Security cameras at the entrance of the Golden Eagle gated community had recorded the Gardners arriving. This was unusual. Normally Samira would pick Gardner up.
He and his son had rang the doorbell three times and when Samira didn’t answer, they had gone around to the side of the house, out of the sight of neighbours. One of them would have had to scale the fence to unlock the gate from the inside. They had then moved on to the enclosed swimming pool. The screen doors were locked, but raccoons had been finding a way in and Gardner would have known about this breach since cleaning the pool area was one of his jobs.
Although Samira had been seen putting something in her Hummer half an hour earlier by two passing neighbours, she was now getting ready for the day and was wearing nothing but a leopard-skin patterned robe. She would have noticed Gardner appear on her pool deck. The day before, she had discovered items missing from her closet, $100,000 worth of clothing and accessories, including a purse that had been made especially for her by her favourite fashion designer and friend, Roberto Cavalli.
She had always stood up for the handyman when things had gone missing from the garage, Doc’s tool sets. She had pointed out to Doc that they would have noticed the handyman carrying a large black Dewalt case when they drove him home after work. But Doc had discovered that the handyman’s modus operandi was to hide things around the property and come back for them later when the couple was at the beach house for the weekend.
With items going missing from her closet, Samira would have realized that the handyman had started doing the same thing to her. His appearance by the pool would have confirmed for her that her purse and jewelry and other items had been taken by Gardner and likely hidden somewhere amongst the many ornamental planters surrounding the enclosed pool. The last time he had worked for her, five days earlier, he had been cleaning the pool bathroom that had access to the house. It would have been easy for him to have grabbed some of her jewelry and a few things from the closet and put them in one of the enormous vases until he could return for them.
He likely thought the missing items wouldn’t be noticed for awhile, particularly since the Frasches had been travelling and spending less time at the Golden Eagle home as part of a reconciliation. The marriage had been troubled for several months, but in the last few weeks they had been spending time together, going to Miami and Las Vegas and working through some past hurts. And there was no way Gardner could have guessed that he had taken the one purse out of all of her purses that just happened to be her most prized possession, not just because of its market value, but because of its sentimental value—a reminder of Samira’s days as a high-fashion model in Europe.
Whatever happened after that is only known to Samira, Gardner, and Gardner’s son, but we do know it happened fast. Samira likely confronted Gardner. He had seen her enraged in the past and knew that when she was angry she was capable of violence, of pulling a man’s hair or gouging him in the eyes. He had responded with a blow to her head that had caused her to fall to the ground. Then thinking he had killed her, he had put her into the pool, unconscious, but still alive.
Knowing the Frasches had marital problems in the past, he immediately burst out to the first police officer who arrived that her husband had killed her.
Police just accepted it when Gardner told them he had entered through the outer gate and one of the screen doors to find Samira at the bottom of the pool. Gardner certainly wasn’t going to tell them that he never showed up and just passed through the locked gate and locked screen door to start working. They presumed that Doc—in his haste to flee the premises—had left everything unlocked.
Gardner, of course, had no way of knowing about Matt Christiansen and his daughter, Lauren, seeing a woman resembling Samira out on the driveway only half an hour before Gardner made the 911 call.
Nor did he know that Doc had left earlier that morning at 8 AM with the two young girls, Hyrah and Skynnah, heading for their Panama City Beach home. Doc and Samira had agreed that she would meet him later that day. She had been drinking the night before, was tired and it was likely that she wanted to get to the bottom of who had stolen items from her closet, without the distraction of two small children in the house.
Security footage showed Doc and his two young daughters leaving the community at 8 AM and his phone recorded his steady progression southwest to Panama City Beach. When he arrived, he and the girls were seen on Wells Fargo bank security footage making a withdrawal. A few minutes later, at around 10:30 AM EST, a neighbour saw them all arrive at the beach house, the same time that Matt Christiansen and Lauren were passing by the Tallahassee home.
With the 911 call coming in only half an hour later, the one person they could rule out with certainty was Doc.
In the court of public opinion, he was guilty. The prosecutor tossed unrelated facts together to build her case She told the jury there was an empty bleach bottle left out on the pool deck, giving the impression that Doc had cleaned the whole area after putting his unconscious wife into the pool. There were two problems with her narrative. Samira’s injuries were internal and there had been no bleeding out. First-responders had noted in their report that there was no visible sign of trauma. Everything about Samira’s appearance suggested she had drowned and that she had drowned recently. There was no pruning on her fingers and toes. First-responders worked on reviving her for 45 minutes and she wasn’t declared dead until they reached the hospital.
The second problem was that in the police report handyman Gerald Gardner told a detective that he had left the empty bleach bottle there. On the Tuesday before Samira died, he was cleaning her pool bathroom with it.
The prosecutor showed a photo of a scratch under Doc’s eye and combined this with the information that some traces of Doc’s DNA had been found under Samira’s fingernails. Law enforcement officials had all of the Frasch family phones, and in one of them, the scratch under Doc’s eye could clearly be seen on the Thursday night before Samira died on Saturday morning. It had come from their baby daughter Skynnah’s fingernail. This didn’t come out in the trial. The prosecutor told the jury that a rape kit had been applied to Samira’s body showing that the couple had had sex recently. She had to admit that there was nothing to suggest it wasn’t consensual, but she didn’t make the obvious connection for them that Doc’s DNA under Samira’s fingernails was from the love making. Doc had been asked by detectives about both the scratch under his eye and about his and Samira’s last night together. He had told them about getting the scratch from Skynnah. He had even mentioned in passing that Samira was French in the way she made love, passionate and intense, to the extent that he would get scratched on occasion.
So four years after the trial and when all other appeals failed, Doc began working pro se to demonstrate his innocence, an uphill battle since the presumption of innocence wasn’t there anymore. Not that it had been there in the first place. From day one, law enforcement officials had been treating him like the prime suspect in the death of his wife.
When they had been unable to actually prove it, they had created evidence to justify his arrest. And Doc could demonstrate for his 3.850 that they had done so. It had taken some time, but he had managed to contact an inmates who Dale Folsom talked to.
Dale Folsom’s nervous demeanour in court wasn’t my imagination. Dale Folsom shared with several inmates about how he had helped the state to put Dr. Adam Frasch in prison. Eventually, one of them provided an affidavit for Doc. The inmate told an absorbing story of a conversation he had with the prison snitch who had been such an important witness for the prosecution in the highly public case. The inmate started by sharing that in July and August of 2019, he and Folsom had been housed in the same federal holding facility. Although Folsom had been released by the State of Florida in exchange for his testimony, his career of methamphetamine distribution, as well as other felonies, had resulted in him being rearrested.
A regular informant (State Investigator Jason Newlin admitted as much at Doc’s trial), he told the fellow inmate how he had been put in a cell with Dr. Frasch for six months. When called out for an interview with Jason Newlin in the Leon County Jail, he had been told to keep his eyes and ears open and inform Newlin of anything the doc said about his case and the death of his wife.
It was Folsom’s personal opinion that the doc was innocent but, at the same time, he “knew he had a ticket out of jail” and told Newlin that Doc had already confessed to him that he had killed his wife. Knowing that Doc played golf, off the top of his head, he told Newlin that Doc had told him that he’d hit Mrs. Frasch in the head with a golf club and afterwards, threw her in the pool.
The inmate started taking notes whenever Folsom told him a little more about his involvement with the case. Although Folsom knew from Doc that the marital home was now cleaned out and on the housing market, he told Newlin that Frasch was having trouble finding someone to go to the house and steal the golf clubs from the garage before investigators found the murder weapon.
These conversations between the inmates were limited by their time out in the recreation yard, so the whole saga came out in dribs and drabs. When the inmate asked Folsom what the State had promised him to cause him to lie, the answer was that pending charges would be dropped and that it would be arranged with the Feds to have a Federal Parole violation become null and void.
The affidavit was proof of what Doc had been saying all along, that he had been framed by the State of Florida.
No comments:
Post a Comment