body, more so than the back, which wasn t bad as badly burned. reporter: they would soon learn that the victim was the owner of the house, a 59-year-old man named rob cantor. his body had been found in a basement bedroom the same place where henry rodzen spotted the fire. lawler thought it strange that cantor had died so close to where the fire started. usually, you see healthy, middle-aged males and they re tryin to get away from the fire. so, maybe they re overcome by smoke. reporter: lawler wanted to look around the basement where the body was found, but it was flooded. we had to wait and have the fire department pump some of the water out so we could enter the basement and conduct our investigate. reporter: that job would take several hours giving detectives from the bergen county major crimes unit, time to question neighbors. canvassing is the most time consuming thing, but you have to do that right away. reporter: former bergen county prosecutor, john molinel
reporter: it was an emotional moment of relief for rob cantor s widow and daughters. it was a moment that tony tung says he never expected. you hear the word guilty on murder unbelievable. unbelievable. reporter: though tony never took the stand during his trial, at his sentencing, two months later, he spoke publicly for the first time. i m really for sorry what happened to robert cantor and especially to the two daughters of rob. coming from a father of three daughters, i could tell them that i didn t kill their father. reporter: as expected, no one on the cantor side of the courtroom was buying it. susan, rob s widow, spoke for the family. i think what the defendant leaves is a legacy of darkness and destruction, vengeance and cruelty.
kirschenbaum, seen here in happier times. it s sergeant love. reporter: sgt. cecelia love was the case detective. what was going on in their lives at this time, susan and rob? well, they were living separately. um, they had still had a relationship, because they had the you know, the two daughters together. they were divorcing? yes. and you know, they were they had been discussing selling the house, you know, dividing up assets. that can get tense, even for the best of relationships. absolutely. did you need to take a close look at her? in the beginning, you know, you always would think, it could be his his wife or his ex-wife. reporter: not only that, rob s friends told investigators that he had a younger lady in his life. a french woman named sophie meneut who lived across the river in manhattan. was this divorce because of the other woman? no, it definitely wasn t because of the other woman.
was his girls. reporter: veteran prosecutor wayne mello, who was chosen to try the case obviously saw it differently. this case was about perhaps the oldest motive in the world, in this case she and he done him wrong. reporter: according to the prosecutor, tony s rage, simmered until one event finally set him off on march 6th, 2011, that day was the day tony learned that sophie had introduced one of his daughters to rob. this would be first time that a child of tung had met mommy s friend rob. in a timeline, partially captured by security cameras, tony is seen just after 8:00 pm that night, talking with his daughter, cleo in the lobby her mother s apartment building. cleo will tell her father oh, yes i had a lovely day today,
never had him coming outside of the house or we never had him going inside the house. reporter: according to rob s friends, someone had been stalking him. about a year earlier, they said rob told them he d gotten some creepy emails, which suggested that he was being watched. this is one of them rob, saw you this morning with this woman on upper west side. how are things with her? very, very strange email addresses, strange names. one was e-o-r-a-l-l-d. another one was e-o-r-2-4-7. reporter: assistant prosecutor brian sinclair who heads the county s computer crimes unit, says the emails seemed intended to intimidate. imagine that rob was getting these emails, being quite troubled that somebody knew where he was at a particular time, you know, who he was with. reporter: with that in mind, the prosecutor and his top detectives decided to take a hard look at rob s personal relationships, starting with his wife of 27 years, susan