Speaker 1: Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence, and is
not intended for all audiences.
Speaker 2: Listener discretion is advice.
Speaker 3: She said, do you think that I will ever be
able to forget the sound of someone trying to breathe?
Speaker 1: Welcome back. This is season eleven, episode seventy of Sword
and Scale, the show that reveals that the worst monsters
are real. Well, I have nothing clever to say today,
nothing to upset or piss off the audience of people
that are always very eager to be offended by things.
In this case, it was the attempt to the assassination
of former and future US president. We all seem to
have lost our fucking minds. So if you're calling for
the death of another human being, please leave. We don't
need to hear. We are constantly being watched these days
through various forms of technology that monitor the most mundane
parts of our lives, driving through morning traffic, buying a donut,
that sort of thing. Then there's the things we're willingly
offering up ourselves, like, for example, dancing on TikTok, or
posting pictures of our weekend on Instagram, or tweeting about
what an idiot Elizabeth Warren is and yes I did
call it tweeting because I don't know what else to
call it. But despite that, despite the big daddy state,
the surveillance state from nineteen eighty four that we're all
living in currently, people still do horrible things, almost as
if deterrence don't always work. It's like they don't even
think about the fact that they're being watched twenty four
to seven. I mean, most of us probably don't think
about that, so I guess it makes sense. Whether you
go to the gas station or DM a friend on Instagram,
you are constantly being tracked. The government can find out
exactly where you were at what time pretty much unless
you take precautions, unless you cover your tracks. Listen, I'm
not going into a boomer state of the world spraying
you with the garden hose kind of thing. Just bear
with me here. The point is that despite knowing all
of this, criminals still think that they can get away
with murder for some reason, and sometimes they actually can.
You would assume, as a logical person that crime rates
would be going down in such a surveillance state, but
it's quite the opposite. The thing about footage is that
we still don't get the full story. That's the problem
with things like TikTok, where you have a fifteen second
condensed piece of information with no context. What happens when,
let's say, surveillance video lacks sound. It's easy to think
we can get a full picture just from surveillance footage,
but sometimes what's recorded can fit multiple stories at once,
and the truth is always hidden much deeper and is
often much harder to decipher. On October fifth, twenty seventeen,
police were called to a quaint apartment in Plantation, Florida.
Sergeant Chris Tapher was one of them.
Speaker 4: Warriors Plantations Sarmn City, Plantation, almost twenty four years.
Speaker 2: Sergeant, And were you working.
Speaker 5: There back in October fifth of twenty seventeen, Yes, And
what were what were you doing for the police department
about that?
Speaker 4: I was a real patrol officer and on that day,
this incident happened two weeks before I got promoted. So
during this incident, on that day, I was actually riding
with then Sergeant Ryan. She was training me in my
new position.
Speaker 6: Okay, tell us little bit about when you got there,
anything that you noticed right.
Speaker 4: When you buy on scene, as far as walking inside
the house. I noticed that there was a female in
the living room. She was talking to an officer seemed
visibly upset.
Speaker 1: The woman who was visibly upset was Isabella Tegliorini. Her
dyed blonde hair hung over her face as she sobbed.
Speaker 2: And what else did you notice that she kept going
to the hall?
Speaker 4: I noticed just doing the cursory walk through the house,
I noticed that in one of the bedrooms, all the
furniture appeared to be moved in the middle. There was
also a very strong smell of household cleaning products, specifically Fabuloso,
which has a very distinct scent to it. Inside that
bedroom was also on one of the walls freshly applied
wet paint. I could tell that it was white just
due to the smell of paint in that specific room,
as well as the way that the light from the
window was glistening on the machine of the newly applied paint.
Also in that room was a red solo cup like
the time you would drink in a party from It
had n a liquid in it also, and then on
the inside of the white part of the cup there
appeared to be some dark red spots.
Speaker 2: That was also in the room.
Speaker 1: After walking through what felt like a renovated bathroom with
one lone red party cup. Sargeant Taufer made his way
out to the backyard.
Speaker 4: Walking through the residence again, out towards the back adio,
there was a wet mop that was on the ground
leaning against the side of the house. Cement underneath it
was wet, so that indicates to me that the mop
had been whit or freshly used.
Speaker 1: More officers soon arrived on the scene. Isabella sat crying
as the Plantation Police Department invaded her home and started
poking around.
Speaker 7: She was scared.
Speaker 1: Her roommate, list Willcox, was missing, but Isabella knew exactly
where he was, and she said she would show police.
Here's Lieutenant Kuca.
Speaker 3: I was instructed to take a witness, Isabella Taglerini, and
transport her to knob Hill and Cleary Boulevard to the rear.
Speaker 2: Of a publix. And when you took her, did you
take her in your vehicle?
Speaker 7: I did?
Speaker 2: And was she front her to the back? She was
in the back seat. She just transported.
Speaker 7: Nobody rides in the front seat.
Speaker 5: Who was giving any directions?
Speaker 7: She was?
Speaker 2: And you remember if she said anything as you were
getting close to she did she actually made a specific statement.
I just read it out of my report.
Speaker 3: She said, this is the area I remember those cameras.
Speaker 8: She pointed for the.
Speaker 1: Cameras at the public's Isabella led the officers towards a
big dumpster and did you.
Speaker 2: Approach that dumpster?
Speaker 5: They did?
Speaker 2: What did you notice about it? When you walked back there?
Speaker 4: I noticed that there were some blue latex kind of
medical gloves, like the kind of a nurse or a
doctor would where they were on the ground right in
front of the dumpster.
Speaker 1: Then all the officers looked inside.
Speaker 4: I saw a tark elongated, probably around six feet or
so in length. On each end of the tarp was
a belt like a dress belt, like the kind of
a man would wear with a suit on both the
top and the bottom of the tarp.
Speaker 1: The contents of the tarp looked human, like someone had
stuffed a limp body into a giant tube and tied
it off with two belts. It was Nicholas Wilcox. Isabella
Taglierini confirmed it. Here is Prosecutor Peter Sapek.
Speaker 7: My name is Peter Spak. I've been working for the
State Attorney's Office seventeenth Ususual Circuit for about eighteen years.
About seven of those has been in a homicide in
capital crimes.
Speaker 1: Pierce Apak was one of the detectives called after Nicholas
Wilcox's body was found.
Speaker 7: The medical examiner, I don't have it in front of me,
but if I remember, is Blunforth's trauma. He had a
number of very deep wounds to his face which were
consistent with a very hard object hitting him a number
of times, and also some stab wounds around his neck area.
So the way he down died was Blunforth's trauma in
combination with some stab wounds. Where he was found in
the dumpster, he was actually in a tarp blue grayish
tarp that was taped up.
Speaker 1: Nicholas Wilcox had been beaten and stabbed, then rolled into
a tarp and chucked into a dumpster behind the Publix.
Quite an unceremonious ending, if you ask me. The thirty
nine year old general contractor had been living a simple life,
devoid of crime. He was separated from the mother of
his children, but spent plenty of time with his kids.
He wasn't doing anything remarkable or unremarkable, as this is
often the case for most victims, but Isabella had not
called the police to report Nicholas missing. This whole thing
started to unravel when she got her ex husband involved.
Speaker 7: If she had to understand that, Isabella called her ex husband,
mister tagler Reini, but she had no idea that mister
Taglerine would go out of his way and call the
Plantation Police department. So when the police arrived, she's kind
of caught off guard.
Speaker 1: Isabella did not expect the police to come rolling into
her apartment that day, smell the bleach and the fabuloso
and see the wet paint. She never expected the cleanup
job to be spotted. As the police drove Isabella down
to the police station to speak with her, she kept
quiet well for the most part.
Speaker 3: She said, uh, do you think that I will ever
be able to forget the sound of someone trying to breathe.
Speaker 1: Isabella Taglierini was a Brazilian immigrant who, like most women
in her position, came to the United States for a
better life. Here's prosecutor saypack again.
Speaker 7: When she originally came here was with either a boyfriend
or another ex husband, and that that relationship fell apart
because there was domestic violence. So she was really left
in this country by herself, and she met mister Taglerini,
and you know, kind of developed from their own So
she did move here with another man at first.
Speaker 1: After Isabella divorced her first husband, Nicholas Teglerini, she met
a man named Eric Robinson. Eric was a bit older
than Isabella. He was big and burley, with a shaved
head and kind of mean eyes. He'd been involved in
some criminal activity, but worked construction and spent most of
his time at the gym. I'm going to reiterate he
was a big dude, but he was.
Speaker 7: Known to be a gym rat. That's where he met.
There might have been some incidents of steroid ust, so
you know, he was a bigger guy.
Speaker 1: Isabella and Eric struck up a romance as soon as
they moved in together in June of twenty sixteen. Due
to her immigration status, Isabella relied on the men in
her life for employment. She never really had a career
of her own. She moved to America on the back
of old boyfriend, and then when she married Nicholas Taglierini
in Florida, he took care of her. Now that she
had started things up with Eric, she relied on him
in the same way.
Speaker 7: She really never had a job of her own. She
was always taken care of, whether it be her ex
husband mister Tagler Reini, or Eric Robinson or Nicholas Wilcox.
You know, she was always you know, she was always
looking for somebody to take care of her.
Speaker 1: I believe that was the dynamic, and it suited Eric nicely.
You see, Eric was a controlling guy. I'm trying to
paint you a picture of Eric that translates into words.
Imagine an aging club bro in his fifties with bad
tribal tattoos and a shimmering tan. Yeah, that kind of guy.
The kind of guy who posts pictures on Facebook of
himself wearing salmon pink pinstriped shirts with bejeweled patter. Are
you starting to get a vibeer? Isabella was under Eric's
thumb and he took advantage of that. Plus, they weren't
the most chill couple on earth. According to neighbors, the
two fought constantly, and sometimes they're fighting spilled out onto
the street for all to see.
Speaker 2: There's always issues here at this house. She ran over
me a couple of times to escape, and she's always
screamed and stuff about what he's doing to guy Eric.
Speaker 1: He was a big guy. As if things weren't crazy enough,
Eric and Isabella decided to invite their friend Nicholas Wilcox
to move into their shit show. Maybe they thought that
a third party would help keep the peace. Maybe they
just needed the extra income. Either way, thirty nine year
old Nicholas moved in.
Speaker 7: Nicholas Wilcox.
Speaker 8: When did he move into that?
Speaker 2: Apartments? In the middle of two set him? Nicholas was
a roommate?
Speaker 4: Correct?
Speaker 2: Was the roommate?
Speaker 7: How many bedrooms in that department or that house?
Speaker 9: Three bedrooms master, a master, vagiol, avestamle inside and then
two other bed two other bedrooms and investment.
Speaker 7: So Nicholas would have his own bedroom.
Speaker 2: Yes, of course. Did you share a bedroom with Eric? Yes,
we did, specifically our August of that year. Were you
sharing your bedroom of Eric? Yes, I was.
Speaker 1: Nicholas moved in and Isabella soon started working for him.
She had no job and he needed an extra set
of hands.
Speaker 7: What did Nicholas will Cox you for a living?
Speaker 2: He was a general contractor. Are you a general contractor?
Speaker 9: No? Not?
Speaker 2: How would you be working for him? He offered me
the job in the beginning to dig and to clean.
The places where he was.
Speaker 7: Were keen, and the majority of time, which county were
you working?
Speaker 2: We were was some beach.
Speaker 1: Working together every day. Nicholas and Isabella developed a strong friendship.
He often did work preparing houses for hurricanes, and as
Hurricane Irma loomed in the distance, so did a spark
between the two roommates. But then, in June of twenty seventeen,
a big fight between Isabella and Eric erupted in the home.
He was arrested on domestic violence and strangulation charges, but
let out two days later. Isabella did not want to
press charges. Here's prosecutor say, pack again.
Speaker 7: So many times you see this, and I've had this
in many homicides where the woman or a man is
beaten and it happens over and over again, and all
you see is the victim, you know, show up to
the state at Journey's office and say they don't want
to prosecute, and it's a circle, and sometimes it ends
up in murder.
Speaker 1: So Eric was released and things in the apartment only
intensified between the three. Though he had not made it
known yet, Nicholas developed a crush on Isabella and would
often get involved when she and Eric argued, no.
Speaker 7: There was even a recording that we had, and on
their recording, it's Isabella Tagerini recording a fight between Eric
Robinson and Nicholas Wilcox and they're really getting into it,
and the reason for the fight is something to do
with Isabella. And at one point where when Eric Robinson
realizes that Isabella Tagerini is recording both of them, he
jumps on top of Isabella and you can you can
hear her screaming.
Speaker 1: Tensions were high, but Isabella and Eric stayed together and
she went off to work every day with Nicholas. What
a strange arrangement. Then in August of twenty seventeen, Eric
was arrested for cocaine possession. This time it would not
be bailed out quite so quickly. Nicholas and Isabella continued
living in the apartment together despite Eric's absence. And I
bet you can kind of guess what happens next.
Speaker 8: At any point, did you develop a relationship with Nicholas Wlocox? Yes,
how long did it take? And did you have any
communication with Eric Robinson on that point? You moved out
to Nicholas Molokos.
Speaker 2: I'm see you moved out to Nicholas wlocos. Yes.
Speaker 1: According to Isabella, it took a few weeks, but soon
Nicholas was sleeping in her room. Their relationship had been
growing for so long that it was only a matter
of time, but for the spark would ignite, before the
very white music would start playing, before love would be
in the air or something. Anyway, With Eric stuck behind bars,
Nicholas and Isabella were safe to embark on the honeymoon
phase of their romance. It was like a fairy tale.
That is, until the early morning hours of October fifth,
twenty seventeen. Isabella and Nicholas were laying in bed, sound
asleep after another blissful night together of fucking and whatever
else they were doing, when Isabella was jolted awake at
two thirty in the morning.
Speaker 2: I will call with Eric holding my mouse in my egg.
And then I opened my eyes. The television was so
and the lights were on.
Speaker 1: Top of you, or he was on top of me,
and the faint glow of the television still on and
flickering in the corner of the room. Isabella saw Eric's
angry face and he climbed on top of her, crushing
her body down with all of his might, and like
I said, big dude.
Speaker 2: Well at that moment, Eric made a question, Now ask
him if I want to leave or die, and also
telling me to be quiet, continue holding. I couldn't turn
my head, Jimmy said, and I could hear Nicholas Milcox
struggling to breathe.
Speaker 5: What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2: Was a noise that will never leave my mind forever
heard of all person struggling. I couldn't see him, but
he was struggling. Terrible noise like a noise like this
in my mind. I saw that Nick was scared or
I didn't know he was hurt. Then Eric woke me
out of the bed until around the bed I couldn't
see Nick, and a glimpse of my eyes I saw
some scene on his face that looked like wood.
Speaker 1: Eric through the comforter over Isabella's head and covered her mouth.
Then he marched her into the living room and shoved
her down onto the floor, set me down, and.
Speaker 2: He was telling me that he was seeing not sure
if he was going to kill me.
Speaker 10: To ask him why, I she didn't know him and
stayed with Nicholas Wilcox and we could listen Nicholas trying
to raise and he said he had.
Speaker 2: To finish his show.
Speaker 1: Eric grabbed a crowbar and stormed back into the bedroom
towards his former roommate and friend, Nicholas.
Speaker 2: He had a big piece of metal, dark metal like
I didn't know the name before, but was a big
metal and he was he was doing like hitting him
several times and saying, dying, mantherhooker, dying manerhook her, and
that's that's why he was doing. Until the noise disappeared.
I couldn't look. I was so afraid, so scared because I.
Speaker 1: Knew it was going to be the next Isabella sat
in the hallway trembling as she listened to Eric pommel
Nicholas over and over with a metal rod until the
gurgling stopped. Blood had sprayed all over the bedroom. Isabella
was shrieking and Nicholas was dead. Eric then comes back
out into the living room and starts talking to Isabella.
Speaker 2: He told me, where is your medications for anxiety depression?
I said it inside the bedroom in the same Joe
so Hate told me he gave me. Tell me to
stay four bars and then have some vot. I could
come down and probably he could take control of my actions.
Speaker 1: After that, Eric gave Isabella her cocktail of vodka and xanax,
then wasted no time getting to work cleaning up the mess. Now,
let's be clear, four bars of xanax, in case you
don't know, is quite a bit about as much as
some people take before calling into our voicemail hotline eight
nine six eight five four. So she must have been
completely out of it.
Speaker 2: Eric was preparing, Eric asking me if there was there
was black bags or something else, and somehow he came
up with a tar, silver tarn.
Speaker 7: Where did he get the silver tar?
Speaker 2: I mean it was in the house because that was
Nicholas John. He was putting tarps in the roofs, in
the roof of the houses because there was a hurricane.
Speaker 1: Isabella trembled as she watched Eric wrap Nicholas in a tar.
Speaker 5: He wrapped it.
Speaker 2: Like a briton, and he put two belts, one around
the neck and one around the feat. I remember one
of the belts, Eric mentioning the motherfucker was using my belts,
was along the house.
Speaker 1: Eric took both her and Nicholas's phones and told her
not to bother trying to call for help.
Speaker 2: I couldn't signs that was militory order to stay next
to you.
Speaker 1: Eric dragged Nicholas out of the bedroom and shoved him
into the back of his work truck. The sun was
beginning to come up and Isabella's reality was closing in
on her. Eric said she was next if she did anything,
called anyone, or tried to run. He threatened to have
her kids back in Brazil murdered. He had connections, he said,
Why wouldn't Isabella believe him? Eric was supposed to be
locked up in jail for a long time for drug charges.
Then boom, all of a sudden, he shows up in
her bedroom and kills her boyfriend. Thank you American criminal
justice system. Bill beck ut her my ass I was.
Speaker 2: So scared, so free, and I didn't trust the niece at.
Speaker 1: That time, because that's the thing, and why Isabella Tegnerini
was on the witness stand and why she had been
arrested herself. Eric left, He wrapped up Nicholas and left
Isabella all alone in the apartment with her phone for hours.
She could have called the cops. She could have run
outside and screamed for any one of the neighbors who
knew how dangerous, Eric was, but she didn't. Instead, she
did what Eric told her to do. She started cleaning
the apartment as Isabella floated around the murder scene in
a traumatic daze. She sobbed and wondered how Eric had
known what was going on between her and Nicholas. Was
this all planned? Why had he showed up at the
apartment at two thirty in the morning. Eric returned to
the apartment an hour later and made more demands of Isabella.
Speaker 2: He asked him me too, to were some lunguries and
be sexy. He wants to have sex with me. I
need to survive.
Speaker 1: Right after he came back, after the two had sex
and quotes, Eric and Isabella loaded up his car and
set off to get more cleaning supplies. Being fresh out
of jail, Eric had to check in with his probation
officer some time later as well. But still the question remained,
how did Eric find out about Nicholas and Isabella. Prosecutor
Saypak had an idea and it all came down to
a silly little love contract.
Speaker 7: We were thinking that he gets out of he gets
out of Brown County Jail, his ex girlfriend, Miss Kenseck,
picks him up. They go back to her location. Sometime
that night when he gets out, he goes back to
the location, and we love the homicide. We know that
because Miss Kenseck testified that she drove in there so
he can pick up his cadillag. We believe that he
went in the house prior to the homicide, saw this
note on the wall, took it to his ex girlfriends
Miss Kenseck's home, and the following night or the night afterwards,
he borrowed well, he stole her car to go to
the location and bludgeon Nicholas.
Speaker 1: The love note in question was a single sheet of
paper signed by Isabella and Nicholas with their blood. Cute.
Remember how I said they entered into the honeymoon phase fast. Yeah, well,
these two were completely in love, like two stupid teenagers.
One night, after a couple of cocktails, they drew up
a little romantic deed.
Speaker 7: It was almost like a childish contract that they wrote
together that you know that Nicholas Wilcox will marry Isabella
Tagreeni and be faithful to her at all times. And
then it was signed, and I believe it was also
not signed with blood, but there was. There was fingerprints
laced with blood and both their fingerprints were on the note,
and her story was that she left that note on
the bedroom wall, and then after the homicide, it miraculously
appears with Eric Robinson's property at his other girlfriend's place.
So how it got there we don't know, but we're
assuming that he read this and obviously got upset. And
it's just, you know, it's a knife that cuts both ways.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 7: It shows us that Eric Robinson obviously read it because
it's with his property and it's supposed to be on
the wall and the in the bedroom of the homicide location,
and it wasn't obviously, But at the same time, it
doesn't paint Isabella and in the greatest of greatest of ways,
I guess, because like I said, it's a little childish.
Speaker 1: After Eric returned from dropping off his ex girlfriend's car,
he had to dispose of Nicholas's body, which was still
at the house in his work truck. There was a
lot of driving back and forth during the whole crime,
and Isabella was not the most credible witness, being on
four bars of xanax and completely traumatized.
Speaker 7: The truck is actually backed up to the backyard of
this residence and there's a neighbor, Miss Ginsburg's, that sees
somebody that looks like Eric Robinson backing up the victim's
truck to the back door of the homicide location and
putting something heavy inside the truck, that being you know,
the tarp that the body was wrapped in, and then
the truck speeds off.
Speaker 1: Isabella and Eric took off in Nicholas's truck with his
body in the back. They had no idea where they
were going to dump it from there.
Speaker 7: You know, they go to they go to the Everglades,
but there's too many people there. According to Miss Tagerini,
they show up at the dump and they don't. They
don't end up dumping the body of this place because
again there's people watching.
Speaker 1: Eric was brazen, judging by his actions that day. Prosecutor
Sapak believes he thought he'd never get caught.
Speaker 7: You know the fact that he's driving around Brower County
with the body in the truck, in the victims truck.
You know, he's going to a dump and there's very
good video at this dump. It's it's beyond hd. You
can hear all the conversation. You know, the worst place
to dispose of the body, especially in Brower County, is
a dump because they're surveillance is top notch.
Speaker 1: He's not kidding. The dump footage is clear as day
and you can watch it all on YouTube.
Speaker 7: There's a number of stops, and in today's day and age,
you record it everywhere. There's nowhere you can go where
there's no cameras or cell phone technology. You can also
pick you up if you have a cell phone on you.
You're constantly giving the police information.
Speaker 1: After an unsuccessful trip to the dump, Eric had to
meet his probation officer, so he took Isabella to the courthouse,
which happened to be down the street from a Publix. Meanwhile,
don't forget, the body is still in the car as
they're driving. While Eric is at the courthouse, Isabella is
left at the publics to wander and wait for him
to return. Of course, like prosecutor say Pak said, her
entire trip to the publics is filmed. Isabella strolls around
the store, pushing a grocery cart and examining items like
a typical housewife. Just imagine pushing your own cart past
her at that moment, and remember, there's a body in
the parking lot.
Speaker 7: In her car.
Speaker 1: Then she's seen using her phone and Eric walks into
the store and finds her.
Speaker 2: I was afraid I have to meet him, very sure
that I was going to be recite and do whatever
he told me, that I was not going to run away.
I was going to tell anything he told me to do.
Speaker 1: The footage is damning. Isabella had multiple opportunities to get help.
She was alone in Public's for over half an hour,
and right across the street is the courthouse filled with cops.
Yet she does nothing but embrace Eric and follow his
lead like a good little accomplice.
Speaker 7: And even though she embraces him at at the supermarket,
that can be explain as you know, someone being in fear.
You have to realize she's from Brazil. All her family
is in Brazil, and the people that she knows here
is really her ex husband, mister Taglerini, Nicholas Wilcox who's
dead now, and Eric Robinson who murdered him. So she
really has no place to go. So her story starts
making a lot more sense when you put it in context.
Speaker 1: You know, Isabella and Eric ended up throwing Nicholas's body
in the dumpster behind the Publics. Ironically, that was the
place with fewer people around. Then they went home and
began their cleanup job. They got rid of all of
the evidence, scrubbing every drop of blood from the scene
and painting the bedroom. But still it wasn't enough.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the mattress was disposed of at a different dump
sight not too far away from the homicide location. It
was ripped up and police were able to discover that
as well because of Isabelle to and they were able
to match the DNA to that of the scene and
mister Wilcox. When the police arrived on scene, there was
obviously no mattress. The place really reeked of bleach and
they also use what's.
Speaker 1: What's it called fabuloso is the cleaner I would know.
I grew up in little Havana and still have traumatic memories.
Speaker 7: It stinks, you have to understand it. Unless you do
a very good job, and you're someone like Dexter, you're
never going to get rid of blood evidence as much
as you want to try.
Speaker 1: After they cleaned everything up, Eric left Isabella alone in
the house and that is when she finally cracked and
called her ex husband, mister Taglierini and told him what happened.
He then immediately called the cops.
Speaker 7: When the police arrived, she's kind of, you know, caught
off guard, and mister Robinson's not in the area. But
when the police were there, they knew what kind of
vehicle he drove, and they saw the vehicle driving past.
When they saw the vehicle driving past a homicide the location,
they did what's called a thulling stop, guns drawn, and
he was taken into custody, and he never gave a statement.
Speaker 1: Eric may be brazen, but he wasn't dumb. He refused
to talk the cops. You should too. But Eric was
still arrested for the murder of Nicholas Wilcox and taken
to jail. Isabella was also arrested for her part in
the cover up, but her family would soon bond her
out and she'd be on an ankle monitor until the trial.
Isabella would appear to be the victim in all of this,
but Eric's defense was going to make sure that the
jury got the full picture, all of the full picture,
including the ugly parts. Isabella Taglierini had been in bed
with her new boyfriend and roommate, Nicholas Wilcox, when her
old boyfriend Eric Robinson caught her cheating on him. Eric
had been released early from prison, unfortunately, and came home
to find a love note from Nicholas to Isabella. He
became so enraged he bludgeoned Nicholas to death with a
crowbar in his sleep and made Isabella help him cover
up the murder. This sick love triangle had ended in murder,
and now Isabella would have to face her part in
the horrific crime. Eric Robinson didn't say a word to
the police and lawyered up with a strong female litigator
who was determined to make the jury see all the
faults in Isabella's story and character. Her defense was that
Isabella actually murdered Nicholas herself and called Eric to help
her finish the crime.
Speaker 6: What happened in this case is that Isabella Taglierini killed
her boyfriend Nicholas Rocos and blamed it.
Speaker 2: I'm her ex boyfriend Eric Robinson.
Speaker 6: You will hear that Eric Robinson was arrested by the
Plantation Police Department immediately based on what Isabella Taglieri told them.
Speaker 2: The police rushed to judgment. They thought what they.
Speaker 6: Had at first was someone being honest and straightforward.
Speaker 5: Turns out, missus Taglierini's stories and statements and details kept changing.
Speaker 7: Well, they really try to blame everything on Isabella because
of the inconsistencies in her statement and obviously the number
of times that she could have called the police but
refused to do it. And I believe that they also
try to, you know, blame her immigration status that she wanted.
You know, she wanted a green card and Eric Robinson
was not, you know, not the person that was gonna
give it to her, so, you know, she she kind
of got Eric Robinson involved in this. Their story was
that she committed this heinous act, called Eric Robinson to
help her dispose of the body. And that's that's kind
of their story because if you think about it, if
you paint the picture that way, our evidence also fits
that scenario because a lot of the evidence that we
had was subsequent to the actual homicide, post homicide, you know,
the clean up, driving around the body, these are all
things that have been after the homicide. So if you
blame it on another person and say, listen to that
person called Derk Robinson to help and clean up the
crime scene, all the evidence that we had and we
presented fits that scenario as well.
Speaker 6: MS Tivanerini gives five different statements under oath to the police.
Speaker 5: Finally, on October fourteenth, they confront her with all of
the inconsistencies because as they start pulling surveillance and doing things,
they start to realize how.
Speaker 2: What she had told them was not necessarily true. For example,
give you money, yeah, but until show that she told.
Speaker 6: The police that immediately after leaving the house, that partner
Robinson with the body of mister Wilhof's body in.
Speaker 2: The bed of the Ford F one fifty, And I know,
drawing a lot of.
Speaker 5: Details out to you, and this will all kind of
come together as you start hearing the evidence that they
took that vehicle to the courthouse with the body in it,
and that she waited, had no phone, he had taken
her phone.
Speaker 2: What comes out in the next week or.
Speaker 6: So, after the lead detective pulls the footage from the
publics right down the street, is that.
Speaker 2: No, they were not in the F one fifty. In fact,
is a Bella tyler i Ani was.
Speaker 6: Actually driving Eric Robinson's catalog to publics.
Speaker 2: And the surveillance shows that miss tiger Ierni has her
phone the entire time and her purse, and that when.
Speaker 5: Mister Robinson comes to meet.
Speaker 6: Up with her at the public so they can leave.
Speaker 2: They're hugging, they're kissing, they're holding hands.
Speaker 1: Despite her bad behavior and the small details changing in
her story, prosecutor Saypak said that what actually mattered about
Isabella's testimony never changed.
Speaker 7: The Rootover testimony never changed. It was always, you know,
it was always that that story, the truth of what happened.
Minor things might have changed. She might have said that
they drove a different vehicle when they came to public,
so when we look at the surveillance, you know, it
wasn't the truck. It was a Cadillac and she was
driving when she said that Eric Robinson was driving. So
small things but that maybe she didn't remember. But you know,
the general aspect of her testimony never changed from day one.
And you know, you have to understand they don't have
to prove anything. The state is the one that's bringing
the charges, so we have to prove up the charges.
Speaker 1: The state had to prove that Eric did this without
a confession or the murder weapon, the crowbar was never found.
Their strategy had to be airtight, which is why they
decided against first degree murder in Florida.
Speaker 7: You know, we have various types of homicide. You have
first degree premeditated murder, and the law doesn't necessarily fix
the amount of time that must pass between the regination
of the thought and the actually execution of the of
the of the homicide. You know, it can take a
second just by pulling a trigger. Then you have also
a felony murder, which is also a first degree homicide,
which means that somebody is killed within the perpetration of
an enumerated felony such as burglary, such as robbery such
as you know, robbing a bank, things like this, If
somebody dies, that's also first degree murder, okay, And then
you have murder and a second degree and that is Hey,
we don't know what happened inside the apartment, necessarily because
we don't have any witnesses other than Isabella Tagerini, but
it is it is murder with a depraved mind, which
means that there was some sort of rage on the
part of Eric Robinson. That seemed to fit our storyline
a lot more because says we didn't have to prove motive,
We didn't have to prove pre meditation. You know, the
sentence for secondgree murder is life. The sentence for first
degree murder is life as well. So it enabled us
to explain the story with what he had and the
evidence that we had, without having the need to prove
an extra element, that being the premeditation part of it.
Speaker 1: Eric's defense lawyer argued that Isabella killed Nicholas herself and
then had Eric handle the cleanup. But prosecutor Saypak found
that far fetched for many reasons.
Speaker 7: And you have to understand also her physical abilities. You know,
she's a small person. You can see that on you know,
when she takes a stand. But to dispose of the body,
you know, wrap them up in a tarp, to even
move a mattress. These are all things that you need
some amount of strength for. And if you look at
Eric Robinson you could see that he's capable of it.
And I don't I don't believe that she'd be able
to commit this murder on her own and dispose of
the body and so forth.
Speaker 1: But there were many weird things that Isabella did that
really trashed her credibility. For one, she tried to go
on the Doctor Phil show to talk about the murder. Yeah, yeah,
here's Eric's defense lawyer discussing this with the judge during
the trial.
Speaker 6: At sometimes in the past, I believe a couple of
years is Tier reached.
Speaker 2: Out to the Doctor Phil show to be a part
of the show, to me to ask me if we
wanted to be involved, which.
Speaker 1: Pending it wasn't before the incidents.
Speaker 8: Okay, obviously I could find but that's how I know
doubt about it.
Speaker 2: So I did a miss and deposition about it. For
answer about why she wanted to run the Doctor Phil
show was because she wanted to get some type of therapy,
because she knew that part of being on the show
that maybe she would be able to get therapy.
Speaker 1: I mean, what can I say? I'm kind of with
Eric's defense lawyer on this one therapy from Doctor Phil.
This is America. There are thousands of hotlines in every
state that offer free trauma counseling and assistance for those
in need of it. But I guess some people really
like trashy daytime television. Here's the judge's response, what is
the relevance of that? I mean, let me put this way,
if you ask her about it, then.
Speaker 2: The net and.
Speaker 7: It opens up the door to the why.
Speaker 2: I think it's totally irrelevant. But if I do allow
you to ask it, that means the state gets to ask, you.
Speaker 7: Know, why did you do it?
Speaker 2: Because obviously you're bringing it out because you think that
there's some sort of negative connotation of that. Well, I
think it's fair.
Speaker 6: To say that for somebody who was so traumatized by
an incident, I think it's.
Speaker 2: Just well, there are different.
Speaker 7: Conclusions you could make.
Speaker 4: One you could say that it's a bizarre act and
maybe she's seeking some type of publicity.
Speaker 2: The other another argument could be that.
Speaker 7: She was suffering and needed free therapy.
Speaker 1: Still, Isabella decided to testify against Eric because well, just
because she was promised nothing, and that says something about
her character and perhaps negates this weird doctor phil stuff.
Speaker 7: So prior to her testimony, we never promised her anything,
and that's you know the reason for that is so
we can we can ask her understand and true, have
you been off for anything? He played open to judge.
You don't know what you're gonna get, and here are
the apostible penalties. And you're here testifying because you know
you want to and itself your own.
Speaker 1: Free will, and let's show what you did the prosecution's
whole case rested on Isabella's story. That was all they had,
along with the video footage, which actually made her look
worse and helped the defense. Despite all this, the jury
came back in favor of Isabella. They believed her. You know,
I mean, for some reason, there's a propaganda campaign that
says that women aren't believed when they say something, and
I'm not sure what the fuck these people are talking about.
Modern day Western culture bends over backwards to believe women,
whether they lie or not. But regardless, Eric wouldn't be
so lucky. They would be locked away for life. Prosecutor
say Pak and his team were happy with this verdict,
but the question remained, why did Eric think he would
get away with this? As say Pac said, we leave
a digital footprint everywhere we go today. Everybody knows this
isn't that right, Siri.
Speaker 7: I really think that he thought he could control Isabella.
I think that he was such a dominering personality in
that relationship that there was no doubt in his mind
that she would ever flip on him. You have to
realize that without Isabella's testimony, you know, from the beginning,
it'd be very hard for the police to go in
the right places to look for, that being the dump,
you know, that being the various locations that she told
us about. Eventually, I believe they might be able to
get there through a cell phone technology, but you know,
without her immediate intervention and her ability to tell the
story and exactly where they went, that enabled the police
to go to these locations and get the surveillance footage,
which might have been deleted by the time they would
have gotten there.
Speaker 1: The true hero of this story is Isabella's ex husband,
because without his nine one one call, who knows how
long it would have been before anyone noticed Nicholas Willcox
was gone. Eric sent out text messages from his cell
phone to friends and family trying to explain his absence,
and he worked for himself with Isabella. All of Nicholas's
family was in New York, except for his father, who
attended trial every day. In a very real sense, Eric
and Isabella could have gotten away with this if that
nine one one call had never been placed, but they didn't,
and now Eric Robinson will spend the rest of his
life behind bars until he dies.
Speaker 7: Good good, there's no parole in Florida. When you go
away when you're sentenced to life in Florida, the only
way that you're getting out is in a casket. Murder
is crazy. Murder is crazy, and murder and murders do
a lot of a lot of a lot of things
that you don't make sense, and that's why they get
caught sometimes.
Speaker 1: Eric Robinson was a controlling man who thought he could
get away with murder. After all, every time he was
put in jail for hurting Isabella, she refused to press
charges and he'd be released again. It's not shocking that
this relationship ended in homicide. This is a recognizable pattern
that often ends in bad things, including homicide. It was
volatile and crazy from the start. As for Nicholas Wilcox,
you just got caught up in a love triangle. Isabella
was an attractive, exotic woman and I'm sure she had
a damsel in distressed type mentality that appealed to him.
Maybe if that stupid love contract hadn't been posted on
the wall, this would have ever happened. She could have
kept lying, gotten away with the affair. It really doesn't matter, though,
because Eric Robinson found out and he lost it and
decided to take matters into his own hands. What is
the moral of this story, ladies and gentlemen, Well, there's
a few. The first one is that Three's Company was
a great show in the eighties, but it doesn't work
in real life. Despite what these fucking TikTok millennials will
try to sell to you, love is messy and there's
no room for a cuckchair. Look at the end of
the day, what happened here is that the world is
full of dangerous, scary, crazy people. Eric Robinson was one
of them, and he proved it that night when he
murdered Nicholas Wilcox for sleeping with his girlfriend. There's probably
another lesson here somewhere in this one. It might have
to do with the fact that we're constantly being monitored,
even if we're not committing a crime, even if we're
not Eric Robinson, even if we're just good, tax paying
civilians trying to do the right thing, We're still being
monitored every second of every day by Big Brother, because
we value our safety above our freedom. Unfortunately, don't believe me, Hey,
sirih stay safe, sassholes. Well that's gonna do it for
another one. Go check out our Summer of sword and
scale hats at swordscale dot com we got a new
one with the don't talk to cops design. I might
like stay safe.
Speaker 11: Cock with when no cock, cock with when with wind.
Speaker 7: S, w W.
Speaker 5: S W with.
Speaker 11: W BA bin
Speaker 7: B