but while pam was looking for the right deal in aspen, back in tucson, gary triano was feeling uneasy. gary said, i think we are being followed. i just thought, you are starting to scare me, dude. [laughs] taylor showbergh, his girlfriend at the time, says was gary was convinced that someone was following him. i remember asking him, why would anyone want to follow you? and he said, because of a life insurance policy. turns out gary was insured for $2 million. his children, trevor and lois were the beneficiaries. until they turned 18, though, the money was controlled by their mother, pam. they had gone through a nasty divorce? yes. there were child custody battles and visitation battles. so it would be natural that you would be looking at her. yes.
stepmother gary s oldest kids had grown to love, a woman who had been their friend. they each made an emotional statement. my father s death was sudden, and violent. his life was taken as the result of greed, hate, and malice. heather spoke about the woman she had once defended. to think i had actually stood up for this woman, and suggested she might have been involved in the murder, i told her to keep her head held high because she had nothing to do with this murder theft. boy was i wrong. and then, pam phillips had the floor. she turned towards the gallery, and spoke out for the first time. i just want everybody to know that i am innocent, i am innocent, i am innocent. okay. and i m truly sorry, so sorry this is a nightmare. this is a nightmare. and, gary was my husband, okay,
he ended up with worth about $70,000. gary switched the ring on him? at some point, that is one neil lost it toward gary. he went berserk, and he was so obsessed with gary, he immediately started declaring he was going to kill him, years later. wait, wait, where you heard him say that? many. times many many times. hundreds, to maybe thousands of times. he is obsessed with gary triano, obsessed with him. that was the case that defense made to the jury. they argued neil had the means and the motive, and the stated desire to kill gary triano. any evidence that investigators never looked at this guy as a possible suspect? no. no. they ignored this whole line of investigation completely, completely. the defense even connected neil to a potential bomb maker, his close friend jerry happened to be a master woodworker and handyman. one of jerry s hobbies was he was an avid radio control
welcome her back. what do you say to the family? what do you say to your own children who don t have a father, whose mom and dad will be in jail? but lupita murillo wasn t the only face she saw at the airport. was that like to see them come back to see trial? it was she was not happy to see me. also present, melissa triano. why was it important for you to be there? i think because she thought that she had gotten away with this and i think that we wanted her to see that we knew that she hadn t. there she was on full display, a former socialite chauffeured limos was now a county sheriff s car. gary s youngest child elliott was just seven months old when her father was killed.
i ve never seen an assassination of this kind. if in fact it was a hit, it probably was a professional hits. could the sheriff be right? if so, who hired a hitman? who wanted triano dead? he was very flamboyant, very outgoing, engaging. he ran in real big circles, running around with donald trump, people like that. and he was throwing money around? yes. and so when a flamboyant guy dies in a flamboyant way yeah. people start thinking? you tie him with big money, flamboyant lifestyle, casinos, then he s killed in a car bombing? everyone makes this automatic assumption that that has to be some mob related hit. and as investigators look more closely into garry s finances, they saw only red ink. by the late eighties, the tucson real estate market had crashed and gary s bottom line took hit after hit. investors learned that in 1994,