DECEMBER 2020

The media continued to take an interest in the story, but never from the perspective of questioning the verdict. 

All the media needed to expose a killer was in the police report. On the day Samira died, her handyman had called 911. He couldn’t hide the fact that he had been there. Cameras at the gated community’s entrance had recorded his arrival. But right from the start, he had tried to blame Samira’s death on her husband, despite that to any casual observer, it looked like she had drowned. Even the first responders who worked to revive her for 45 minutes didn’t observe any indicators to suggest that it was anything but a recent drowning. But the first words out of Gerald Gardner’s mouth to Deputy Womble, the first one to arrive at the scene, were “he killed her, he did it.”

Womble admitted on the witness stand that although he wanted to try to get Samira out of the water, he didn’t want to go into the pool himself because of all his gear. According to the police report, just as Womble finally located the pole which he was going to use to get the body out of the water, Gardner started telling him about how she had two small children and directed Womble’s attention to an open door that he said was normally closed. So Womble went inside to look for the children, leaving Samira at the bottom of the pool. This added time in the water likely relieved her killer because it increased the likelihood that when she was pulled out of the pool, she would not be revived. 

Gardner had told the 911 operator that he was concerned about the children, but that he couldn’t get into the house to look for them. At the trial, however, he told the jury that the door was wide open. If Gardner was innocent and genuinely concerned, he could have gone inside himself to look for the children. He worked both inside and outside the home and the children were familiar with him. Instead, he directed Womble away from the body and into a large house, where Womble would have to go through the many rooms in search of the children who weren’t there. 

When Womble came back out, Gardner then lied again and told him that Samira had called him at 9:30 PM the night before telling him she needed some work done around the house. At the trial, a phone expert from the Leon County Sheriff’s office testified that the last outgoing call on Samira’s primary phone (the one she would call Gardner with) ended at 6:20 PM, which was the final active event on it. Ironically, shortly before that, she had made an accidental one to Gardner’s number at 6:11 PM that lasted only 34 seconds. Gardner told the 911 operator about that call and how he had only heard noise in the background, the sound of children. 

The day after her death, though, he changed his story and showed the detective interviewing him this 6:11 PM call on his phone and said that it was the one where Samira asked him to come over and work the next day, to clean the screened in area and around the pool. He told the detective he had been there on Tuesday, bleaching down the side of the house and the bathroom adjacent to the pool. He didn’t mention being there the day before to supposedly pressure wash the front of the house. That story wouldn’t emerge until the trial, when the prosecutor wanted to create a picture of Samira—on the verge of divorcing Doc—at home all day with the kids, rather than out and about with her husband. The defense was able to demonstrate that Gardner had not been there the previous day, and Cappleman had thrown Gardner under the bus in favour of another story, that yes, Samira had been out and about with her husband, but going from their home to his office to their beach home in search of another woman.

Gardner assured the 911 operator that Samira was definitely dead. How could he have known? With Bella running around on the deck, it would have been easy to imagine Samira chasing the dog, slipping, and falling into the water only minutes earlier.

Despite having access to the police report, the media seemed to miss that Gardner lied repeatedly, both on the witness stand and to the police. He told police that Samira never went near the pool and was deathly afraid of water to the point of not even sticking her toe in it. Yet the family phones had footage of Samira in a swimming pool with her family. In one of her music videos on YouTube, “I Want to Be Like You,” viewers could watch her both walking around the side of a pool and in the pool itself, immersed up to her neck. A video at Hyrah’s website showed Doc, Samira and Hyrah in a hotel swimming pool in Las Vegas. Later, the documentaries used all of this footage found on the phones, YouTube and at the website, and yet never contrasted it with the statements Gardner made to the police.