She had heard them speaking Yugoslavian
and Jelka said, "You would like my son."
They kissed on the first date.
And from that day forward,
they were pretty much inseparable.
It was the perfect match.
They were just totally smitten with each other.
It was really quite romantic.
Or so it seemed.
Often, Alex would call me with,
"Oh my God, his mom wants me to do this."
Either Joe stood up to his mom and family,
or that was it.
Until an overbearing mother-in-law...
I wouldn't wish that on any man
to be stuck between his mother, who he loves,
and his wife, who he loves.
It was a bitter custody battle.
She was to blame for absolutely everything.
Turned this model marriage
into a killer relationship.
I knew she'd been shot
and I knew that it wasn't good.
It's so twisted.
This family is evil.
Absolute evil.
If you've ever seen me on Divorce Court,
you know that I often deal with a recurring theme,
in-laws.
They can be a couple's greatest ally,
or their worst enemy.
The story of a young Canadian couple in the Vancouver suburb
of Burnaby, British Columbia is a prime example.
Alexandra Ignatovic could never have imagined
that when she married Joe Pesic,
she'd inherit a true monster-in-law.
Alex was blonde, beautiful, striking.
She had a wicked sense of humor.
All the guys flocked to her.
She was tall.
She was beautiful.
She could charm herself into anything.
She won the Miss Burnaby Pageant.
It was 1984,
the year that we graduated high school,
which then led to her being part of the Miss Canada Pageant.
Ladies and gentleman,
please welcome the 42 contestants
for the title of Miss Canada, 1985.
She would kind of laugh about it.
And she said it just made her feel more confident.
Good evening, everyone.
My name is Alexandra Ignatovic and I represent Burnaby, BC.
The pageants are a fun diversion,
but as a child of working-class immigrant parents,
20-year-old Alex is expected to have a job
and be self-sufficient.
She does just that,
working as a dentist assistant during the week
and spending time with her mom on the weekends.
So, one thing Alex and her mom, Zdenka, loved to do
would go to local open houses.
And this one particular Sunday,
they went to an open house
and another person heard them speaking Yugoslavian
and came up and started chatting with them,
saying, "Oh, I'm also Yugoslavian.
I'm Jelka Pesic."
And they immediately became friends.
Jelka was explaining that they had a family business.
It was a car mechanic shop.
And Alex was like, "Oh, perfect.
My car needs to be serviced."
Jelka was, "Oh, you've gotta go bring it to my son.
You would like my son."
Right away started playing matchmaking.
The next week, Alex drops her car off for tune-up
and meets 27-year-old Joe Pesic.
Soon after, she had called me to say,
"We're going on a date.
Oh my God, he's so cute."
I remember her telling me
that they had kissed on the first date
and he was a really good kisser.
That she was really falling for him.
From that day forward, they were pretty much inseparable.
I think they were just totally smitten with each other.
It was really quite romantic,
the way that she had described it.
He always showed up with flowers,
took her to the nicest restaurants.
Joe had a motorcycle,
so they'd go riding a lot.
They'd go on little weekend trips.
Always up to planning the next adventure.
Alex and Joe are falling hard
and fast for each other.
And after one blissful month of romance and excitement,
Joe proposes.
It was a dream come true for both Zdenka, Alex's mother,
and Jelka, Joe's mother.
I think that Jelka saw Alex as a very good fit
for her son.
I think she was very impressed with her.
Jelka so overjoyed with Alex,
that she leaps head first into planning the wedding.
I remember Alex wanted blue dresses,
but Jelka had envisioned red.
Alex got her way, but Jelka was a little bit annoyed.
Often, Alex would call me with,
"Oh my God, his mom wants me to do this.
I don't wanna do that."
The night before the wedding,
Alex started doubting if she was making the right decision.
Despite Alex's doubts, on June 11th, 1988,
the couple take their vows
in front of hundreds of friends and family in Vancouver.
She was absolutely beautiful.
It was a fantasy wedding.
And everything went as planned.
A lovely, lovely day.
After a sun-soaked week in Hawaii,
the honeymooners returned to Canada
and settled into a routine,
Joe at his parent's garage
and Alex at the dental practice.
But Alex quickly discovers her mother-in-law
also has a routine,
stopping by the couple's apartment while they're at work
to drop off groceries and clothing --
things they never asked for.
Jelka wanted control over any decisions that they made,
anything that Alex was doing,
what Alex was wearing.
Alex felt that as a couple,
they should be making their own decisions
and leading their life the way that they wanted to lead it.
I can't imagine that it was easy for Joe either.
A few months later,
the generous, but unwanted gifts
are topped by something way more extravagant,
when Joe's parents offer the couple,
a substantial down payment on a new house.
But there are strings attached.
It was a little bungalow block and a half away
from the Pesic family home.
But neither Joe nor Alex had a say
in which house it would be.
This is a bit delicate, right?
This could be a dream home
for Alex and Joe to raise a family,
but would it ever truly be their own,
free from Jelka's meddling?
It's a tough decision.
But after thinking it over carefully,
the young couple accepts.
Still, almost as soon as they move in,
issues arise.
There was a definite huge fallout
when it came to the kitchen.
Alex wanted a strip of a red tile in the back splash
and Jelka wouldn't have it.
It's one of many instances
where Jelka's interference upsets the young couple.
First year or so,
Joe would go weeks without talking to his parents
or with his mother because they had interfered in something
that Alex was upset about.
I wouldn't wish that on any man
to be stuck between his mother, who he loves,
and his wife, who he loves.
It's a tricky situation
for both sides of their relationship,
but Joe's efforts at maintaining distance from his mother
go a long way in making Alex feel loved and supported.
So much so that by the end of 1989,
they announced that a new addition to the Pesic family
is on the way,
baby Brandon.
Everybody was jubilant.
She had a fantastic pregnancy and Joe doted on her.
They really were thrilled.
But the bliss surrounding Brandon's arrival
is short-lived.
A grandson opens the door
for Jelka to become even more involved
in Alex and Joe's lives.
Jelka was constantly after Alex
about whether she was breastfeeding correctly,
what she should feed him, how often.
Jelka was doubting her as a mother.
And that really hurt Alex.
Like most new parents,
Joe and Alex barely leave their home
for the first six months of Brandon's life.
But in the winter of 1990,
dad knows just what he and mom need --
a little bit of fun.
Joe wanted to take Alex out on a date night
and also give an opportunity
for his mother to take care of Brandon.
Upon dropping Brandon off,
Jelka began to boast on,
"Don't worry, he's in good hands
because I've just made him this tea
that's gonna really make him sleep."
And Alex was very adamant
that she was not to give anything outside of breast milk.
And Brandon was only maybe five, six months old.
They go.
They have a great time.
They come back,
Brandon is fast asleep.
And Alex asked her, "Did you give my son that tea?"
And she said, "Yes, because I know it's gonna help him.
Look! Look how good it's working."
With a sleeping child, you prod them or they'll squirm.
Alex pinched his skin.
There was no response to him whatsoever.
And she could barely feel a pulse.
She was terrified he wouldn't wake up.
Alex was in a panic because she couldn't even rouse him.
She constantly said,
"I think they're really gonna kill me."
And that's when I would say, "Are you crazy?"
She'd been out with friends
and she heard footsteps behind her.
And he chased her to the front door.
It always amazes me how often I see couples
in Divorce Court whose marriages are impacted negatively
by overbearing in-laws.
For 21-year-old, Alex Pesic,
a controlling mother-in-law is ruining
what is otherwise a perfect marriage.
Though it's not as often as Alex would like,
Joe frequently takes his wife's side
and keeps the peace in their home.
But that peace turns into pandemonium
when Grandma Jelka is babysitting
and Alex and Joe come home
to find their six-month-old Brandon
unresponsive.
Alex was in a panic because she couldn't even rouse him.
And she rushed him to the hospital.
Brandon finally woke at the hospital,
but Alex wouldn't quite figure out
what Jelka had given the child.
Alex told that in her mind, that was it.
She just no longer trusted Brandon with Jelka.
That was the straw that broke the camel's back for Alex.
A big fight ensued.
That night, she took the baby
and went and stayed with her mother.
Alex clearly outlined that she was not gonna live like this
and that either Joe stood up to his mom and family,
or that was it.
She had hit her end.
I think she was disappointed because at some point,
a young man has to cut the apron strings from his mother.
I know that Joe really loved Alex,
but he was torn in the middle.
And we saw that Joe was not manning up.
Caught once again
between two women in his life,
his wife and his mother,
Joe was finally forced to pick a side.
There was pressure from the family business side.
They held the purse strings.
If he wasn't talking to his family,
he didn't get that part of his pay.
So, at some point, he had no more fight in him.
She was very disappointed
that Joe did not put her first before his parents.
Their decisions held more sway with him
than she did as his wife.
She could not continue living like that.
And she didn't wanna raise a child
in that kind of stressful environment.
In the spring of 1989, just two years into their marriage,
Alex files for divorce.
Joe and his traditional parents are appalled
by what they see as Alex's betrayal of sacred marital vows.
And they view her, resentfully,
as the reason the family is ultimately torn apart.
In court, the claws come out.
It's a story I've seen countless times.
When couples get too caught up in revenge, everyone loses,
especially when children are involved.
Once they had officially separated,
he did not put Brandon first.
He was more caught up in his rights
than in really being a dad.
I started to lose a lot of respect for him.
Joe and his parents fought at every turn over money,
over custody, over visitation,
over who was gonna control Brandon's life.
It was a mess.
They wanted the house
and they wanted custody of Brandon.
His parents had put the down payment on the house,
the matrimonial home,
and they had helped buy some of the appliances and things.
So, his parents took the position
that those were all their possessions
and they didn't want her to get anything.
The one lawyer that finally took her case
told her that she had the most contentious divorce
that he had ever encountered in 20 years.
Although it was a hard fought battle,
when the dust settles,
Alex wins full custody of Brandon
and is awarded child support
as well as possession of the home the Pesics helped purchase
for her and Joe.
The Pesics really saw this as a slap in the face.
They saw it as, "How dare you live in our house."
The grandparents were ordered
not to have anything to do with them
because they didn't seem to be very good influences
on the child.
They were shocked.
I think that it made them angry.
I think it made them just dig in their heels
and direct all of their anger at her.
That she was to blame for absolutely everything.
Joe was ordered to pay child support.
He failed to do that.
He was in arrears.
Had to be in another court appearance to explain why,
and he said he was unemployed,
which was kind of odd because he worked for his father.
The proceedings are contentious to the bitter end,
but six months later, in November, 1991,
the divorce is finalized.
With full custody of Brandon,
Alex moves back in with her mom, Zdenka.
And feeling supported, begins to find a rhythm again,
balancing work, life, and motherhood.
Eight months after the divorce,
it's a bright and warm evening
when Alex and her friend, Bernice,
make their way to Alex's car across the parking lot
at the dentist office where they both work.
We were kind of laughing and talking
as we went to the car.
She got into her side and I'd walked around the other.
I was stuffing my gym bag between my feet...
and that's when I heard the first bullet.
I knew she'd been shot.
And I knew that it wasn't good.
As a trial attorney and prosecutor,
I've often been amazed and deeply moved
by hearing people relive
the absolute worst moments of their lives
while remaining calm and collected.
People like Bernice Courson,
whose coworker and friend, 25-year-old Alex Pesic,
has just been shot from close range while sitting in her car
with Bernice right beside her.
Her shoulder and her head hit my back.
And as soon as I felt like the bullets had stopped,
I could hear wheels of a car pulling away.
And I looked at her really quickly
and I jumped out of the car
and I ran to the office
to get the doctor that we worked for.
It was a nightmare.
Alerted by passersby,
paramedics and police quickly arrive on the scene.
Alex is rushed to the nearest hospital.
But she never regains consciousness
and is pronounced dead a short time later.
It was scary, it was surreal,
it was numbing.
It was just,
there were no, I can't, I can't even explain it.
I can't.
It's horrific.
Alex's death just destroyed her mother.
She loved her daughter.
Her daughter was the light of her life.
Minutes after the shooting,
police arrive on scene.
People were rushing around.
It was a bit chaotic, of course.
The first priorities were to secure the vehicle.
There were four bullet recovered from the fender
and the door.
There were two in Alexandra.
They were a .380 caliber.
The first question police want answered
is who could have committed such a brutal crime
in such a public area?
And why was Bernice spared?
Was Alex the intended target?
One thing that was significant
aside from the bullet holes in the car,
there was a telephone bill laying in the console
that had a license plate number written on it.
Corporal Goodall collects the bullets
and the slip of paper with the license plate number
and wonders why would Alex have written down this number
and whose vehicle might it belong to?
With the crime scene secured,
investigators question the numerous witnesses.
It was very unusual.
This was a brazen daylight shooting
of a beautiful young woman in a residential neighborhood.
Where were you at the time?
I was right over on that corner over there.
People saw two characters sitting down the street
in this red vehicle.
They had face coverings, sunglasses, ball caps.
They kind of stood out on a warm summer day.
In fact, more than 30 people
noticed a flashy red car parked nearby
in the neighborhood earlier that day,
three hours before the murder.
They were young men,
two Caucasian men with dark hair in a red car.
And the police officer and myself held towels
one on each side of her head.
She had two holes in her head.
How are you feeling right now?
Shaken up a little bit.
Then it sped away.
And he saw the license plate number.
Investigators wonder
if the plate number reported by the eyewitness
could be a match to the one found in Alex's car.
Unfortunately, it's not.
But when they run the plate from the red Camaro
through their database,
they immediately get a hit.
There was a report that the red vehicle
had been stolen a few days before from the Burnaby area,
not all that far away.
The flashy stolen car is puzzling,
but investigators know one thing for certain.
Well, you've got these two characters
sitting down the street in a stolen vehicle
in the middle of the day and then they just roll up
when Alexander comes out of work
and lean out the window and shoot at her
and then drive away.
There wasn't much doubt in my mind
that it was a targeted shooting.
But who would target a 25-year-old mother
and former beauty queen?
To find an answer, investigators attempt to question Bernice
who was seated beside Alex when she was shot.
The police just came in.
I remember just sitting on the floor of the office
and I wasn't crying.
I was in so much shock that I just,
I couldn't respond to anything.
With Bernice too traumatized
to talk right after the murder,
Alex's grief-stricken employer,
the dentist,
points his finger squarely at a suspect.
He said she'd had a long ongoing marital dispute
with her ex-husband, Joe Pesic.
And he felt he would have some responsibility
somewhere in the mix of it.
There was this bitter custody battle.
Alexandra had been awarded full custody by the court.
She had been awarded alimony.
She got most of the matrimonial home.
So, there was reason to believe
that Joe was angry and upset.
He clearly had motive.
And so the next day, the police went to find him
and to interview him
to see where he was and what he was doing.
When they arrive,
investigators quickly realize Joe was young, in his 20s,
Caucasian, and has dark hair,
the same description witnesses gave
of the men in the red vehicle.
The interviewer described his emotional state
as unemotional and not overly upset
about the death of the mother of his child.
But in this case, Joe had an alibi.
He was at a swimming pool, a number of miles away.
And he produced a receipt of his admission to the pool
with a time on it.
He had it and ready to show the police right away.
And that was actually a suspicious thing
because who keeps receipts from a pool?
Nobody would do that ordinarily.
It was like he might have known
exactly what was going to happen.
And that's why he had come up with this convenient alibi.
Just days afte
of former beauty queen, Alexandra Pesic,
friends and family gather
on the outskirts of Vancouver, Canada
for a sad and untimely farewell.
We were standing graveside.
It was an open casket funeral.
I could not look at her
because I don't want to remember her being in that casket.
I just wanna remember the girl that I knew.
You could see her mother's grief.
Oh, it was, it was heartbreaking.
It was horrible.
We were so upset.
It was really, for me, it was
heart-wrenching.
They were going to lower her casket into the ground.
And at the top of the hill was somebody on a motorcycle
just watching the funeral.
It was a hot day
and this person was in full black leather gear
and a helmet that they didn't take off.
And then I realized that it was Joe...
watching Alex be buried.
It really shook me.
Bernice isn't the only one
who finds Joe's actions bizarre.
His claim of being with his son at a pool
during the time of his ex-wife's murder
and the unusual fact that he kept the receipt,
makes police suspicious.
Was Joe an occupant in the red Camaro
that was spotted firing the weapon?
Or if he wasn't, did he put a hit out on his ex-wife
out of spite after the nasty divorce?
The alibi that Joe provided
was just a little too convenient from everybody's thoughts.
So, they continued their investigation to see if,
whether it was a false alibi
or whether, in fact, he was there at the swimming pool
as he said he was.
As investigators hunt down the shooter's car,
the red Camaro,
they turned to Alex's best friends.
They want to know more about the divorce
and its aftermath.
And what they learn is an extraordinary story.
From the minute it happened,
this was 100%, no doubt in our minds,
from the hands of the Pesic family.
Angie provides more insight
about the failed marriage
and tells investigators about Alex's overbearing
mother-in-law, Jelka.
She also shares details of the disturbing events
of Alex's last few weeks, which started
when Alex received an anonymous package in the mail,
a paperback book.
It was a book about a woman being hogtied and tortured.
And they highlighted inserts.
My book, it was about a psychiatric nurse
who was found dead.
There had been a number of incidents over eight years.
Harassing phone calls and there were some bush set on fire
in front of her house.
And she was being terrorized before she was killed.
A few days after she receives the book,
Alex and Angie are sitting in Alex's living room
when they hear a strange noise.
I was just feeding Brandon a bottle.
And Alex said, "Did you hear crackling in the front yard?"
I'm like, "What was that?"
And we look out
and the front yard is in flames.
She got really freaked out.
And she goes, "This is in the book."
Everything that had happened to that woman
that was underlined in the book,
was systematically happening to her.
It's so twisted.
As time went on,
she started to notice a car that kept following her.
We were talking about it over lunch one day
and she said, "The next thing that they're going to do
is they're going to arrange to have me shot.
They, being the Pesic family,
that's the only thing that they haven't done to me
and that's what's coming."
So, at that point, I said,
"Well, would you be open to hiring like somebody privately?"
Bernice suggests a family friend
and private investigator named Ozzie Kaban.
Two weeks before her murder,
Alex meets with Kaban and hires him,
hoping his team will find out exactly who is tormenting her.
Alex also provides Kaban with the license plate number
of the car that had been following her.
Ozzie Kaban started to watch her ex-husband
because of the very bitter series of events between them.
Two weeks later on August 5th, 1992,
Alex is murdered in broad daylight.
And the following evening,
Ozzie Kaban reaches out to law enforcement
to share the information he and his team gathered
before Alex's death.
What he has to say surprises the investigators.
Ozzie Kaban told me that that day on August 5th,
he had a surveillance team following Joe Pesic.
They were able to tell me that Joe picked up the child
at 5:00 PM or thereabouts
and went to a swimming pool in Burnaby.
The PI also provides an alibi
for Joe's domineering mother, Jelka.
Ozzie Kaban's crew had noticed the parents
outside their repair shop at the time of the shooting.
So, it was quite apparent that they weren't actually
the ones pulling the trigger.
While the PI's evidence corroborates Joe's alibi,
it proves neither he or his mother fired the weapon,
investigators believe Joe still may have had a hand
in orchestrating his ex-wife's murder.
Their next stop is to the Pesics,
where they interview Jelka and her husband, Sam.
Jelka played it pretty low key.
They didn't know anything about it and thought the divorce,
they said that was all Joe's thing.
And they didn't really know too much about it.
And didn't think that Joel was too upset by it.
Jelka's description of her son's divorce is 100% at odds
with the descriptions given by Alex's friends.
So, with their suspicions raised,
the investigators put a surveillance team on the Pesics.
Meanwhile, police urgently scoured
Vancouver and its suburbs for the red vehicle
and lean heavily into the trove of information
Alex's PI is providing.
One of Ozzie Kaban's employees
was sitting outside of Brandon's daycare,
keeping an eye on him.
There was a white vehicle that was sitting there
with a young man in it.
And he noticed that this young man was wearing sunglasses
and it was a cloudy day.
He also didn't appear to be going anywhere.
And he thought that was suspicious.
So, he happened to make a note
of the description of the car, the person,
and wrote down the license plate number.
The careful work by the PI
turns out to be a critical lead in the case,
when just days after Alex's murder,
a red IROC Camaro is finally spotted,
abandoned in a McDonald's parking lot.
It has the same license plate witnesses jotted down
at the crime scene.
A palm print was recovered
from the gear shift of the vehicle,
a fingerprint from the license plate.
And there was some hair on the passenger seat.
But that's not all detectives discover
when they question employees at the McDonald's.
Within two or three minutes of Alexandra being murdered,
the witness who was working at McDonald's
saw a car come flying up and two young men bail out of it
and get into a white car that she then saw leave.
Well, we had the getaway car.
He stepped out of his vehicle,
a bunch of money falls out of his shorts,
turned out to be $30,000 -- $100 bills.
Law enforcement in Vancouver
has just found the red IROC Camaro
identified in the drive-by shooting of Alex Pesic.
What's more, employees at the McDonald's where it is found
witnessed two men get out of the red car
and into a white one on the day of Alex's murder.
Police suspect the white vehicle is the same one spotted
by both Alex and the private investigator she hired,
Ozzie Kaban.
Yes, the license plate number
that Ozzie Kaban surveillance team member provided
was very similar to the one
that Alexandra had supplied to Ozzie.
And the other thing that connected with that
is the telephone bill I mentioned earlier
on the console of Alexandra's car when she was shot,
it had transposed license plate number written on it.
We found out the registered owner of that license plate
was named Milan Nenadic.
Milan Nenadic was an auto mechanic
and he did have one conviction,
but it was some years before.
So, he wasn't somebody who appeared to be
deep in the criminal world.
Nenadic's fingerprints are in the system,
but it turns out, they're not a match
for the ones found on the red Camaro.
When police run those,
they discover they belong to a different man.
They identified the palm print and fingerprint
on the red IROC as belonging to Lawrence Delorme.
Lawrence Delorme was often stealing cars
or breaking into places, that sort of thing.
So, his fingerprints were on record.
We decided that we should be watching these guys
and put a surveillance team on them.
With Nenadic and Delorme being watched around the clock,
it's now a waiting game,
until five days after the murder,
when the surveillance team watching Nenadic
crosses paths with the surveillance team at the Pesics.
August 10th, mid-afternoon, he goes to the Pesic house
and then Jelka Pesic leaves in her vehicle.
And goes over to the shopping mall in Burnaby,
not all that far away.
And Jelka drives into the underground parking lot.
And Milan sits up in the back seat.
Had been laying down in the back seat.
So, then thinking what the heck's going on here?
And they go into the mall,
but they'd walk separately from each other.
And then when they leave, same thing.
They got back in the car.
Milan once again, got on the floor of the car.
And stays there all the way back to her house.
He got out of the vehicle.
And when he got out of the vehicle, he was wearing shorts.
It was summertime.
And he had a very big bulge in his pants.
So, they followed Milan who got in the car
and had to make a decision
about whether they had reasonable and probable grounds
to pull him over and arrest him or not.
And they decided to take a chance.
He stepped out of his vehicle.
A bunch of money falls out of his shorts,
turned out to be $30,000 -- $100 bills.
The implication was that that was the pay
for planning the murder of Alex.
And the more stunning implication is that Jelka Pesic,
a grandmother and former mother-in-law
is likely the mastermind behind Alex's murder.
It's the belief that's driven home
when a family friend is able to confirm
some incriminating details.
We got a call from a woman named Helen Katona,
who was a friend of Jelka Pesic's.
Helen was over at the Pesic house for dinner one night
and Jelka suggested they go for a walk.
They walked by Alexandra's home.
And Helen was present when Jelka set fire
to the tree on Alexandra's front lawn.
I then asked why Jelka just lit this tree on fire.
Helen had seen a copy of the book,
the Cindy James story in the Pesic household.
According to Helen Katona,
Jelka Pesic was obsessed with this book.
And that book was sent to Alexander
with those words underlined.
Helen Katona was also able to provide a connection
between Milan Nenadic and the Pesics.
She was at Jelka Pesic's house
when Milan came over there.
She knew who he was.
She knew that the Nenadic family and the Pesics were friends
and Jelka went and talked to him
in an area where Helen could not hear what was being said.
Milan then left and Jelka said,
"Well, that's good then.
It'll soon be over."
With Helen's story,
police had enough circumstantial evidence
to arrest Alex's mother-in-law, Jelka Pesic,
for her murder.
And when they searched both Delorme's and Nenadic's homes,
most of the puzzle snaps into place.
One thing that came out of Delorme's house,
there was a note recovered from his residence
that had Milan's name, phone number, and address.
So, it connected them.
At the Nenadic's house,
the search ensues and a .380 caliber handgun
is the most significant thing that came out of that house.
It was in a Crown Royal whiskey bag
with a box of shells
and six bullets were missing out of that box of shells.
Law enforcement initially suspected Joe Pesic
orchestrated the incredible daylight execution of his wife,
25-year-old Alex Pesic.
It turns out he didn't.
Instead, a twisted murder-for-hire scheme
was paid for by his own mother,
Alex's mother-in-law, Jelka Pesic.
Alex was enamored by the fact
that they shared this culture
and had the same family values.
So, it really is ironic that it's that family unity
that ultimately killed her.
So, if Jelka Pesic was the instigator of this plot,
Milan Nenadic supplied the murder weapon
and the getaway car,
and Lawrence Delorme was the driver,
who was the second man in the red Camaro?
The man who fired the six shots that killed Alex?
With the three suspects in custody,
the answer comes quickly.
At Lawrence Delorme's home,
they found a note with Milan and his number
and a piece of paper with a partial address
and a name on it.
It was David Segoviano.
Segoviano is a new name for investigators,
and they get a warrant to search his home.
He lived with two or three other people.
A fellow who lived in the house, he says,
"He came home one day and he cut his hair off.
And he said it's still in that garbage can in the bathroom."
So, we seized that hair back
and it's compared to the hair in the red Camaro.
That's the same hair.
And David Segoviano had an address book
that had Milan Nenadic's telephone number in it
as well as Lawrence Delorme's.
But that's not all police get
from their search.
Segoviano's girlfriend who was at home
when law enforcement arrived
tells police that Dave has been acting suspiciously.
Her name was Faye Bremner.
And she agreed to have a wiretap put into her home.
And she got Segoviano speaking about what he had done,
including confessing being the killer of Alexandra Pesic.
In the course of that,
he also spoke about what everybody else did.
In late 1993, the trial begins
of Alex Pesic's murder.
All four of the defendants received the maximum time
for first-degree murder in Canada, 25 years.
People go through divorces all the time.
People lose custody battles all the time.
They don't go about killing people.
But in this particular case,
that generated an incredible hatred in Jelka.
And interestingly, there was never enough evidence gathered
to lay any charges against Joe Pesic.
I think Jelka was jealous
that Alex was the person that she wanted to be,
but never was.
And so, her jealousy and rage with Alex,
it was overwhelming
and she just could not and would not let it go.
I lost my best friend, sister, maid of honor.
Thirty years and it still happens.
We all have really beautiful memories of her as a person.
And I wish she was still here.
Alex Pesic thought that marrying
within her Yugoslavian culture would be the perfect pathway
towards a long fruitful relationship.
Never could she have imagined that Joe's mother, Jelka,
the woman who brought the couple together
would turn out to be the one
who ripped apart their marriage
and ordered the execution of her son's wife.
I've seen some bitter fights between couples
and their in-laws.
And sometimes those disagreements end badly
for all parties involved,
but I've never seen a case like this one,
where a true monster-in-law
turned her son's marriage
into a killer relationship.