OCTOBER 2020

Matt Christiansen, a neighbour of the Frasches, was interviewed by Detective Bill Revell of the Leon County Sheriff’s Office two days after Samira’s death.

“I appreciate you coming up here,” said Revell, once they were seated.

“Sure,” said Christiansen 

They got the information portion out of the way first, full name, address, phone number. Then they moved on to specifics, where Christiansen lived in relation to the Frasches. 

“It’s kind of a maze,” said Revell about the whole Golden Eagle subdivision. 

“In regards to the incident?” Christiansen used hand gestures to explain where he lived in relation to the Frasches. “You go to the gate and it kind of veers you to the right. We’re the first street up here on the right hand side. So if you’re going to the house of the incident, you would continue going like this [more hand gestures] and you come to a four-way stop sign. You turn left and that house is right here. So we’re a quarter of a mile, twelve houses by walking, something like that.” 

Revell asked how long they had been in Golden Eagle. This was February of 2014 and the Christiansens had been living in the gated community since June of 2012.

“Now, did you know the people that lived in that house at all?”

Christiansen shook his head. He had never spoken with them, or even seen a person related to that house before the morning of the incident. The house was notable, though, he told Revell, because of a huge golden eagle statue that used to be on the mailbox and because there were usually 10 to 12 cars always parked in the yard or on the driveway.

“And they don’t have a circular driveway, so it was like a car on car on car on car on car.” Christiansen illustrated this, again, with his hands. “It was always just, it didn’t fit in, it was always kind of like sports cars. Some were high-end, some were not, but it was always…” He didn’t finish that sentence but went on to say that when the cars had been reduced to only four cars, it had been noticed.

“OK,” said Revell.

“You would think four would still be a lot for most houses,” Christiansen continued, “but this was, like, two-thirds fewer than what it was. It was enough to where people in the neighbourhood were like, ‘what’s with the house with the cars?’”

Christiansen had obviously not heard that the homeowners association had sent the Frasches a letter saying that people in the gated community had been complaining about the number of vehicles on the property. About two weeks earlier, a tow truck had been employed by the Frasches to take some of the cars away, where they were then stored in a warehouse Doc rented in Thomasville, Georgia, near his podiatry clinic. 

Revell directed the conversation to the topic of the incident that had brought Christiansen in that day. 

“All right, um, obviously I don’t know, have you been watching the news or maybe you’ve seen photos of these people? Have you seen photos from the news or anything like that?”

Christiansen hadn’t seen any photos, but when he had heard the woman’s name on the news he had visited her Facebook page. He had been moved to call the police when he realized he had information that might be relevant to their case. He and Revell established that they were talking about Saturday morning.

“Lauren, who you’ll be talking to, she and I, my stepdaughter, she and I went for a walk in the neighbourhood, and we walked one round, and on the way home we walked past the house. We were walking past the house probably at between 10:25, I would guess between 10:45 AM. We saw a lady in the yard going into a vehicle, kind of by the passenger side.” Christiansen continued to use his hands to illustrate his story. “She looked, wasn’t Caucasian, but she didn’t look like dark-skinned black. She looked kind of in between.”

Revell was listening, processing this information. Two days earlier, on the day Samira had been found dead in the pool shortly after 11 AM, he and another detective had interrogated Doc. Doc had been picked up by Panama City Beach law enforcement, two and a half hours away from Tallahassee. Law enforcement had applied all their best techniques to try and get him to confess that he had killed his wife before leaving that morning at 8 AM. But if Christiansen’s story was true, that meant that Samira was still alive two and a half hours after her husband had left. In fact, if one did the math, she was still alive at the time her husband had been arriving in Panama City Beach. 

“I noticed her because I was like, that’s the first person I’ve ever seen at that house,” Christiansen continued, unaware that he was undermining law enforcements’ operating principle that nine times out of ten, when there was a dead wife, it was the husband who did it. “And she did kind of look like a model, meaning she looked slender in build, taller than 5’7”, 5’8”. And I didn’t really stare, but I was like, huh, that must be the owner. Maybe she’s African or Middle Eastern or something. She just didn’t look, she wasn’t generally like me.” 

Christiansen and his daughter, Lauren, had kept walking back to their house. Shortly after that they had heard sirens, although they hadn’t thought much about it. When his wife and other daughter returned from a dance audition in Valdosta, they had noted the law enforcement officials at the gated entrance. Police appeared to be going through the security footage.

Later that afternoon, he and his wife had gone for a walk and noted two sheriff vehicles and yellow tape around the house. 

It wasn’t until Sunday that he began to piece it together. 

“And the news was that a body had been found in a swimming pool and then as I started to read into it more, I saw the time frame of 11 AM. I started to think that shortly before that, we were there. And then we were having dinner, Lauren was like, remember we saw the lady there and I was like, oh my gosh, that’s right. We did see someone there prior to this. At that point, I called you.”

Understandably, Revell wanted to go back and revisit the timeframe. Because if it was Samira Frasch in the driveway around half an hour before the 911 call came in saying she was at the bottom of the pool, and her husband was 115 miles away, then he couldn’t have done it.

“OK, let’s go back, let’s try to figure out this timeframe. Well, first of all, do you normally go for walks? Is that pretty regular?”

“It’s regular, but it’s not on the schedule.”

“OK, so then when you do go for walks, you normally go take that route, the same route each time, go by the house?”

Christiansen said, usually, yes. Revell asked if they took walks at the same time every time they went, or just whenever?

 

“Weekends, sometimes we do it in the mornings. Weekdays, normally the afternoons, early evenings.”

This was unfortunate for Revell and the case that the detectives were trying to build against Doc, because it confirmed that Samira had been seen in the morning. 

“OK, so on this particular day, you said, what would you say 10, between 10, that you went by the house was between 10…”

Christiansen reiterated that it was between 10:25 and 10:45. 

“And why say that?”

Because his wife had called him prior to 11 AM and he and Lauren were already back at the house by then. In fact, it was easy for Christiansen to show on his phone that the call from his wife in Valdosta at the dance audition had come in at 10:52 AM.

“So it only takes approximately how long to get from where their house is to your house, walking. Did you go directly…?”

“Yeah, it takes a couple of minutes. Pretty short. I can pull a map up real quick.” Christiansen would have done so on his phone if Revell had wanted him to. “If that would help. Yeah, it’s not a long walk at all. It’s a few minutes, tops.”

“OK,” said Revell, choosing to move on. “Um, do you remember what this person was wearing?”

Christiansen said he thought the woman was wearing red, but he couldn’t be certain because there had been a new vehicle in the yard, a three-wheeled motorcycle, was how he described it, with two wheels in the front. It was fire engine red and he wasn’t sure whether his brain had seen that red and put it on the woman in the driveway. Red pants was what he wanted to say she was wearing, but he couldn’t tell for certain. Red and white, “but I could be incorrect.”

“What vehicle did you notice there? Did you…”

Christiansen said he saw a dark SUV, four doors, and that she had the door open to the passenger side. Later, at the trial, Revell would be called to the stand after Christiansen’s testimony. It was important to the prosecutor to make sure the jury knew that Samira had a white Hummer. The defense was quick to point out that there was a black tire on the back, and significantly, since the interior was also black, the door had been open. Christiansen had also accurately noted on the day of his first police interview, that when he saw the woman putting something in the vehicle, the vehicle had been pulled into the driveway. Normally, the vehicles were backed in. 

In the interview, Christiansen stressed that, “It was the first person I’d ever seen at that house, ever.”

 

“And tell me again, um, what color pants and shirt you thought, I know you were kind of…”

“I feel like, I feel like she was wearing red pants and a white shirt. (Revell: OK.) Now, I know when I say this, I’ve studied a lot of psychology and I understand sometimes your brain sucks at seeing something and trying to, like, link things together when it doesn’t really, really didn’t. Um, when the story began to break and I started doing some research and saw the victim’s name and Googled and saw her Facebook page, she may have been wearing that in one of her Facebook pictures. But when I saw one of her pictures in Facebook, I was like, that looks like the person I saw in front of the house. That’s when it kind of, like, hit home.”

They continued to discuss this point. 

“But prior to that you had no idea what either whoever lived there looked like?”

“No idea whatsoever. I knew nothing about them. (Revell: OK.) They were just the house that had all those cars that were kind of the oddball…”

“OK. Let’s switch gears a little bit. I want to go back and, um, let’s try to talk about the timeline a little bit more. What, do you remember what time you woke up that day?”

Yes, this was critical. If only they could find a flaw in the narrative and somehow shift it to another day. But Christiansen went through his day and was even able to provide phone confirmation of all the times. It was notable that he had talked to his wife upon her arrival in Valdosta. She had called him at 9:52 to say their daughter had just gone into the audition. Then she had called him again at 10:52. The two men commented on the neatness of it, the even hour between the calls, and Christiansen told Revell the walk had taken place between the calls. 

“And we’re sure that was Saturday?” Revell asked, once again despite that he had seen the phone with the date and times of the phone calls. 

“Positive,” said Christiansen.  

A sinking moment indeed for Revell. Doc was being held in jail on child custody charges with the understanding among law enforcement officials that what they were really trying to do was build a murder case against him. Two days earlier, Revell and another detective, Brice Google, had done their darndest to convince Doc that the evidence against him was strong and that he should just come clean. Doc had maintained that he wasn’t there, so he didn’t know what had happened. And now Mr. Christiansen’s testimony was telling Revell that it was absolutely true. 

Furthermore, as the interview with Christiansen wrapped up, he casually mentioned that a neighbour driving by had stopped to talk to them—something the police followed up on later and learned that, yes, Trip Frazee had talked to Matt Christiansen and Lauren on Saturday at 10:22 AM, just as they were leaving the lake and before they passed the Frasch home. 

Matt Christiansen was called in for another interview the next day. This time he was outright told that the information he was giving them was very, very critical to this investigation. That part was true. But then he was told that law enforcement had received, or, rather, the information that Christiansen had given them was not really matching up with some other information or evidence they’d obtained by, um, another means. This was completely false. No other witness had come forward with conflicting evidence. Everything in the police report lined up with Matt Christiansen’s testimony. The only way his information didn’t “match up” was if someone in law enforcement was 100% determined to blame Dr. Adam Frasch for the death of his wife. 

“That’s funny,” said Revell. Christiansen agreed. Revell continued, “So, that’s why your… the information you gave us is critical to this entire investigation. So I wanted to make sure that…”

Christiansen was interested in learning more.

“Does that mean that the information provided from the defense, if you will, is saying something different, or just…”

“No, there’s not a defense yet. It’s just the statements you gave us and then the evidence and other information we’ve obtained from other witnesses and neighbours aren’t really coinciding with each other.”

“OK.”

“And I got to thinking yesterday, uh, you know, after we talked also that, I know you talked about studying psychology and all that stuff, and things mixing together, so, maybe sometimes… Is it possible that when you go on a walk that things that you may have seen could be mixing up with a different time that you’ve been on walks…”

“It’s possible,” said Christiansen agreeably. He had indeed talked about psychology the day before, saying that the red he had recalled seeing on the woman might have been from the fire engine red, three-wheeled motorcycle. “That definitely can’t be discounted.” Revell must have had a moment of hope, until Christiansen leaned forward in his chair and said, “The things I know for certain were the timeframe we were in front of the house, roughly 10:25, 10:45, around then. That was certain. That was certain on Saturday morning. I am certain that we saw a woman in the front yard that looked, based on the skin complexion, and long hair that was down, to look similar to the possible victim. Now, with that being said, you know, whether it’s for sure her or not, I don’t even think seeing a photo would allow me to say, I unequivocally know that was the woman without question.” He concluded with, “But there was, without question, a woman who had a light dark skin in the front yard going into a vehicle with long dark hair. I have no doubt about that.” 

“OK,” said Revell. What else could he say?

“Now, what she was wearing, I’d need to see a hypnotist.”

“Yeah and let me expand on that a little bit,” said Revell. “And I’ll go a little further. Obviously we can’t, you know, tell you the other information and other evidence that we’ve obtained just for the integrity of the investigation.” Christiansen agreed, and Revell continued. “But I will tell you that yesterday when we talked, uh, you thought she was wearing white pants…”

Christiansen had never said anything about white pants. But this idea was introduced because Samira had been wearing white pants on Friday and investigators were desperate to get Christianen’s story of seeing Samira moved to Friday afternoon or evening.

“… And maybe a red shirt.” 

Christiansen agreed. After all, he had seen some red. If the detective who had access to all the information gained by the investigation up until this point suggested white pants and a red shirt, it sounded believable. Christiansen’s openness to being wrong about the colour of the woman’s pants was twisted against him. At the trial, he would be ridiculed by the prosecution for his supposed errors in describing the woman’s outfit. 

Having gained this murmur of agreement, Revell continued,  “Um, well I can tell you that Friday evening she was wearing white pants. We know that, so that’s, we just, I don’t know, did you go on a walk Friday evening and then Saturday morning and then now, maybe… you see what I mean?”

“I do,” said Christiansen. Despite his deference to Revell on the point of the colour of the pants, he still came across as an equal partner in this discussion.  “Here’s what I can say, though. We have never seen a human at that house.”

“OK,” said Revell. 

“Now, normally, that wouldn’t be anything that anybody should catalogue in their brain, that’s an anomalous event. The reason that is something that sticks out in our head is that’s a house that we always look at when we go by there because of all the cars, because of the fact that it’s an odd house amongst many. It draws attention. And because it draws attention you tend to remember certain things such as an absurdly high amount of unique cars.”

Matt Christiansen would go on to say, “And the fact that we saw someone there whereas we had never seen a human there before very much is going to register. Now, you look at any other house in the neighbourhood, could very easily blend into, I can think of plenty of houses as I walk by, I can’t remember seeing somebody. But not a house that you look at every time you walk by because it is such an oddball. You can drive through that neighbourhood. You’re not going to find another house that has ten cars consistently parked, and not even in a circular driveway, to where they’re spread out. I mean, they’re packed in there…” He demonstrated with hand gestures. “… like they’re valeted in there. I mean, it’s just odd and so I can’t remember if we went for a walk on Friday night, and we very well could have. But I know it was Saturday morning that we saw someone there.” 

“OK.” At this point, Revell sounded glum, defeated. 

Furthermore, Christiansen was able to text his wife and learn they did not go for a walk Friday evening. And, besides, he had had a conference call with his boss in Chicago that night. 

“All right,” said Revell. “I’m going to show you a picture of her. And just, you know, see if that’s the one that maybe you can recognize. I don’t know how good a look you got at her.”

Things were about to get worse for Revell.

“Really, I think it looks pretty dang close. Um, light complexion, Like I said, I used to live in New York and I used to work in production and I’ve been on a lot of model shoots. Obviously I was not on that side of the camera. But when I saw her, the woman in front, she looked different, meaning, she had a slender look. She just looked, it reminded me of that. When you work in the model industry, everyone’s gonna understand, most of them are 5’10” or taller. They’re thin. They have similar facial features. They don’t have short arms, you know. They’re long.” He was looking at the photograph. “This looks, I mean this looks pretty, yeah, I feel it looks pretty dang close.”

Christiansen had never met Adam or Samira Frasch to know that she had been a model before she got married. Certainly, the professional quality of the photos at her Facebook page might have tipped him off, but did it get any better than this in terms of a credible witness? A man who had been in the modeling industry recognizing a woman with distinctive model features.

There wasn’t much more that could be said at that point. Revell wrapped it up with, “We just want to tell you we appreciate you coming in. We know it’s inconvenient.” In reality, it was far more inconvenient for investigators than it was for Christiansen who gallantly replied, “Well, a homicide in my neighbourhood is pretty inconvenient, so I want to do all I can.” 

As he was getting ready to leave, Christiansen said, “Yeah, Lauren and I talked about it the whole way home. We talked about it at dinner. I mean, we kept retelling ourselves and talking over and over again. It was definitely Saturday morning. 

Revell: Yeah. 

“It’s the definite time frame. The calls do back it up because Beth called before we started our walk. She called and I answered after our walk. We were definitely in front of the house in that range. I dunno if you recall Trip, like I said, I saw him prior to us concluding and beginning our walk back. It was a beautiful day out. It definitely wasn’t rain, or anything like that, I mean it was a crystal clear day in terms of vision and line of sight. She looks, her skin tone, for sure, matches up. No doubt about that. 

This wasn’t helping Revell. He replied, “OK. Well, that’s good enough. Like I said, if you think of something, jogs your memory, don’t hesitate to call me.” 

“I’ve never seen anyone else there,” said Christiansen. “Like I said, the reason it just sets in, really what I mean, you can drive around the neighbourhood…”

“A lot of people say the house sticks out.”

“That one sticks out. Yeah, it just did. And because you happen to walk by it, you look at that one versus the other house. It’s just the human nature component to it. And when you look at all oddball houses, you look for things, you look for changes. I don’t look at a change for a house that doesn’t really grab your attention… To see someone there registered.”

The flamboyance of the Frasches should have kept Doc from even being charged, never mind being found guilty.  

Lauren, Matt Christiansen’s 15-year-old daughter was interviewed right after her dad’s first interview. At the end of his interview, Christiansen had asked if he should be present. Revell had replied no, and then said, "Yeah, it usually works out better that way, just in case she wants to say something different and maybe she’s scared to say something different with the parent being in the room." 

And yet, 14-year-old Gerald Gardner Jr. had cried his way through his interview with his mother prodding him to talk to the detectives. This was the young man who had ‘found’ Samira dead at the bottom of the pool with his father. How much more should investigators have wanted to get him away from his parents to find out if that truly was what had happened that day? A body with no pruning on the fingers and toes had been pulled out of the pool over ten minutes after the initial 911 call. With Doc 115 miles away, who more likely to have put her in the water than Gerald Gardner Jr.’s father for pruning to have not occurred?

As I continued to look into the case for myself, Doc was able to share the complexities of his personal life with me. Samira was the woman of his dreams, but there were times that the dream was jeopardized by the childhood abuse she had experienced in Madagascar, and the way it continued to play out in her life with a bipolar condition. 

And Doc continued to live with violence every day in prison. In early October, he was attacked while sleeping, his watch was stolen, and despite being the victim, both he and his assailant ended up in solitary confinement. I knew his attacker. Tiger.