She had found exactly what she was looking for
and what she was missing.
Lawrence came into her life and made her happy.
He is the ideal partner,
a stabilizing presence for her rocky past.
Lisa was injured in a car accident.
For somebody to make her feel beautiful,
it was very nice.
But her sense of security is soon replaced
by his overwhelming need for control.
Lawrence did not like Lisa being in the military.
He would call her two, three, four times a day.
Every day.
She left a message on my answering machine.
"I have something to talk to you about,
very important."
And then we never seen her again.
Lisa just disappeared.
There was no clues.
We didn't have nothing.
An eight year investigation
uncovers difficult truths.
He said, "I've got tapes of Lawrence."
And I'm like,
"You've got tapes?"
And reveals the long-sought secret behind
a killer relationship.
We start that dig,
one inch at a time.
And I find these teeth...
and I'm like, "Oh my God."
Divorce.
It's messy.
Usually really messy.
I should know.
As the judge on Divorce Court,
I've seen my fair share.
For 28-year-old Lisa Marto,
divorce is especially painful.
Her parents bitterly split when she was a child,
and Lisa's first marriage ended quickly
leaving her struggling with little help or support.
It's why Lisa's marriage to Lawrence Gaudenzi
in the spring of 1994
is full of so much hope and promise.
Lisa had a very privileged childhood.
Her father had multiple stores at the time,
on the Boardwalk of Atlantic City.
And they had a large house with swimming pool
and multiple fireplaces.
They used to get taken to school, her and her sister,
in a Rolls Royce.
They had an upstairs maid, a downstairs maid.
That's how she grew up.
But when Lisa is eight years old,
her mom and dad fight through a bitter divorce
and her beautiful life falls apart.
She grew up with the split family,
with a father she saw on the weekends
and mom during the week.
She wrote to a friend how she would have given up
all the clothes and all the fancy cars
to have, you know, one week as a family.
Unfortunately, it's not her only early trauma.
As a teenager, Lisa suffers another setback.
Lisa was injured in a car accident.
She was about 15, 16 years of age
and it left some scars on her face
up in this area.
She was more self-conscious than anybody else.
And she had a porcelain plate put in from the dentist.
At the age of 20,
looking to put her troubled past behind her,
Lisa takes off and settles near Palm Beach, Florida,
where she meets a man named Jim Burdette
and quickly gets married.
Lisa is searching for stability,
but her young husband isn't close
to being able to provide that.
She became pregnant, and the reality of being a parent,
being a father set in,
and he was not ready for that
at that point in his life.
The couple soon divorces,
but not before welcoming a baby girl named Lea.
Sadly, she's born with a debilitating illness.
Lea had cystic fibrosis,
so she was very ill,
and that can be a terminal illness for a child.
They didn't expect me to live a very long at all.
So it was really hard on her.
But my mom was a very strong person,
mentally and physically.
Want to know how strong Lisa is?
She's in her early 20s,
a single mom with a young daughter
who's got serious medical issues,
and she's living on her own with no outside support.
So what does she do?
In 1991, five years after her divorce,
Lisa moves with her six-year-old Lea
from Florida to Richmond, Virginia
so she can enroll in pre-law studies
at Virginia Commonwealth University.
That's right.
She decides to become a lawyer.
Lisa was raised with a lot of material values
and she did want to be the opposite as an adult.
She wanted to serve the public
and help the underprivileged and get her education
so that she could achieve her dream of becoming a lawyer.
To help pay for school and babysitting,
Lisa takes a full-time job,
which is where she meets Lawrence Gaudenzi.
Lisa was working for an auto body shop
when she met Lawrence.
Lawrence was a tow truck driver.
Lawrence came into her life and made her happy.
Lawrence absolutely charmed Lisa,
saying all the right things
about family values and raising children.
By Christmas 1992, Lawrence and Lisa are spending
all their time together.
And she is convinced that unlike her first husband,
Lawrence is a man who will support her
and her young daughter.
A lot of men don't want somebody else's child
and they don't want to take care of them,
and Lawrence did.
She kept telling me, "My biological clock is ticking.
I want another baby."
Lisa's wish comes true in November of 1993,
when she and Lawrence welcome Shelby into the world.
And six months later,
Lisa and Lawrence get married,
moving the family of four to a house
in a small town outside of Richmond.
There was a Christmas where, you know,
he was picking her up and, you know,
holding her and carrying her around.
And she had such a beautiful smile going on.
And she didn't really think she was very beautiful
as a person because she had been in a car accident
and had a lot of scar tissue on her face.
So for somebody to make her feel beautiful was very,
it was very nice.
But the honeymoon doesn't last very long.
The marriage quickly becomes strained
when Lawrence can't find enough work to support the family.
Earning a full-time income from towing cars
was not as easy as it was when he lived in the city.
Lawrence's ability to provide was questionable.
Money.
It's what brings more couples into Divorce Court
than anything else.
And not being able to provide for his family,
it brings out the worst in Lawrence,
revealing a darker side Lisa has never seen before.
Everything looked fine on the outside,
but we were in the bathroom,
and...
I was doing her hair and her makeup
and the towel fell off of her.
And I seen her legs all bruised.
I told Lisa then, "You come home with us.
You take the girls,
both the girls,
and you come home with us."
And she said, "No, everything's okay.
Everything's been straightened out."
I said, "Okay."
By the fall of 1994,
Lisa is heartbroken.
She's in another unsupportive marriage
that is on the verge of a breakup.
Hoping that if she can take the financial pressure
off of Lawrence, she can salvage their marriage,
Lisa takes a dramatic step
and enlists in the Army.
One of the things that the military offered her
would be a chance to gain her, you know,
legal training through the military
and then serve in the military as a judge.
Lawrence reluctantly agrees to take care of the girls
while Lisa goes through training.
But instead of appreciating her sacrifice for the family,
he resents her for it.
Why?
Because Lisa's dreams of becoming a military judge
are at odds with the future he once envisioned.
As the time comes for Lisa to leave
for eight weeks of basic training,
she's worried about leaving nine-year-old Lea
with her stepfather.
Lawrence and Lea were not getting along at all.
So Lea was sent to Florida
to be with her grandmother.
So Lawrence only had to care for Shelby at that point.
The time apart between Lisa and Lawrence
does little to improve their relationship.
Lawrence did not like Lisa being in the military
because Lisa was not accessible.
He could not call Lisa whenever he so chose.
And he tried.
And not only did he call with regularity,
he showed up a few times
trying to get her to quit
or get thrown out
or come home.
In spite of Lawrence's best efforts
to derail Lisa's military career,
she graduates from basic training in the winter of 1995.
Lea was already settled in,
in Florida with her grandmother,
but Lawrence showed up at the graduation
with the baby disheveled,
in dirty clothes,
without socks.
This is Virginia in the winter.
And I think that instantaneously her plan changed
and she knew that she needed to go home
and deal with the situation.
The Gaudenzis make their way to Virginia.
And after just a day back home, on January 26th, 1995,
it's time for Lisa to leave her family once again,
to take the next step in military career.
That's the weekend Lisa was supposed to report
to officers training.
So Lawrence took Lisa to Richmond's bus stop
and she got out of the car...
and he'd never seen her again.
Most cases, you know who the bad guy is,
but we didn't have nothing.
Lawrence did not show up
for his scheduled lie detector test
and Lawrence and Shelby vanished overnight.
When the babysitter picked the lock on the door,
all she saw was the bathroom full of blood,
everywhere.
January 28th, 1995.
Two military policemen knock on Lawrence Gaudenzi's door
in Lakeland, Virginia to deliver the news that his wife Lisa
never showed up for officer training camp at Fort Lee.
Lawrence contacted the sheriff's office
in Caroline County where they resided.
In a city of fewer than 30,000 residents.
Caroline County doesn't have a missing persons division,
but a detective hears Lawrence out.
Lawrence told the story
that he had driven her from where they live
in Caroline County
to the bus station in Richmond
and put her on a bus to go to Fort Lee.
Lawrence also tells the detective
he believes he knows why his wife may have left him.
He says Lisa had disappeared
because of problems with depression.
That she had just decided that she wanted
to get away from everything for a while.
The sheriff's office interviews
Lisa's father and stepmother, Joe and Nancy,
who admit Lisa may have wanted to get out
of a difficult marriage.
Maybe she did run away.
In the very beginning, that's exactly what we thought.
We thought that she had disappeared.
She took off.
To be honest with you,
we were hoping Lisa had run away.
But as the days turn into weeks
with no sign of Lisa,
her parents know
there's one telltale sign that their daughter
may not have left of her own freewill.
She used to call Lea every day,
two or three times a day,
and all phone calls stopped to Lea.
She had every intention of coming to get me
as soon as she could.
To me, it was far-fetched
to even think that she was running away.
Never would have Lisa abandoned her children, never.
Lea came first,
Shelby came first.
She adored both of those kids.
We realized
Lawrence did something.
The Marto's shared their concerns about Lawrence
with law enforcement,
including the bruises Nancy saw on Lisa's body
at the start of her marriage.
So the Carolina County Sheriff's Office
looks deeper into Lawrence's character
and his possible role in Lisa's disappearance.
They interviewed his landlord.
They interviewed the babysitter.
They interviewed people around the garage where he worked.
He had a lot of people convinced
that he was the poor husband
whose wife had left him with these children.
And he was the standup guy.
He was the hero here.
You know, "My wife left me and you know,
I'm doing the best I can."
Investigators search Lawrence and Lisa's home
looking for clues to Lisa's whereabouts
or any evidence of foul play.
There was just nothing there.
There was no clues,
there was no blood stain,
there was no footprints,
there was no nothing.
It's hard to develop a case without something.
This is troubling,
but as a prosecutor, I also find it fascinating.
Right now law enforcement is hearing two different stories
from two different sides of the family.
One from the man who says he's a loving husband
whose wife abandoned him and the children.
The other from parents who say law enforcement
is getting it all wrong.
That the man who claims to be a perfect husband
is anything but.
The sheriff absolutely believed
that Lisa had run off and left him,
which was unfortunate because it left
a lot of undone detective work.
Everybody believed him that she had run off,
and therefore Lisa was simply a missing person
and not the victim of a crime.
With the community on his side,
Lawrence lets law enforcement and his friends know
that Lisa's disappearance seems to fit a pattern.
Lawrence claimed that Lisa was a disgruntled housewife
and she had ran away before.
He had told everybody she ran away from her first husband,
which was Jim.
Investigators attempt to follow up
on Lawrence's claim that Lisa had run away
from her first husband, Jim Burdette.
But Jim has fallen off the map.
No one in Lisa's family has from him
since the couple divorced
and the local police are unable to find any trace of him.
Now, months into the missing persons investigation,
law enforcement is no closer to finding Lisa
than the day she vanished.
Joe was not a happy person.
Caroline County did very little.
My husband and I felt exhausted.
And this case caused him to have a heart attack.
For my family, it was like a daily thing
that I got to see pain in their eyes every day.
The pain is made worse when,
nine months into her disappearance,
the Army declares Lisa AWOL
and dishonorably discharges her.
Joe was so disgusted that he says,
"I've had it. I've had enough.
They're not doing nothing.
The sheriff's departments are doing nothing.
I can't take no more."
And he was ready to give up.
And I says, "I'm not."
With Lisa gone, Lawrence raises Shelby on his own
and makes himself available to investigators at any time.
Yet, despite Lawrence's cooperation with
law enforcement,
Lisa's family still doesn't accept
that she just left on her own.
And they can't imagine her husband
didn't play a role in her disappearance.
And Joe finally, he started to come out of it
and he decided he was putting his foot down.
He wasn't going to let it beat him.
So Joe and myself wrote a letter to the governor of Virginia
and our governor in New Jersey.
We wanted this case to be taken off the back burner.
We wanted something done.
With intense pressure from the Martos
and no new developments in the case,
Caroline County investigators ask Lawrence Gaudenzi
to come in for a polygraph test.
A whole week went by.
He calls, "I'm sick, I can't come in."
Lawrence did not show up
for his scheduled lie detector test
and Lawrence and Shelby vanished overnight.
Lawrence went MIA.
Let me paint you a picture.
Your wife is missing for two years,
the local police investigation
into her disappearance has stalled,
and your in-laws don't trust your story.
So they demand police call you in
to sit for a polygraph test.
Most people would make a beeline
straight to law enforcement, right?
Set the record straight.
But what does Lawrence Gaudenzi do?
He stalls for a week and then,
with his three-year-old child Shelby in tow,
mysteriously disappears.
Lawrence's move changes the course
of this entire investigation.
A local agency only has so much resources to work with.
And the state police has lots of resources.
That's why they turned it over.
So we had to go back and talk
to all these people over and over again.
So the state police opened it up
as a homicide investigation.
We couldn't prove that she was dead,
but we could pretty well prove that she wasn't alive.
Everybody leaves a signature somewhere,
whether you're getting mail,
whether you're getting a check,
all of this stopped.
So that, to us, proved that she was not alive.
But we had no body.
What the state police do have
is a bunch of new witnesses they've unearthed
through their revitalized investigation.
One of these witnesses is a close friend of Lisa's
who wasn't interviewed before.
And now tells a story of the night
Lisa and Lawrence came home from Florida
after basic training graduation.
They dropped the baby off at her friend's house
and asked if she could keep the baby overnight
so that they could have time to talk through
all of the issues in their marriage.
When they came back, she told the friend,
"I'm going to divorce him."
Lisa looked up and Lawrence was standing at the screen door.
Now in conjunction with Lawrence's disappearance,
the jarring revelation pushes state police investigators
to reconsider everything
Lawrence has ever told law enforcement.
According to his statement, when Lisa went missing,
Lawrence took her to the bus station in Richmond
and dropped her off.
We actually found a guy that worked there back in 1995,
and said, "Here's the bus schedule."
But there is no bus that goes from Richmond, Virginia
to Fort Lee, which is only 20 minutes away.
That was the beginning of a long line of
lies.
With Lawrence looking more and more guilty,
state police conduct an all-agency manhunt
to try to find the man who they believe
caused the disappearance of his wife
and now of his child.
Everybody in my family was baffled at how
somebody like that could just easily
slip through the cracks.
My husband, not knowing where any of the girls were,
it broke his heart,
it just...
He was beaten.
That really beat him down.
Could you imagine being Joe Marto, Lisa's father,
your daughter is missing,
the police believe it's a homicide,
and making matters even worse,
your youngest granddaughter has been taken by the man
you believe killed your daughter.
And this goes on for years,
literally.
Despite the non-stop efforts of the Virginia State Police,
the case goes cold for five years.
Lisa's father hired a private detective
to try to find her.
They were constantly talking to the state police.
He spent an enormous amount of money
trying to find his daughter.
She was his life.
He was so proud of her.
She had accomplished so much in such a short time.
And then, in 2002,
Joe and Nancy's persistence pays off.
They finally got some media attention.
There was a local newscast that was broadcast
with Lawrence's picture asking if the public had seen him.
And someone called in a tip
that they had seen him in
the Harrisonburg, Virginia area.
The state police descend
on the town of Harrisonburg,
120 miles from Lisa and Lawrence's home in Richmond.
One of our agents located him and Shelby
and confronted him and asked him
if he was Lawrence Gaudenzi.
And he said, "No."
The man says his name is Randy Evans
and his young daughter's name is Logan.
Investigators think maybe they have the wrong guy,
as it's been years since cops last laid eyes
on Lawrence Gaudenzi.
But fortunately he had gotten
a pretty unique tattoo on his chest.
So the agent asked him, "Let me see,
let me see your chest."
So he opened his shirt.
And at that point in time that he identified Lawrence.
By 2002, it's been seven years.
Seven years since Lisa Gaudenzi was last seen alive.
But there's an incredible development.
Lisa's husband, Lawrence, has just been discovered
after five years on the run.
Now he's in custody after a tip,
having stolen the identity of a missing homeless man
named Randy Evans.
Police did not have enough evidence to arrest him
for Lisa's disappearance or murder,
but they did have fraud charges on him.
So they were able to arrest him on those grounds,
which allowed them to buy some time
to try and get him to confess
or provide information on Lisa's whereabouts.
Lawrence not only took on a new identity,
he also changed his daughter Shelby's name to Logan
and got married to another woman
who raised the child as her own.
All this deception is exposed
with Lawrence's arrest.
So I found out that my dad was not who he said he was.
And I find out that I am not who I thought I was.
A couple hours later my mom, Linda May, had told me,
"You know, your name is not Logan Evans.
Your name is Shelby Marto."
Then, my mom is missing.
My actual mom is missing
and nobody knows where she is.
They've got Lawrence locked up for a year
on the identity theft charge.
So they've got a one-year window
to build a homicide case against him,
because once he's released,
there's a good chance he'll disappear forever.
Detectives redouble their efforts
and in talking to people who crossed paths with Lawrence
over the years, they uncover a curious piece of information.
It seems that Lawrence Gaudenzi
was together with Lisa's first husband, Jim Burdette,
just days after she went missing back in 1995.
It's a long shot, but Agents Collins and Lyons
follow up on the lead.
We couldn't find Jim.
We actually contacted his mother first.
She said she didn't know where he was.
It's a possibility that he was dead.
Detective Collins travels to Florida
and searches the neighborhood where Jim
was last known to be living.
Amazingly, after just several hours,
he spots Burdette on a dusty back road.
This dirt road in the middle of Florida,
in the middle of July, in 100 degrees,
a guy walking down the road with a briefcase.
He was blind from cataract.
I said, "Hop in."
And he said, "Okay."
He really wanted to talk.
And when we got back to the police station,
we asked him what was in the briefcase,
and he opened it up.
It was the corsage that he had
from when him and Lisa were married.
Now this gentleman is homeless,
and he's been carrying this around
for years and years and years.
Jim said that when Lisa went missing,
a day or two afterwards,
Lawrence called him
and asked him to come up and help him.
So, so Jim was suspicious.
So he went up.
What happens next is something
you wouldn't even read in a Hollywood script.
With his sight heavily impaired,
Jim Burdette has taken to carrying a small tape recorder
to help him remember things he can't write down.
And that small device just so happens to be in Jim's pocket
when he visits Lawrence.
And the funny thing was, he said,
"I've got tapes of Lawrence."
And I'm like,
"You've got tapes?"
He said, "Yeah, I've got tapes."
So in that briefcase that he'd been carrying
for years and years were these recordings.
Of course, that was of extreme interest to us.
On the tapes there was a lot of conversation
of just small talk,
but there was one specific conversation.
Lawrence asked Jim if he could help him go bury a dog.
According to Jim's statement,
Lawrence puts in the car a duffel bag
and a couple of shovels and they drive.
For the first time,
the investigators feel a surge of hope.
Maybe the duffel bag that Jim observes
contains Lisa's remains.
Was Jim a witness to the burial of his ex-wife's body?
Jim said, "I think we went out to Interstate 95."
And so he said, "It wasn't too long, but we turned."
He said, "It was next to a store we turned."
I even brought Jim back to Virginia
and we would try to at least get a grid area
of a couple miles to hone in on.
But the search goes nowhere.
And the one-year window runs out for investigators.
By the end of 2003, Lawrence is released from jail
after serving his sentence for the stolen identity charge.
And with him go the investigators hopes
for a resolution to Lisa's case.
In my experience,
some of the biggest turnarounds in cold cases
happen when witnesses are re-interviewed,
sometimes years later.
Time can often do the trick,
helping reveal previously hidden information.
Agent Collins knows this all too well.
So he decides to go back and talk again
to one of Lisa's old babysitters.
She was a young teenage girl that lived downstairs
and would help Lawrence with the child.
So she had told every investigator the same story
for years and years and years and years.
During the investigative process,
I observed that there's more that she wanted to say.
Only thing she was concerned about
was Lawrence coming to get her.
She was petrified of Lawrence.
Lawrence told the babysitter to clean up the house,
but don't go into the bathroom.
So what do you think she does?
She was scared to death.
For eight heartbreaking years,
Lisa Gaudenzi's family has agonized over her disappearance.
But without a confession from Lawrence Gaudenzi
or solid physical evidence,
they may never solve the mystery of what happened to Lisa.
Most cases, you know who the bad guy is,
but you know, it all goes down to proof
and that's what we didn't have.
We didn't have nothing.
Going over the list of potential witnesses,
detectives focus on the name of a teenage babysitter
who worked for Lisa
and lived in the Gaudenzi's basement suite.
For years, she had denied knowing anything
about Lisa's disappearance.
This babysitter, she lives in Georgia.
I went down there to talk to her.
She was petrified of Lawrence.
And she said that when Lisa came home
from the military break, and there was some arguments.
One night she was underneath the deck,
smoking a cigarette and Lawrence came over out the top
and he carried this green duffel bag.
So he left and he was gone for about 20 minutes
and he came back with no duffel bag.
And then he came in the house
and his feet were all dirty.
And he walked into his bedroom,
which he kept locked at all times.
And then he left the house.
Lawrence told the babysitter to clean up the house,
but don't go into the bathroom.
So this girl was 14 or 15 years old.
So what do you think she does?
When the babysitter picked the lock on the door,
she went into the bathroom,
and all she saw was the bathroom full of blood,
everywhere.
She was scared to death
and she never told this story to anyone before.
With this new evidence,
investigators hope to get back into the Gaudenzi's old home.
After Lawrence left there, was a guy in the house
that was in the house since Lawrence left.
So we got a search warrant.
We use luminol, which you spray luminol on in the dark
and it illuminates So when you find blood.ant.
But problematically,
it also illuminates Clorox.
So when we did the bathroom,
it lit up like a Christmas tree.
and sent it to the lab, lab says,
"We can't tell you it's blood,
but we can tell you there's a lot of Clorox
has been in there."
Doc Lyons and I went to a prosecutor
and spelled it all out.
And he was a new prosecutor
and he had just prosecuted another big case in that county.
And he said, "Let's do it."
On May 16th, 2008,
more than 13 years after Lisa went missing,
Lawrence Gaudenzi is charged with her murder.
And even though her body has never been found,
prosecutor's hope that the accumulation
of powerful evidence,
the fact that Lawrence changed his identity,
the statement from the babysitter,
the blood residue at the house,
and the old tapes from Jim Burdette's suitcase
will be enough for a conviction.
And I agree, it looks like a solid case.
In Virginia, when court starts,
they bring in all in the witnesses
that are going to testify and they swear you in.
My personal feeling is that when Lawrence looked up
and saw all of these people,
some of them he hadn't seen in 15 years,
that he had lied about,
and people who saw him as he really was,
I think he had one of them oh my God feelings.
So I'm on the stand and presenting evidence.
The cassettes that Jim Burdette had,
I have them in my hand.
The prosecutor says I'm going to play the first one.
Gets ready to play it.
And the defense attorney asked if we could take a break.
That's when we knew that he knew that he was sunk.
Lawrence turned around and wanted
to take a plea at that point.
As part of his plea deal,
Lawrence provides excruciating painful details
of what he did to Lisa's remains.
He admitted to wrapping her body in a sleeping bag,
putting her in a metal drum
and covered her with muriatic acid
to get rid of the body.
Lawrence doesn't explain why he killed Lisa
or how he killed Lisa,
and leaves out the most important detail of all.
When the judge asks him, "Where did you put the body?"
"I don't remember," he told the judge.
Lawrence's plea deal earns him 25 years behind bars,
but without Lisa's remains,
her family knows there will be no closure.
Then, out of the blue,
after 12 months in Georgia's Augusta Correctional Center,
Lawrence reaches out to try for one last deal.
Lawrence wrote me a letter that told me
that if I could get his sentence reduced,
he would try to lead us to where her body was.
After being locked up for a year
for the murder of Lisa Gaudenzi,
her ex-husband Lawrence reaches out to law enforcement
with a desperate plea.
Telling the lead agent on the case
that he will reveal the location of Lisa's remains
in return for a reduction of his 25 year prison sentence.
He agreed to take us to where
he thought that he had dropped the body.
Now you got to remember, this has been 13, 14, 15 years
since Lawrence killed Lisa.
So you have Lawrence in a car.
You have two U.S. Marshals with them.
You have 30 or 40 police officers are standing by
in locations in case anything were to occur.
He said that he left three containers,
three empty muriatic acid containers,
in the wood line where he had dropped this body.
So we're riding along and he says, "Whoa, let's stop here."
So we go down and they started walking the wood lines
and lo and behold,
we find three empty containers of muriatic acid
that had been there for 14 years.
They were plastic containers.
All lined up one, two, three.
And I'm like, "Oh my God,
we might have the location where she was left."
So then where do you start to search?
I'm thinking to myself,
"We ain't gonna find nothing here."
If there were remains, the animals have carried them off
and all of this sort of stuff.
So I looked down and as I'm walking,
I see this red thread.
Why would there be a red thread in this environment, you know?
And all at once we find remnants of a sleeping bag...
the fibers out of a sleeping bag.
And then we start that dig, as you know,
one inch at a time.
Go down about a couple inches
and I find these teeth.
These teeth did not look human.
When Lisa was a teenager, she was in a bad car accident
and she had a lot of dental work.
I mean, it was like,
I can't believe this.
And the only reason we found her
was because of her accident.
I was always told by her,
"You may not be where you want to be,
but you're always right where you're supposed to be."
It was where she was supposed to be
so that we could find her.
With the dental bridge,
we were allowed to give her a headstone at the cemetery.
She's buried in the military cemetery
on the east coast of Florida.
And...
her name on the headstone
is Lisa Marto,
not Gaudenzi.
So she don't have to lay all eternity with that name.
When I think about my mom's dreams,
it is just, she wanted to be a judge.
She wanted to create this beautiful life for her family.
And that's all she ever really wanted.
I wish I could just tell her thank you
for trying to give me a better life.
She'd always see the best in people.
She always thought she could help try to change them
or help fix them.
And being that I'm still alive,
I'd say she managed to find a way to do that.
Lisa Marto was obviously a remarkable woman,
a woman who never had a chance to fulfill her destiny
as a military lawyer and as a judge.
That's something that hits close to home.
Lisa believed her second husband
would support her and her children
through thick and thin,
for better or worse.
It turned out to be worse.
He was a cold-blooded killer
and a coward.
Ironically, it was her first husband
who had failed her in marriage
that redeemed himself by fighting for her
and finding justice.
But not before it turned
into a killer relationship.