- A Canadian businessman living in Puerto Rico
had gone out to dinner with his wife in Old San Juan.
They were attacked, and he was stabbed several times,
and he bleeds out on the street.
[tense music]
- He was worth about 24 million.
- She was a beauty pageant contestant in Puerto Rico.
Her purse was there. His wallet was there.
There was no attempt to grab anything of value.
It was very hard to establish a motive.
- The only physical evidence is the knife.
♪ ♪
- The victim's father, some of the things that he was seeing
was not adding up, and so
he actually went to the FBI.
- Upon further interviews, we start corroborating
this being a conspiracy.
"I was offered $3 million, and they never paid me."
- So as the investigation unfolds
and you go to speak with the wife,
where do you find her? - She's gone.
♪ ♪
- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
♪ ♪
Drug busts, mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
- Get down! Get down!
- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it. - Freeze!
- FBI. - FBI!
- Action!
- But they don't know the half of it.
[indistinct radio chatter]
What really goes down, we save that for each other
when we're talking agent-to-agent.
♪ ♪
This is "FBI True."
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- On September 22, 2005,
Adam Anhang had gone out to dinner with his wife,
Aurea Vázquez-Rijos.
♪ ♪
They went to a really nice, trendy restaurant
in Old San Juan.
♪ ♪
They go to dinner, and after dinner,
they're walking back.
♪ ♪
And all of a sudden, Adam is--
and Aurea are attacked.
Adam is stabbed several times,
and then he was hit over the head
with a cobblestone from the street there.
♪ ♪
And he essentially bleeds out on the street.
- Carlos Cases was one of the FBI's top experts
in Latin American crime.
Over a 27-year career,
he led investigations into drugs,
gangs, public corruption, and terrorism.
- Adam's last words were, "Run, baby, run."
- So, basically, they leave the restaurant,
they're walking down the street,
and an individual attacks them. - Correct.
- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked gangs, crimes against children,
as well as human and drug trafficking.
- What about the wife? What are her injuries?
- She was hit once or twice.
But she was taken to the hospital.
She ended up staying at the hospital for two whole weeks.
- Who was Adam Anhang?
- Adam was a Canadian businessman
living in Puerto Rico.
- So Adam was in real estate,
and he was looking to build up Puerto Rico.
He was worth about approximately 24 million.
- Significant. - Yes, a lot of money.
- Grettel Chavarria started her career as a detective
with the Miami-Dade Police Department
before joining the FBI, where she has investigated
violent crime, murder, and crimes against children.
- Adam was someone who was really looking to open up
opportunities for the island.
♪ ♪
Aurea was a person that was high in the media
at that time, and it grabbed a lot of attention.
- Aurea, at one time, was a beauty pageant contestant
in Puerto Rico, a pageant called Miss Petite
because she was small in stature,
and so she was a contestant in that pageant.
The murder was a real big deal because it happened
in Old San Juan, which is considered by many
to be not only the crown jewel of Puerto Rico,
but also the Caribbean.
That's where the major cruise ships
dock in Puerto Rico.
♪ ♪
Thousands of tourists flock to Old San Juan
every year to do their shopping
and to do their sightseeing and do what tourists do.
The type of crime that occurs there
is usually your, you know, pickpockets
and that kind of stuff.
You rarely see that kind of violent crime
in that particular area.
Police in Puerto Rico started investigating.
It was very hard to establish a motive
because nothing was taken.
Adam was stabbed, Aurea was hit by the attacker,
and then he fled.
Her purse was there. Adam's wallet was there.
There was no attempt to grab anything of value.
- Yeah, I think it presented straight up at the time
a random act of violence.
- Devin Kowalski spent five years with the CIA
before joining the FBI in 2010.
He has led investigations into fraud, violent crime,
and sexual exploitation.
- Unsolved homicide in the middle of Old San Juan.
So, you know, one event like that
could send things south in a hurry.
- There was a lot of pressure on the police in Puerto Rico
and the Puerto Rico Department of Justice
to solve this homicide.
- Eyewitnesses described the killer as a tall man
who fled the scene toward La Perla,
a nearby high-crime neighborhood.
One witness, a lawyer,
picks out a suspect from a photo lineup.
- The suspect's name was Jonathan Román Rivera.
He had some connection to the Pink Skirt,
which was a restaurant that was owned by Adam
and his wife at the time.
In fact, police encounter Román at the restaurant.
He claims he was asleep at his home in La Perla
at the time of the murder,
but there's no one who can back up his alibi.
- At the Pink Skirt, they start asking
Jon Román questions about
his involvement in the homicide.
They see somebody who generally meets the description
that's being evasive. He's making denials.
He doesn't feel comfortable. He wants to leave.
There's an attorney there.
And the attorney says,
"Hey, there's really not much you can do here,
just cooperate."
And the police of Puerto Rico take him into custody.
♪ ♪
- So he's under arrest.
He goes to trial.
♪ ♪
- There's witnesses at trial, government witnesses,
that are trying to tell the prosecution like, that is--
the person in the courtroom is not the person that I saw,
that a tall, relatively thin-build man
stabs the subject.
- The witness description of the assailant
is "tall, thin guy." Is Román tall, thin?
- No. - No.
- What's he look like? - He's heavier-set.
♪ ♪
- So the chatter was that the police had the wrong guy.
- But the prosecution leans on the credibility
of the lawyer who first identified Román
as the killer.
Román is found guilty and sentenced
to 105 years in prison.
♪ ♪
- So the case is closed. - Not really.
The victim's father, Abraham Anhang...
♪ ♪
He was concerned that some of the things
that he was seeing with regards to the case
and the way it was investigated was not adding up,
and so he actually went to the FBI
and met with the special agent in charge
of the San Juan office and basically
told him about his concerns.
- How often has that happened in anybody's career here,
where a victim's father is like, "You know,
the guy in jail, he may not be it?"
- Not too often.
He was suspicious of many things
that he found out after Adam's murder.
Adam was very close to his mom and dad.
[soft dramatic music]
So one of the things that Abe found out
was that Aurea had told Adam that she was pregnant,
which then caused Adam to make the decision
to marry her without really thinking it through.
You know, he wanted to do the right thing.
He wanted to be a father to the baby.
And they didn't find out
that he had gotten married until after the fact.
Then, when it came to the murder,
for whatever reason, Aurea hadn't cooperated fully
with the investigation.
So Adam's father goes into Jonathan Román's
neighborhood, La Perla.
He meets with some people connected
to the criminal or gang element there,
asking about Adam's murder.
- Another name comes out, Alex Pabón Colón.
- They call him "El Loco," or "The Crazy One."
That's his street name.
- Abe and his colleagues identified
Alex Pabón Colón as the real person
that killed Adam.
- And so as we receive this information,
the FBI opens up an investigation.
♪ ♪
- And then we go and we find Alex,
and we interview him, and he confesses to the crime.
♪ ♪
- Wait, wait. I got to stop you.
So you're interviewing the suspect,
and during the interview, he confesses that,
yes, I did this brutal murder?
- Yeah, he does.
And he confesses to this being a conspiracy.
He had previously been in contact
with Aurea and her family members,
and that Aurea was gonna pay him $3 million.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
"I was offered $3 million, and they never paid me.
And I've sent letters."
- So he actually writes them letters?
- Yeah, he does.
- So as you're hearing this information,
what strikes you first, Carlos?
- We knew that it was very likely
that there was an innocent man in jail.
We let the local authorities know what we had uncovered,
and they dug in their heels,
and they said that Jonathan Román was the killer
and that as far as they were concerned,
it was a closed case.
♪ ♪
We knew that we had to make it right.
It was a moral obligation to make it right.
So the U.S. attorney presents our new evidence
in a federal court, and after eight months
in prison, Román is released.
[applause]
Very gratifying, very rewarding,
the fact that we were able to make this right
and for him to be able to regain his freedom
after he was looking at life in jail...
- I mean, think about it.
- It doesn't get any better than that.
And that's when the FBI then went full steam ahead
with the murder-for-hire investigation.
Alex Pabón is indicted.
- So now we've got the right guy in custody.
And we've also indicted Aurea Vázquez.
- So as the investigation unfolds
and you go to speak with Aurea, where do you find her?
- She's gone.
- What do you mean, she's gone?
- Adam was attacked, stabbed several times.
He bleeds out on the street.
[tense music]
Alex Pabón is indicted.
And Aurea was indicted.
She was wanted for murder in Puerto Rico.
But she's gone. She moved to Italy.
♪ ♪
So we're working with our
International Operations Division,
keeping tabs on her. - Right.
- But at the same time, Abraham, the victim's father,
is doing the same thing with his private investigators
that he had hired to be able to track her as well.
- What's happening in Italy?
- We find out that she changes her name
from Vázquez-Rijos to Domenici.
♪ ♪
She creates this whole profile of being
this Jewish widow and a whole fake life
of who she was.
- Italy will not extradite someone
that's charged with a death penalty eligible offense.
And the murder-for-hire that she was charged with
is a death penalty eligible offense.
- Aurea Vázquez goes one step further,
seducing a local and giving birth to twins.
♪ ♪
- Now she has an Italian husband
and two Italian children.
We couldn't get her out because the Italian Constitution
forbids the extradition of the parents of Italian nationals.
- So we're working the fugitive piece.
We're also working the investigative piece
back in San Juan.
About eight years had gone by.
The only physical evidence, really,
is the knife that we have.
- Alex Pabón pleads guilty.
He's in jail awaiting sentencing.
- We all came together and said,
"You know, we need to reconstruct that relationship."
♪ ♪
- Back in March of 2005, Aurea coaxes Adam
to get married before she has a kid.
♪ ♪
- Aurea took over his entire life
and his finances.
- She buys vehicles, moves her family
into the house.
♪ ♪
He ends up buying her a restaurant,
the Pink Skirt.
♪ ♪
- So he just becomes, like, sort of
an outsider in her life
versus them having a relationship.
- Absolutely.
- And he found out that she wasn't pregnant either.
- Oh. Well, that's something.
- It was a lie. It was a lie.
She concocted a lie that she was pregnant
to get Anhang to marry her.
♪ ♪
But that's not the only lie in the marriage.
♪ ♪
- What do you mean by that?
- So she's stepping out, doing her thing.
- She's having an affair. I mean--
- Oh, a full-blown affair? - Yeah, multiple.
♪ ♪
Each person we would talk to, like, people in the community
that knew Aurea before Adam, would be like, "Holy cow,
this is pretty obvious." - She was a liar.
She always tried to manipulate everyone in her life.
- They went to marriage counseling.
Over each session, it became clear
that he wanted a divorce. - He had buyer's remorse.
He went back to the store to return it,
and she wasn't having any of it.
So on December 21, 2005,
Adam files for divorce.
- The prenuptial agreement generally called for
if they were divorced, she would get a couple of
hundred thousand dollars of alimony.
But if Adam died, she would be paid out
a lot more money, several, several million dollars.
- And that's where she comes up with this wild idea
that she was gonna have him killed.
- Alex Pabón Colón talks about José Ferrer,
Aurea's sister's boyfriend.
♪ ♪
They met in Old San Juan a couple of days
before the crime,
and Alex was walked through what exactly
that they wanted him to do.
♪ ♪
- The next morning, Aurea reaches out
to Adam, begging him to discuss
the divorce over dinner.
- So she had this sense of urgency to sit with him,
but it came tied with the fact that she already had a plan.
♪ ♪
- So after dinner at the Dragonfly,
they stop by the Pink Skirt
down the block to have a drink.
♪ ♪
- While they're there, José Ferrer Sosa
calls Alex Pabón, who gets ready to attack.
- They went to go pick up their car to drive home,
but on the way, at the corner of La Luna and San Justo,
is where Adam was attacked.
♪ ♪
- FBI investigators now understand who killed Adam,
how they did it, and why.
But they want to know how Jonathan Román ended up
taking the fall for the murder.
- A couple of weeks after the murder,
José Ferrer Sosa, Aurea's sister's boyfriend,
starts showing some interest in Jonathan,
summoning him to the Pink Skirt.
They'd walk into the Pink Skirt,
and the Police of Puerto Rico case detective is there.
We have an attorney somehow there that's paid for
by Aurea and her family. - He was a patsy.
- With a full understanding of the conspiracy,
agents step up their efforts to capture Aurea,
who's still in Italy, now working
as an international tour guide.
- We know that she's traveling all over the place.
She would go to a country as a tour guide
for one or two days.
We had strong information
that she was in a particular location in Gibraltar.
♪ ♪
We started to get our ducks in a row
to have the approvals in place
for a provisional arrest warrant.
That would have given the Gibraltar police
the authority to go grab her.
[siren blaring]
But those approvals didn't come into
play until after she'd left the country.
So it was a near miss, wildly frustrating.
After Gibraltar, what was clear was racing against the clock
when she's bouncing around the country
every other day, that isn't a good solution.
So we develop an informant who has access to her,
and we start communicating with her about a future trip.
♪ ♪
- Aurea's company specializes in tours for Jewish Americans,
so the agents invent just such a trip
to a country which would extradite her to the U.S.
- It was a lure to get her to Spain.
♪ ♪
- When we take her into custody,
we want to do it simultaneous to arresting other associates
back in Puerto Rico, other family members
and associates that are involved in this conspiracy.
And I think as we're going through
this operational planning phase,
I was kind of tough to work with.
I'll be honest with you.
Like, I wanted to get stuff done,
and I wanted it done yesterday.
The boss only gives us a 50/50 chance
of it being successful.
♪ ♪
- Aurea arrives in country.
And as she arrives in country and gets off the plane,
she was met by the agents of the Spanish National Police,
and they take her off to jail.
♪ ♪
- And we were staged up, ready to go.
Executed the two locations in Puerto Rico.
Two arrest teams, one to go to José Ferrer Sosa's house,
one to go to Marcia Vázquez-Rijos's house.
It's one of the few times that things actually go to plan.
- So she's in jail, pending extradition
back to the U.S.
The whole thing takes over a year
because she went back to her Italian playbook.
Lo and behold, she gets pregnant by an inmate.
♪ ♪
"I'm gonna have a kid born in Spain.
"And because of this, the Spanish
won't be able to extradite me back to the U.S."
- It was that feeling of, wow, could anything else
come from this woman?
♪ ♪
- But to her dismay, the Spaniards
were having none of it.
They couldn't wait to get rid of her.
♪ ♪
Knowing her propensity for drama,
I don't want to fly her commercial from Madrid
back to the U.S. because she's gonna cause
a scene in the airplane,
and the pilot is gonna, you know, kick her out
and kick the agents out.
So what I did was I got authorization
to use one of the FBI's jets to bring her back
straight to Puerto Rico.
♪ ♪
- We had everything for the baby.
We had a carrier. We had medical personnel.
- Prior to landing, when we gave her
a final opportunity to spend time with her child...
- Yes, I went up to her, and I said,
"Hey, this is gonna be your last, you know,
"breastfeeding opportunity.
Just so you're aware, we're gonna land in San Juan."
And she immediately asked me, "Is there gonna be any media?"
And, "Can I fix myself up?"
♪ ♪
- To me, it was mind-boggling.
You know, here you are, facing life in prison
for the murder of your husband.
You're about to lose your baby, newborn baby.
You're probably never gonna see her again
while you're free,
and all you care about is looking good for the media?
[soft dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- 27 years in the FBI.
I worked criminal my entire career.
I dealt with killers, homicidal maniacs,
drug traffickers, gun traffickers,
but when you got to talking to them on a one-to-one level,
you could sort of understand
why they turned out the way they turned out.
Aurea is the first and last one in my career
that I could truly say this person was evil.
♪ ♪
- She used her beauty, her charm,
to try to get away with murder.
♪ ♪
- We can't pick our cases.
We can just choose to work them
like they involve our own family,
and I don't know that I've ever had
an experience with such a passionate next of kin
than Adam's father.
I really only see that same passion
for seeking the truth in law enforcement.
And so just to be able to deliver for him
and his family is just huge.
♪ ♪