
What it kept coming back to is, yes, her phone was in D.C.,
but other than those phone calls,
there was really nothing to corroborate that she was there.
A big key of this investigation was the fact that,
just prior to Peggy Nadell being murdered,
her phone received a call from an alarm company.
And in looking at the caller ID, we saw that just before
the alarm company called, it was what some people call
a burner phone-- a phone that's prepaid,
that's not really associated with any one specific person.
When we learned that the Trac-phone
was purchased in Florida, so close to Diana Nadell's home,
that was a game changer for us.
And, it really shifted the focus of our investigation.
- ♪
- RICHARD: We did a thorough analysis
of Diana Nadell's phone records.
Just a day or two before Peggy Nadell was murdered,
all of a sudden, Diana Nadell starts speaking
on the phone with a person named Andrea Benson,
who's in Washington, D.C.
She also starts communicating with a person named
Tanisha Joyner in the days following the murder.
People she had never spoken with prior to this happening.
At that point, we had enough to go up on a wiretap.
What we decided would be the perfect trigger
is, "Let's ask Diana Nadell about her alibi.
Who was she with in Washington D.C.?"
And we were asking her if they could just give us a call
and confirm her alibi, and once we did that,
her phone calls exploded.
She reached out to Tanisha Joyner.
And it was this very, uh, interesting call.
Tanisha says, "Wait a minute,
"was I with you from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.
or from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.?"
Because she doesn't know because she wasn't with her.
There were several phone calls
with Andrea Benson.
They wouldn't talk about the case on the phone,
but there was one time when Andrea Benson said,
"Listen, I'm in this with you.
I'm in this too."
The adrenaline starts pumping,
we feel like we're really getting to the point
where our theories are now--
they're not theories, now it's evidence.
It was after that phone call about her going to Jamaica,
we decided to move.
We sent people to interview Diana and all the people
that she had involved in this plot.
- ♪
- RICHARD: We had the teams actually with people
under surveillance.
At the word "Go," everybody went into action.
Tanisha Joyner was taken into custody,
Andrea Benson was taken in to custody.
And that all happened simultaneously.
Once these people are being spoken to
and interviewed by detectives,
Diana Nadell's entire story starts to break down.
Tanisha Joyner was being interviewed in, uh, Baltimore,
and was telling the detectives there that Diana Nadell
had asked her to make phone calls that evening.
- ♪
- RICHARD: When we interviewed Andrea Benson,
we learned a lot of details about this case
that we just didn't know,
things that we thought were always going to remain
a mystery.
She met Diana Nadell through her aunt.
Andrea's aunt was supposed to pick up Diana Nadell
from the airport in Washington D.C.,
but she couldn't, and so she sent Andrea.
Once she picked Diana Nadell up,
Diana asked her if she wanted to make $10,000,
and to do so, she would have to go up to New York
and kill Diana's mother-in-law.
While driving up to Valley Cottage,
Diana had Andrea Benson activate the burner phone
and that was along Route 95.
On their way up,
Diana--every time they were at a toll plaza, would hide
her face so that her face couldn't be seen on camera.
Once they got to Peggy Nadell's home
in Valley Cottage, Diana Nadell called Peggy
from the burner phone
and told her she was in the area,
could she come in.
- ♪
- RICHARD: It had to have been such a surreal scenario for her,
her daughter-in-law's at her door with a stranger,
it's 1 o'clock in the morning.
Nonetheless, it was her daughter-in-law
and she let her in, gave her a glass of water,
sat down and spoke with her.
At that point Diana asked Peggy, "Can we go upstairs?"
Peggy told Diana she was gonna go use the restroom.
And so Diana and Andrea were in the room alone,
and Diana begins like, "We're gonna do this now."
And Andrea told us that she had taken off the strap
from her pocketbook, it unhooked on either side,
and she was gonna use that to strangle Peggy.
Diana talks--starts talking to Peggy about the family jewelry,
and they start going down the stairs and Peggy's in front,
Andrea's right behind her.
At that time, Andrea starts strangling Peggy from behind.
And in interviewing Andrea, she kept repeating the phrase,
"But she wouldn't...go, she wouldn't die."
Diana ran to the kitchen and grabbed a kitchen knife,
and brought it back and was telling Andrea,
"Stab her, stab her."
And Andrea said she refused to do it and so...
while she was choking Peggy...
Diana stabbed Peggy Nadell in the chest.
- ♪
- RICHARD: Once Diana was picked up in Florida
and brought in for an interview...
at first, she didn't know why she was there.
And then she saw Detective Lorence
and Detective Cole-Hatchard walk in the room
and her face dropped.
The first words she said was,
"You think I killed my mother-in-law?"
- RICHARD: Under those circumstances,
it was very telling.
Diana Nadell and Andrea Benson were both
arrested and charged with murder
and had to wait to be extradited to the state of New York.
Just when we thought this case couldn't get any crazier,
it did.
- ♪
- SUSANNE: I was fast asleep, it was like 11 o'clock
at night, 10 o'clock at night.
And Bobby came in and woke me up and said,
"Your cousin is here."
I came out, they said-- they told me they arrested Diana
and I was--I was shocked, but I wasn't surprised.
I think the first thing I said,
"I knew she had something to do with it."
- RICHARD: When Andrea Benson and Diana Nadell
were first charged, they were charged with
murder in the second degree.
Once Andrea Benson flipped
and became a witness for the prosecution,
we were then able to upgrade the charges against Diana Nadell
to murder in the first degree, murder for hire.
Tanisha Joyner also became state's evidence
and pleaded guilty to a lesser crime.
- EARL: Andrea, she doesn't come from a lot,
she's had a tough upbringing as it were,
and she has quite a criminal history.
She has a young child at home, doesn't have a husband.
Works a menial job at, uh, one of the local supermarkets.
Diana offers her $10,000 if she would help her kill Peggy.
She agrees on the drive from the airport.
- Andrea Benson only received $500 up front and was gonna get
the rest of the money when Diana got her money,
which never came, obviously.
- RICHARD: I received a phone call from a detective
in the jurisdiction of where Diana Nadell was being held
in custody pending trial,
and we were told that an inmate had reported that Diana Nadell
tried to hire her
to arrange for the murder of Tanisha Joyner.
There are some people that can't help
but to try to control every aspect of a situation,
and Diana Nadell kept trying to do that
even while she was in jail.
We met with the inmate, um,
she was fitted with a recorded device,
and went back into the area where Diana Nadell was.
And at that time, Diana Nadell
did exactly what the inmate said she did.
She gave her the information of Tanisha Joyner,
said she needed to be dead.
We went in to the grand jury and indicted Diana Nadell
at that point for attempting to have this witness murdered,
and at that point, ah, she had no choice
but to plead guilty.
Diana Nadell's attorney came to us and asked us
if we would consider a plea of 23 to life.
And after speaking with the family
and weighing everything...
for us, that was something we could live with.
- I saw Diana... when she was being arraigned.
That's the first time I saw her after my mother's murder.
She wouldn't even turn around and look at me.
- ♪
- RICHARD: This murder was about greed.
Diana learned that if she left her husband
prior to Peggy's death, she would get nothing,
and that wasn't something she was willing to accept.
- SUSANNE: Diana saw my mother as a cash machine.
Diana thought she knew what my mother was worth,
I didn't know what my mother was worth,
I knew there was money, I didn't know how much money.
It didn't matter.
- It sounds cheesy, but you become a prosecutor because
it's one of the only jobs in the world where your job
is to just do justice and to do the right thing.
This case began with walking into Peggy Nadell's home
and seeing her...
brutally murdered on her floor,
and it ended with Diana Nadell serving what I believe
will be the rest of her life in prison.
- SUSANNE: I know that Diana is not enjoying jail.
I've heard through the grapevine Diana refuses to tell anybody
why she is there.
I guess she's embarrassed, she doesn't want anybody
to know she's a murderer.
I think to this day she's still claiming she was framed.
- ANNE: She just ruined so many lives.
You know, friends, family.
I mean, what Susie had to go through,
and even, I'm sure, what Jimmy had to go through.
- DARCY: Now Susanne and Jimmy
have to live without their mother.
And live with the nightmare of what happened.
Not only did Susanne and Jimmy lose their mother,
they lost each other.
- ♪
♪♪