Speaker 1: A father takes his young daughter to a house in
Speaker 1: the dark, right in the dead of night exactly. The
Speaker 1: neighborhood is completely silent, and the air is cold enough
Speaker 1: that every time they exhale, it turns into the small
Speaker 1: white cloud.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that freezing midwestern cold. Right.
Speaker 1: And he walks this little girl up to a ground
Speaker 1: floor window. But you know, this isn't just any house.
Speaker 1: It's the house where her own mother lives.
Speaker 2: Which is just it's immediately unsettling.
Speaker 1: It really is. He looks down at his child and
Speaker 1: tells her to put her hand over her mouth. He
Speaker 1: actually instructs her to hold her breath, explaining that the
Speaker 1: fog from her lungs will fog up the glass and
Speaker 1: give them away.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And then, and this is the part that just sticks
Speaker 1: with you, he asks her to act as a human
Speaker 1: surveillance camera. He wants her to peer through that cold
Speaker 1: pane of glass to spy on the private life of
Speaker 1: her own mother.
Speaker 2: It sounds completely like the cold open of a like
Speaker 2: a psychological thriller or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, you hear a sequence of events like
Speaker 1: that and you think it's a script. But this is
Speaker 1: not a script. That chilling scene was a documented reality
Speaker 1: and a criminal complaint filed in the state of Wisconsin. Right,
Speaker 1: it actually happened, It did, And just weeks after that
Speaker 1: midnight visit to the window, the man that the mother
Speaker 1: was dating, a man named Rosalio Gutierrez Junior, he would
Speaker 1: just vanish from the face of the earth.
Speaker 2: Vanish completely completely.
Speaker 1: I mean, to this day, nobody has ever been found,
Speaker 1: not buried in a landfill, not concealed in a burn pit,
Speaker 1: literally nowhere.
Speaker 2: And you know, it is that kind of total erasure
Speaker 2: that Lee's investigators with almost nothing but shadows to chase exactly,
Speaker 2: and that specific kind of erasure, that absence is what
Speaker 2: makes this case so monumentally significant in the eyes of
Speaker 2: the law.
Speaker 1: Absolutely so welcome to our audio exploration today. We are
Speaker 1: focusing entirely on the case of Zachariah Anderson. He was
Speaker 1: an audio visual technician, a father of three who basically
Speaker 1: orchestrated this massive campaign of obsession that turned his own
Speaker 1: family into instruments of control.
Speaker 2: Yeah, instruments is the perfect word for it.
Speaker 1: Our source material today comes from a comprehensive true crime
Speaker 1: documentary that meticulously tracks the timeline, the evidence, and the
Speaker 1: resulting trials and Our mission for you, the listener, is
Speaker 1: to unpack the absolute anatomy of a nobody homicide.
Speaker 2: Right, which is incredibly rare.
Speaker 1: Exactly, we are analyzing only the fifth case of its
Speaker 1: kind to ever be successfully prosecuted in the entire history
Speaker 1: of Wisconsin.
Speaker 2: Only the fifth that really puts it in perspective.
Speaker 1: It does. So let's just let's unpack this right away,
Speaker 1: because taking a murder case to trial without a victim's
Speaker 1: body seems almost mathematically impossible to me.
Speaker 2: Oh, it is. It's a massive gamble.
Speaker 1: Right, Like, if you don't have a body, how do
Speaker 1: you even prove a crime occurred in the first place?
Speaker 2: Well, you have just hit on like the single greatest
Speaker 2: hurdle in the entire criminal justice system. Our entire framework
Speaker 2: of Western law is terrified of prosecuting a murder without
Speaker 2: a body.
Speaker 1: Terrified. Why terrified?
Speaker 2: Because of history. Honestly, there is this deeply rooted legal
Speaker 2: concept called deleikti, which translates directly from Latin as the
Speaker 2: body of the crime.
Speaker 1: Okay, the body of the crime.
Speaker 2: Right now, in modern law, that doesn't just mean a
Speaker 2: physical human corpse, you know, it means the foundational fact
Speaker 2: that a crime actually happened, but historically it was quite literal, like.
Speaker 1: They actually needed a body exactly.
Speaker 2: Back in the seventeenth century in England, there was this
Speaker 2: famous incident known as the Campden Wonder. Three people were
Speaker 2: executed for the murder of a man who had vanished. Okay,
Speaker 2: and a few years after they were hanged, the supposedly
Speaker 2: murdered man casually returns to town.
Speaker 1: Wait, you're kidding.
Speaker 2: He was alive, completely alive. He had been abducted and
Speaker 2: sold into slavery overseas, but he wasn't dead. So the
Speaker 2: law executed three innocent people because they just assumed a
Speaker 2: disappearance meant a murder.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So the legal system fundamentally designed itself to
Speaker 1: prevent that specific nightmare from ever happening again.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the law built up these massive walls of burden
Speaker 2: of proof. Usually, when a prosecutor stands in front of
Speaker 2: a jury, they have a body to definitively prove a
Speaker 2: death occurred.
Speaker 1: Right, They have an autopsy exactly.
Speaker 2: An autopsy provides a cause of death. They have a
Speaker 2: weapon to show the mechanics of how it happened, okay,
Speaker 2: and ideally they have an eyewitness to say who did it.
Speaker 1: But in the case of Rosalio Guciroz Junior, they don't.
Speaker 2: Have any of that, none of it. Investigators walked into
Speaker 2: a situation with none of those three pillars. To prove
Speaker 2: a murder without them required a prosecutor to convince twelve
Speaker 2: highly skeptical jurors, like beyond a reasonable doubt that a
Speaker 2: person did not simply walk away from their life.
Speaker 1: Right, that they didn't just decide to disappear.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they have to prove that the victim didn't flee
Speaker 2: a debt or run off to start a new life,
Speaker 2: and they have to prove that this specific person sitting
Speaker 2: at the defense table is the sole architect of their demise.
Speaker 1: So the police are basically standing there with this massive
Speaker 1: absence of evidence. Because they don't have Rosalio, they can't
Speaker 1: perform that autopsy, no cause of death exactly, they can't
Speaker 1: match a bullet to a gun or a blade to
Speaker 1: a knife block. That missing piece fundamentally changes the entire
Speaker 1: trajectory of the investigation.
Speaker 2: It forces them to go in reverse.
Speaker 1: Right, they can't work backward from the victim's body. They
Speaker 1: have to work forward from the suspect's life, which is
Speaker 1: so much harder it is, which begs the question, how
Speaker 1: does a seemingly ordinary father, a guy with absolutely no
Speaker 1: violent criminal record, end up at the center of such
Speaker 1: a complex, calculated and successfully hidden crime.
Speaker 2: Well, to understand the mechanics of this, we really have
Speaker 2: to look closely at the contrasting lives of the two
Speaker 2: men involved.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's do that. Let's start with the architect of
Speaker 1: this tragedy, Zacharia Anderson. He was born around nineteen eighty,
Speaker 1: raised in Port Washington, Wisconsin, Okay, and from his earliest
Speaker 1: years his life was marked by a severe structural fracture.
Speaker 1: His parents separated, his mother moved out of state to Texas,
Speaker 1: his father remarried, and he grew up navigating this massive,
Speaker 1: blended network of full half and step siblings, and.
Speaker 2: They were stretched across two completely different geographical regions.
Speaker 1: Exactly Wisconsin and Texas.
Speaker 2: And you know that lack of geographical and familial stabidity
Speaker 2: early on, it's not just a background detail, it's a
Speaker 2: critical psychological component, right, has shaped him absolutely. The source
Speaker 2: material highlights this very striking event from his adolescence. He
Speaker 2: actually moved to Texas as a teenager to try and
Speaker 2: reconnect with his mother. He was looking for that anchor.
Speaker 1: But it didn't work out.
Speaker 2: No, the arrangement rapidly failed, and instead of flying back
Speaker 2: or having a parent drive him, he ended up hitchhiking
Speaker 2: all the way back to Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: Wait, a teenager hitchhiking.
Speaker 2: Alone, completely alone on the highways. I mean, think about
Speaker 2: the developmental impact of that.
Speaker 1: That is incredibly dangerous.
Speaker 2: It's a profound dangerous journey for a kid to undertake
Speaker 2: by himself. It speaks to a very early, very deep
Speaker 2: seated need to find control and engineer his own.
Speaker 1: Stability because the adults in his life had just failed
Speaker 1: to provide it.
Speaker 2: Exactly, when you have to rely entirely on yourself to
Speaker 2: nap the gate across the country as a kid, you
Speaker 2: develop a really rigid grip on your environment.
Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense. So he gets back
Speaker 1: to Wisconsin, He manages to finish high school and eventually
Speaker 1: earns an associate degree from a local technical college. Right,
Speaker 1: and looking at his adult life, I kind of think
Speaker 1: of him as a human Swiss army knife.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 1: Right. He builds his entire existence around technical manual problem
Speaker 1: solving skills. He gets a job as an audio visual
Speaker 1: maintenance technician at the very college he graduated from.
Speaker 2: But he doesn't just stop with the nine to five.
Speaker 1: No, he takes on demolition work. He does independent contracting
Speaker 1: on the side. He helps his brother with these extensive
Speaker 1: remodeling projects. His daily routine basically revolves around dismantling complex structures,
Speaker 1: handling intricate electronics, running hidden wires, and this is crucial
Speaker 1: cleaning up construction.
Speaker 2: Debris, which becomes the precise focus of the investigation, right
Speaker 2: because I mean, an audio visual technician doesn't just plug
Speaker 2: in monitors. They understand how systems communicate silently in the background.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they know they hidden stuff.
Speaker 2: They know how to route cables through walls where no
Speaker 2: one will see them, how to place cameras from maximum
Speaker 2: field of view, and how to operate digital interfaces that
Speaker 2: track data. And the demolition side of things, well, a
Speaker 2: demolition worker understands the physics of tearing something apart. They
Speaker 2: know how to remove waste so thoroughly that you would
Speaker 2: never even know a structure was there in the first place.
Speaker 1: Okay, I have to push back a little on that though,
Speaker 1: because tearing down drywall and hauling away two by fours
Speaker 1: in a dump truck is vastly different from erasing biological evidence.
Speaker 1: I mean, how does remodeling a kitchen equate to committing
Speaker 1: a perfectly clean murder.
Speaker 2: That is a fantastic point of skepticism, and it's exactly
Speaker 2: what a defense attorney would argue to a jury. Right,
Speaker 2: But let's look at the actual mechanics of demolition and
Speaker 2: contracting work. When you do heavy demolition, especially in occupied buildings,
Speaker 2: you have to understand dust mitigation.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, Yeah, you.
Speaker 2: Have to understand how to set up negative pressure environments
Speaker 2: so particular matter doesn't spread to other rooms. You deal
Speaker 2: with industrial grade chemical solvents.
Speaker 1: All the time, right, You're constantly cleaning, and.
Speaker 2: You know how to transport heavy, awkward, massive loads of
Speaker 2: material out of tight spaces without damaging the surrounding hallways.
Speaker 2: You know where the blind spots in building security are
Speaker 2: because you have to haul materials in and out of
Speaker 2: them every single day.
Speaker 1: I didn't even think about the security camera exactly.
Speaker 2: These are not inherently sinister skills in a vacuum, but
Speaker 2: if you apply that specific knowledge base to a dark purpose,
Speaker 2: they represent the absolute perfect resume for someone trying to
Speaker 2: monitor a target digitally. And subsequently erase a physical crime scene.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, that makes total sense when you frame it
Speaker 1: around the logistics of material transport and containment. It is
Speaker 1: a terrifying application of everyday blue collar knowledge.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: Now we have to contrast that intensely controlled, dismantling focused
Speaker 1: life with the victim. Rosalio Gutiras Junior.
Speaker 2: Was known to everyone in his life as Pocho Pocho.
Speaker 1: Yes, he was also born in nineteen eighty, a lifelong
Speaker 1: resident of Kenosha, Wisconsin. But his trajectory was incredibly grounded
Speaker 1: in community building, very different vibe completely. He held degrees
Speaker 1: in criminal justice and sociology. He spent time working for
Speaker 1: the State Public Defender's office. He eventually transitioned into property
Speaker 1: management and construction himself. But he was a deeply embedded,
Speaker 1: active member of a local church congregation.
Speaker 2: And a devoted father too.
Speaker 1: Yes, most importantly, he was a devoted father who coached
Speaker 1: his kids in Little League and personally drove them to
Speaker 1: their gymnastics practices.
Speaker 2: The contrast is just dark, and there's a cruel irony
Speaker 2: to Rosalo's life path here. How so, Well, here's a
Speaker 2: man who dedicated his formal higher education to criminal justice
Speaker 2: and sociology. Those are field explicitly focused on understanding the law,
Speaker 2: projecting the vulnerable, and analyzing how human behavior impacts a
Speaker 2: community structure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he studied the very system that would later be looking.
Speaker 2: For him exactly. People described him consistently as the kind
Speaker 2: of guy who would literally interrupt his own schedule just
Speaker 2: to help a stranger fix a flat tire on the
Speaker 2: side of the road. He was a builder of social fabric.
Speaker 1: It's a great way to describe him.
Speaker 2: And yet this man who was so dedicated to the
Speaker 2: health of his community becomes the victim of a crime
Speaker 2: that tears a permanent, unresolvable whole right through it.
Speaker 1: So you have these two wildly different men with entirely
Speaker 1: different approaches to life, living in the same general region,
Speaker 1: but in completely separate spheres.
Speaker 2: Until those spheres violently collide exactly.
Speaker 1: In the early spring of that fateful year, Zachariah Anderson
Speaker 1: had been in an on and off relationship with a
Speaker 1: woman named Sadie Beacham for roughly twelve.
Speaker 2: Years long time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they shared a home, they had three children together,
Speaker 1: but the dynamic was really volatile. She alleged ongoing infidelity
Speaker 1: and he struggled aggressively with the concept of separation.
Speaker 2: He couldn't let go right.
Speaker 1: By the end of the previous years, Sadie had decided
Speaker 1: to sever the romantic tie for good. And then, as
Speaker 1: the world was navigating the massive disruptions of the pandemic,
Speaker 1: Sadie met Rosalio and it.
Speaker 2: Was a new relationship. But it got serious fast.
Speaker 1: It did. She integrated him into her life and introduced
Speaker 1: him to her children, and Zachariah Anderson.
Speaker 2: Noticed, of course he did.
Speaker 1: But you know, breakups happen every day. People move on,
Speaker 1: blended families are formed. So how does a standard, albeit
Speaker 1: emotionally difficult separation devolve into a highly calculated campaign of terror.
Speaker 2: It doesn't happen overnight. It devolves through a very specific,
Speaker 2: escalating timeline of coercive control. And to understand the trigger,
Speaker 2: we have to look at the immense pressure cooker of
Speaker 2: Anderson's life during that specific spring.
Speaker 1: There's something else going on, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, the catalyst wasn't just the loss of his romantic relationship.
Speaker 2: He was facing a massive life altering external crisis. He
Speaker 2: had just been convicted in South Dakota for possessing over
Speaker 2: ten pounds of marijuana ten pounds.
Speaker 1: Ten pounds, that is not a minor recreational charge. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to picture what ten pounds of marijuana even
Speaker 1: looks like. That's a trafficking volume, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Precisely, ten pounds is a massive, bulky amount of narcotics
Speaker 2: in South Dakota that carries severe felony weight. And he
Speaker 2: had a formal sentencing date looming on the calendar for
Speaker 2: late May.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, so the timing is everything it is.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the psychology of a situation. You have
Speaker 2: a man whose physical freedom is actively being threatened by
Speaker 2: the state. He is experiencing a total catastrophic loss of
Speaker 2: control in his legal and financial life.
Speaker 1: Right, He's about to go to prison.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And precisely at the moment the walls are closing
Speaker 2: in on his freedom, he realizes he has also lost
Speaker 2: control over his family structure back home in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: That is a dangerous combination.
Speaker 2: Incredibly dangerous. The psychological concept here is that when a
Speaker 2: highly controlling individual loses agency in one major arena of
Speaker 2: their life, they will often violently overcompensate by tightening their
Speaker 2: grip on whatever they can still reach.
Speaker 1: And the kids were what he could reach exactly.
Speaker 2: They became the only things he felt he could still dominate.
Speaker 1: So that external legal pressure is the spark that likes
Speaker 1: the powder keg. Because just days after that drug conviction
Speaker 1: in South Dakota, the digital and physical stocking of Sadian
Speaker 1: Rosalio begins in Earnest.
Speaker 2: It rams up so fast it does.
Speaker 1: The source material details the purchase of two separate GPS
Speaker 1: tracking devices. But Anderson didn't just log into his own
Speaker 1: computer and buy them with his own credit card on
Speaker 1: his own account.
Speaker 2: No, he was way too careful for that right.
Speaker 1: He bought them through an online retail account that was
Speaker 1: explicitly tied to his young daughter.
Speaker 2: Which is a brilliant, if deeply manipulative layer of digital obfuscation.
Speaker 2: I mean, he is using his own child's digital footprint
Speaker 2: to mask his surveillance purchases.
Speaker 1: It's sickening.
Speaker 2: It is because if law enforcement ever subpoenaed the purchase history,
Speaker 2: they would initially see a child's account, not he is.
Speaker 2: It is a profound crossing of boundaries, utilizing a miner
Speaker 2: as a digital shield for illicit behavior.
Speaker 1: And the escalation is just rapid from there. Shortly after
Speaker 1: those trackers are purchased. Sadie wakes up in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night her doorbell is ringing. She goes to
Speaker 1: the window only to see a dark vehicle speeding.
Speaker 2: Away into the night, just letting her know he's there.
Speaker 1: Exactly around that exact same time, Rosalio makes a disturbing discovery.
Speaker 1: Personal papers, along with his vehicle registration are suddenly missing
Speaker 1: from the interior of his car.
Speaker 2: Someone was inside his vehicle.
Speaker 1: Yes, Sadie starts feeling this creeping, suffocating paranoia because Anderson
Speaker 1: suddenly knows things he couldn't possibly know through normal conversation.
Speaker 1: He knows what outfit she wore on a specific Tuesday.
Speaker 1: He knows what she was doing inside the privacy of
Speaker 1: her own living room.
Speaker 2: That is terrifying.
Speaker 1: And then the paranoia is completely validated. A burner phone
Speaker 1: is found hidden beneath a child's booster seat inside Sadie's car. Oh, man,
Speaker 1: I really want you, the listener, to just pause and
Speaker 1: consider the physical logistics and audacity of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, think about what it takes to do that.
Speaker 1: He didn't just slap a magnetic tracker onto the undercarriage
Speaker 1: of her bumper while she was in a grocery store,
Speaker 1: he opened her car door, he reached into the exact
Speaker 1: physical space where his own child sits, lifted the safety seat,
Speaker 1: and planted a listening or tracking device underneath it to
Speaker 1: monitor his ex partner.
Speaker 2: The physical intrusion into the child space is staggering. And
Speaker 2: when that specific burner phone goes missing, when Sadie finds
Speaker 2: it and removes it, his reaction is incredibly telling.
Speaker 1: He didn't handle it well, did he?
Speaker 2: Not at all? He doesn't play it cool. He becomes
Speaker 2: completely frantic. He is contacting her relentlessly, desperate to know
Speaker 2: if she found a phone in her.
Speaker 1: Car, because he lost his ear to the ground exactly.
Speaker 2: And when law enforcement eventually gets involved and questions him
Speaker 2: about this specific device, his defense is astonishingly weak. He
Speaker 2: claims to the police that the phone simply fill out
Speaker 2: of his pocket while he was standing near her car.
Speaker 1: That defies the laws of physics completely. I mean, a
Speaker 1: burner phone doesn't just fall out of a pair of jeans,
Speaker 1: bounce through an open car door, navigate her on a seatbelt,
Speaker 1: and wedge itself securely underneath the molded plastic of a
Speaker 1: child's booster seat.
Speaker 2: Right, It is a geographically impossible excuse, Yes, but the
Speaker 2: fact that he offered such a flimsy, illogical lie highlights
Speaker 2: his absolute desperation.
Speaker 1: He was panicking, he was.
Speaker 2: Caught red handed in the act of surveillance, and his
Speaker 2: need to maintain a grip on her movements completely overrode
Speaker 2: his ability to construct a believable alibi.
Speaker 1: Which brings us directly back to that harrowing scene we
Speaker 1: opened with the window incident. Because he wasn't just relying
Speaker 1: on electronics from big box retailers. He was weaponizing his
Speaker 1: own flesh.
Speaker 2: And blood using his daughter. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He walks his young daughter up to the cold glass,
Speaker 1: tells her to cover her mouth so the condensation doesn't
Speaker 1: alert the people inside, and forces her to spy on
Speaker 1: her mother and Rosalo.
Speaker 2: It's just so sad it is.
Speaker 1: He had also previously handed the same child a phone
Speaker 1: implicitly instructed her to hit record whenever her mother got
Speaker 1: upset or argued. He even allegedly planted a recording device
Speaker 1: near the air conditioning unit outside Sadie's house.
Speaker 2: The AC unit trap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was trying to figure out how that would
Speaker 1: even work. Why an AC.
Speaker 2: Unit, Well, it has to do with the acoustics and
Speaker 2: airflow of an HVAC system. An air conditioning condenser unit
Speaker 2: sits outside, but it is connected to the dutch work
Speaker 2: inside the house. Okay, if you place a sensitive microphone
Speaker 2: near the intake or the structural penetration with the lines
Speaker 2: go into the house, the physical duct work can actually
Speaker 2: act like a megaphone.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
Speaker 2: It carries the vibrational sounds of voices from inside the
Speaker 2: house out to the exterior. It's an old school, highly
Speaker 2: technical eavesdropping method, and it again points directly back to
Speaker 2: his audio, visual and construction background. He understands how sound
Speaker 2: travels through a building's infrastructure.
Speaker 1: It's just so calculating, you know. When we look at
Speaker 1: this relentless pattern, the trackers, the ac audio traps, making
Speaker 1: his kid hold her breath at a window, it is
Speaker 1: incredibly tempting to reach for a clinical label.
Speaker 2: Sure people want to diagnose him.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You hear words like psychopath, sociopath, or a malignant
Speaker 1: narcissist thrown around constantly in true crime media.
Speaker 2: They do get thrown around, But we have to be
Speaker 2: incredibly careful here. The source material is definitive on this point.
Speaker 2: There are no public medical or psychiatric records offering a
Speaker 2: formal diagnosis for Zacharia Anderson. We cannot and ethically should
Speaker 2: not give him a clinical armchair diagnosis from AFAR. Instead
Speaker 2: of focusing on a medical label, we have to focus
Speaker 2: entirely on the mechanics of the behavior itself.
Speaker 1: The behavior is loud enough exactly.
Speaker 2: This is a man who is entirely fundamentally unable to
Speaker 2: tolerate losing the narrative of his family. He ceases to
Speaker 2: be a former partner navigating the difficult emotional terrain of
Speaker 2: a breakup. He shifts entirely into the role of a warden.
Speaker 1: A warden.
Speaker 2: Yes, he is actively policing her physical borders, he is
Speaker 2: monitoring her digital communications, and he is conscripting their chilln
Speaker 2: to act as his prison guards.
Speaker 1: A warden. That is the perfect distillation of his behavior.
Speaker 1: He even terrified a friend of Sadi's who occasionally babysat
Speaker 1: the kids.
Speaker 2: Oh I remember this part.
Speaker 1: Yeah, This poor woman woke up in the middle of
Speaker 1: the night in Sadie's house to find Zachariah Anderson literally
Speaker 1: looming over her in the pitch dark, demanding to know
Speaker 1: where Sadie.
Speaker 2: Was inside the house.
Speaker 1: Inside the house, The situation escalated to the point where
Speaker 1: someone had to call for emergency help because his physical
Speaker 1: presence was so threatening.
Speaker 2: It's just escalating and escalating.
Speaker 1: But here is the terrifying reality of coercive control. This
Speaker 1: pattern of escalating surveillance is constant tightening of the net.
Speaker 1: It inevitably has to break.
Speaker 2: It can't last forever.
Speaker 1: Exactly, you cannot maintain that high wire act of obsession
Speaker 1: without it eventually spilling over into a physical confrontation. The
Speaker 1: watcher eventually has to step out of the shadows, and
Speaker 1: that causality brings the timeline to those fateful days in
Speaker 1: mid May.
Speaker 2: The transition from surveillance to violence is almost always triggered
Speaker 2: by a received loss at the target.
Speaker 1: So let's carefully map out the last normal moments of
Speaker 1: Roussalio Gatera's's life. It is a weekend in mid May.
Speaker 1: He spends the daylight hours with Sadie and his kids.
Speaker 2: A totally normal day.
Speaker 1: By all accounts, it is a perfectly normal, happy, uneventful day.
Speaker 1: The next evening, he is back at his own apartment.
Speaker 1: He speaks to a female friend on his cell phone.
Speaker 1: The call happens around eight point four nine pm eight.
Speaker 2: Point four nine pm. That's the anchor point.
Speaker 1: Right during that call, he is alive, he is well,
Speaker 1: he is relaxed, and he is rooted in his normal
Speaker 1: evening routine. And then the timeline completely.
Speaker 2: Fractures right after that call.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a neighbor who shares a wall in his apartment
Speaker 1: building recalls hearing a sudden, incredibly loud bang that night.
Speaker 1: They describe it to investigators as sounding like something heavy
Speaker 1: and substantial being violently forced against the shared dry wall.
Speaker 2: And this specific moment is where the timeline becomes incredibly fragile,
Speaker 2: because it hinges on a tiny, almost imperceptible mistake of navigation.
Speaker 1: You're talking about the other visitor.
Speaker 2: Yes, there was another woman, a woman named Narata Machias,
Speaker 2: who had made plans to meet up with Rosalio at
Speaker 2: his apartment that very night, but when she drove to
Speaker 2: see him, it was dark. She was unfamiliar with the complex,
Speaker 2: and she went to the wrong apartment building by mistake, she.
Speaker 1: Was physically in the wrong place exactly. I want to
Speaker 1: stop and look at the math of that mistake for
Speaker 1: a second, because why does a woman knocking on the
Speaker 1: wrong door matter so much to a murder investigation?
Speaker 2: Because In a circumstantial case, timeline is absolutely everything. If
Speaker 2: you don't have a body to determine a time of death,
Speaker 2: you rely on the last known interactions.
Speaker 1: Right, You need to lock down the minutes exactly.
Speaker 2: If Mackias had gone to the Corets apartment, she might
Speaker 2: have interrupted the crime. She might have seen Anderson, or
Speaker 2: she might have arrived and found the door open in
Speaker 2: the scene bloody establishing an exact time of the event.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But because she went to the wrong building, her
Speaker 2: testimony about what she saw and heard and exactly when
Speaker 2: she was there became.
Speaker 1: Because she wasn't actually outside his door.
Speaker 2: Right. If she says she arrived at nine pm and
Speaker 2: heard nothing, but the neighbor swears they heard a violent
Speaker 2: bang at nine to fifteen pm, the defense attorney suddenly
Speaker 2: has a fifteen minute window to introduce reasonable doubt.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's brilliant for the defense.
Speaker 2: It is they can look at the jury and say,
Speaker 2: the state's own witnesses can't agree on when this happened.
Speaker 2: Maybe someone else slipped in during that fifteen minute gap.
Speaker 2: A tiny navigational error by a guest creates a massive
Speaker 2: fault line in the prosecution's chronological.
Speaker 1: Narrative that makes the stakes of every single minute so clear.
Speaker 1: So after that loud bang against the wall, Rosalio goes
Speaker 1: completely silent. He stops answering text messages, he stops answering
Speaker 1: phone call.
Speaker 2: He's just gone.
Speaker 1: The sun comes up, and he doesn't show up for
Speaker 1: his construction job, which is highly out of character. And
Speaker 1: on that exact same rainy morning, while Rosalio is inexplicably
Speaker 1: missing from his life, surveillance cameras capture Zachariah Anderson walking
Speaker 1: through the sliding doors of a big box store in Sockville.
Speaker 1: This is the Walmart trip, Yes, and I was looking
Speaker 1: at the details of the shopping trip and it stopped
Speaker 1: me in my tracks. Let's meticulously unpack his cart. It
Speaker 1: is raining heavily outside, yet Anderson walks into the store
Speaker 1: wearing a jacket and flip flops.
Speaker 2: Which is an odd choice for heavy rain.
Speaker 1: Very odd. He goes to the register and pays for
Speaker 1: everything entirely in cash, leaving no direct digital bank trail.
Speaker 1: And let's look at the items he is buying. Two
Speaker 1: boxes of thirteen gallon garbage bags, large containers of chlorox wipes,
Speaker 1: two packages of heavy duty large gloves, cotton swabs, old spice,
Speaker 1: hygiene products, a personal shaver, and three tins of sardines.
Speaker 1: The sardines can't get past the sardines. You were buying
Speaker 1: a textbook murder cleanup kit and you throw in a snack.
Speaker 2: Well, it is the single detail that catches every investigator
Speaker 2: and jury member completely off guard.
Speaker 1: It's so weird.
Speaker 2: It is in a cart full of industrial cleaning supplies,
Speaker 2: gloves to protect hands from chemicals, bleach wipes to destroy DNA,
Speaker 2: large bags for trans swabs for getting into tight architectural corners.
Speaker 2: You have this incredibly pungent, specific food item. Now the
Speaker 2: defense would argue it's just a mundane craving a man
Speaker 2: running errands who happens to like fish. But given the
Speaker 2: context of what prosecutors allege he was doing that morning,
Speaker 2: we have to look at the biology of scent.
Speaker 1: Masking exactly why sardines Specifically.
Speaker 2: Sardines are packed in fish oil, and they contain highly
Speaker 2: volatile organic compounds, specifically amines. When fifth degrades even slightly,
Speaker 2: it produces a smell that is overwhelmingly powerful to the
Speaker 2: mammalian olfactory system. It stinks, basically violently stinks. If you
Speaker 2: are a demolition worker trying to transport biological material that
Speaker 2: you desperately do not want a cadaver dog or a
Speaker 2: passing patrol officer to smell. Masking that scent becomes your
Speaker 2: number one priority.
Speaker 1: And cadaver dogs are incredibly sensitive.
Speaker 2: They are cadaver dogs are trained to detect putrescine and cadaverine,
Speaker 2: which are the chemicals of human decomposition. But if you
Speaker 2: saturate an environment with aerosolized fish oil or amine heavy compounds,
Speaker 2: you can potentially overwhelm the canine's olfactory receptors wow, or
Speaker 2: at least create enough sensory confusion to pass a cursory inspection.
Speaker 1: The biological calculation behind that is terrifying. You're buying materials
Speaker 1: to erase the physical evidence of a crime scene, and
Speaker 1: you throw in a chemical masking agent from the grocery aisle.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly thorough.
Speaker 1: It is. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. Rosolio misses work
Speaker 1: for a second consecutive day. His cars have not moved
Speaker 1: an inch from the apartment complex parking lot. Finally, concerned
Speaker 1: relatives call the police to conduct a formal welfare check
Speaker 1: just after eleven.
Speaker 2: Zero am and that's when they find it.
Speaker 1: Yes, the officers arrive, knock, get no answer, and make entry,
Speaker 1: and when they walk into his apartment, they step into
Speaker 1: an absolute horror scene.
Speaker 2: The visual evidence left behind painted a picture of absolute
Speaker 2: kinetic chaos. The patiodor was left wide open to the elements.
Speaker 1: Just blowing in the wind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the heavy furnature in the living room was entirely displaced,
Speaker 2: pushed violently aside as if a massive frantic physical struggle
Speaker 2: had occurred across the floor plan.
Speaker 1: And most bizarrely, a very large area rug was completely
Speaker 1: missing from the floor, just.
Speaker 2: Gone, which is a huge red flag.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to picture the physical logistics of this. If
Speaker 1: you wrap a grown man in a large area rug,
Speaker 1: how heavy is that? Is it even physically possible for
Speaker 1: one guy to carry that down an apartment Stairwell, let's.
Speaker 2: Do the math on the physics of it. A healthy
Speaker 2: adult male like Rosalio weighs roughly one hundred and eighty
Speaker 2: to two hundred pounds. Okay, a large, high quality area
Speaker 2: rug can easily weigh forty to sixty pounds on its own.
Speaker 2: You were talking about manipulating roughly two hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: pounds of dead, awkward, shifting weight that is incredibly heavy.
Speaker 2: It is rolling that up, securing it and maneuvering it
Speaker 2: out of an apartment complex without drawing the attention of
Speaker 2: neighbors requires tremendous sustained physical exertion. It requires knowing how
Speaker 2: to leverage weight, how to pivot heavy loads around door frames.
Speaker 1: Which goes back to his background exactly.
Speaker 2: It speaks directly to that physical demolition and contracting background
Speaker 2: we discussed earlier. He hauled heavy materials for a living.
Speaker 2: But while he could haul away the rug, what he
Speaker 2: couldn't completely remove was the blood.
Speaker 1: The blood evidence is what makes the missing rug so ominous.
Speaker 1: Investigators found blood smeared on a door, blood cast off
Speaker 1: onto the ceiling, and blood pooled across multiple surfaces in
Speaker 1: the living area.
Speaker 2: It was everywhere.
Speaker 1: It was a crime scene. Expert later testified that the
Speaker 1: specific spatter patterns indicated at least seven separate blood producing events.
Speaker 1: This was not a single, clean, accidental strike.
Speaker 2: No, this was a fight.
Speaker 1: This was a sustained, violent, chaotic, close quarter struggle that
Speaker 1: moved across the room.
Speaker 2: And to add a deeply eerie modern technological layer to
Speaker 2: the physical scene, Rosalio's cell phone wasn't missing.
Speaker 1: With him, right, they found it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, relatives eventually found it hidden deep inside the refrigerator.
Speaker 1: So refrigerator, why put a phone in there? Was he
Speaker 1: trying to muffle the ringing fling sound?
Speaker 2: Is one possibility, But there's a much more technical reason,
Speaker 2: especially for an av technician. A modern refrigerator acts as
Speaker 2: a rudimentary Faraday cage.
Speaker 1: A Faraday cage, right, It is a.
Speaker 2: Thick metal line box designed to insulate temperature. But that
Speaker 2: dense metal also heavily degrades or completely blocks cellular and
Speaker 2: GPS signals.
Speaker 1: Oh, that is smart, It's very smart.
Speaker 2: If you want to immediately sever a phone's connection to
Speaker 2: the network so it can't be pinged by cell towers,
Speaker 2: but you don't want to carry it with you and
Speaker 2: risk it connecting to towers along your escape.
Speaker 1: Route, you just toss it in the fridge.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Tossing it into a metal refrigerator is a rapid,
Speaker 2: highly effective way to silence its digital footprint.
Speaker 1: That is a chilling application of technical knowledge in the
Speaker 1: heat of a murder. But the overarching screaming question when
Speaker 1: you look at that apartment remains if the scene looks
Speaker 1: like a slaughterhouse. Where is the victim?
Speaker 2: Where is Rosellio?
Speaker 1: The apartment is totally empty, Rosalio is gone, and because
Speaker 1: they don't have a body, the police are forced to
Speaker 1: build their case backward, working from the suspect's life. They
Speaker 1: immediately turn the full force of their focus onto Zachariah Anderson.
Speaker 2: And they start executing search warrants on his physical assets.
Speaker 2: Let's list the concrete physical evidence they eventually tied to him. First,
Speaker 2: they impound his work minivan. When forensic investigators open the doors,
Speaker 2: they find that a large section of the interior carpeting
Speaker 2: has been completely ripped out and removed down to the
Speaker 2: bare metal floorboards.
Speaker 1: That's incredibly suspicious.
Speaker 2: Furthermore, the interior of the vehicle absolutely reeks of chemical bleach.
Speaker 1: Reeks of it. Next, they move to his property in Mikuon.
Speaker 1: Because he operates as a contractor, he has a legal
Speaker 1: city issued permit for a controlled burn pit on his
Speaker 1: land to dispose of construction waste, which is convenient very
Speaker 1: but when police inspect the specific pit, they find it
Speaker 1: has been recently intensely used. Sifting through the ashes, they
Speaker 1: find heavily heat damaged bleach containers and the charred, burned
Speaker 1: remnants of clothing.
Speaker 2: And then they brought the dogs in.
Speaker 1: Yes, a specialized cadaver dog is brought in and the
Speaker 1: handler reports that the dog alerts to the scent of
Speaker 1: human remains in the general area of this pit.
Speaker 2: And that isn't the only site they find. They also
Speaker 2: execute a search warrant on his family's sprawling tree farm
Speaker 2: in the Sackville area. They locate a second recently used
Speaker 2: burn site.
Speaker 1: There two burn sites.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the exact same property where his young
Speaker 2: daughter later testified she had seen him do a chainsaw
Speaker 2: in the days following the disappearance, allegedly telling her it
Speaker 2: was for relatives to.
Speaker 1: Repair a chainsaw. So you have ripped carpet, bleach, multiple
Speaker 1: burn pits, and a chainsaw. Law enforcement even spent days
Speaker 1: searching a massive nearby commercial landfill, coming through literal mountains
Speaker 1: of compacted garbage with heavy machinery, desperately looking for Rosalglio's
Speaker 1: remains or any discarded bloody evidence. But they found absolutely.
Speaker 2: Nothing good thing at all.
Speaker 1: They are left with a collection of highly suspicious but
Speaker 1: ultimately circumstantial items, which forces us to ask, how on
Speaker 1: earth does a prosecutor prove to a jury that a
Speaker 1: burned bleach bottle and a missing piece of carpet actually
Speaker 1: equate to first degree intentional homicide.
Speaker 2: When there are alternative explanations for almost all of it.
Speaker 2: Exactly well, that gap between suspicion and proof is exactly
Speaker 2: where a skilled defense team plants their flag. Anderson's lawyers
Speaker 2: launched a brilliant, incredibly aggressive strategy to unravel this circumstantial web,
Speaker 2: thread by individual thread.
Speaker 1: How did they do it.
Speaker 2: They didn't just deny the evidence. They systematically offered a
Speaker 2: highly plausible alternative reality for every single piece of it.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's start with the blood in the apartment, right.
Speaker 2: The defense viciously attacked the credibility of the state's analysis.
Speaker 2: They pointed out to the jury that the specific police
Speaker 2: officer who interpreted the blood spatter patterns, the one who
Speaker 2: confidently claimed there were seven distinct violent events, only had
Speaker 2: about forty hours of formal training in bloodstained pattern analysis.
Speaker 1: Wait, forty hours, that's it.
Speaker 2: That's it. He was a local cop who took a
Speaker 2: week long seminar. Are not a world renowned, board certified
Speaker 2: forensic scientist. They argued his interpretation of the chaos was
Speaker 2: entirely speculative and shouldn't be trusted as scientific fact.
Speaker 1: That casts immediate doubt on the severity of the scene.
Speaker 1: But what about the mini van. How do you explain
Speaker 1: away a van that smells like a swimming pool and
Speaker 1: is missing its.
Speaker 2: Carpet by attacking the chemistry. The prosecution use chemical presumptive
Speaker 2: tests inside the van, chemicals like luminol or phenol phalin
Speaker 2: that reacted and changed color to indicate the possible presence
Speaker 2: of blood.
Speaker 1: Right they glow or turn pink.
Speaker 2: But the defense countered with an unassailable scientific fact. Those
Speaker 2: specific presumptive blood tests look for the iron and hemoglobin
Speaker 2: by triggering an oxidation reaction. However, household bleach is a massive,
Speaker 2: incredibly powerful oxidizing agent.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, so the bleach triggered the tests exactly.
Speaker 2: So if Zacharia Anderson was simply cleaning his dirty construction
Speaker 2: van with chlorox wipes, which we know he bought at Walmart,
Speaker 2: the chemical test gets the bleach, oxidizes the chemical and
Speaker 2: it lights up bright pink or blue, exactly as if
Speaker 2: it were a bloodbath.
Speaker 1: The defense argued the state was testing cleaning supplies, not
Speaker 1: murder evidence.
Speaker 2: Yes, Now, the state did find one tiny microscopic pinhead
Speaker 2: size stain in the van that yielded a DNA profile
Speaker 2: connected to Rosalio, But on cross examination, even the state's
Speaker 2: own DNA analyst had to admit they couldn't confirm with
Speaker 2: absolute scientific certainty that the substance was definitively blood as
Speaker 2: opposed to sweat, saliva, or another fluid transferred innocuously during
Speaker 2: a previous interaction.
Speaker 1: That is some incredible reasonable doubt. They dismantled the digital
Speaker 1: stalking evidence using a similar tactic, didn't they Precisely?
Speaker 2: The state had the digital receipts showing Anderson bought GPS
Speaker 2: tracking devices on his daughter's account, but the defense highlighted
Speaker 2: a glaring physical gap. Law enforcement searched Rosalio's vehicles top
Speaker 2: to bottom and never actually found those specific trackers.
Speaker 1: They weren't there.
Speaker 2: Buying a piece of electronics at a store not a crime.
Speaker 2: Proving beyond a reasonable doubt that it was planted, utilized,
Speaker 2: and monitored is much much harder without the physical device
Speaker 2: in hand.
Speaker 1: But looking over the trial transcripts, I think the biggest,
Speaker 1: most glaring gap the defense exploited was Zachariah Anderson's own
Speaker 1: physical appearance.
Speaker 2: Yes, this was huge.
Speaker 1: Police encountered him and interviewed him shortly after the disappearance.
Speaker 1: This is a guy, the state claims, just committed a horrific, bloody,
Speaker 1: close quarters murder in an apartment, engaged in a massive
Speaker 1: physical struggle, and rolled a two hundred pound man into
Speaker 1: a rug. Right, and yet the clothes he was wearing
Speaker 1: that week and his physical body had absolutely zero visible
Speaker 1: blood on them. There were no scratches on his face,
Speaker 1: no defensive wounds on his hands or arms noted by police.
Speaker 2: Nothing. He was clean.
Speaker 1: The defense forced the prosecutors to essentially invent a theory
Speaker 1: where Anderson is some sort of forensic supervillain. They had
Speaker 1: to argue that he committed a brutal, messy assault, rolled
Speaker 1: up a body, moved it out of a building, tore
Speaker 1: out his van's carpet, burned evidence, and perfectly cleaned his
Speaker 1: own body, all without leaving a single speck of physical
Speaker 1: evidence on his person and without a single eyewitness seeing
Speaker 1: him do any of it.
Speaker 2: It is often called the perfect cleanup theory in legal circles,
Speaker 2: and defense attorneys love to mockt The defense argued that
Speaker 2: investigators developed severe tunnel vision.
Speaker 1: On day one, they just zeroed in on him.
Speaker 2: They decided Anderson was guilty because of the contentious breakup,
Speaker 2: and they retrofitted every piece of mundane blue collar life
Speaker 2: to fit a murder narrative. You have burn pits. He's
Speaker 2: a contractor who burns construction wasts, which is why he
Speaker 2: has a permit. You have cash from Walmart. He work
Speaker 2: side jobs and gets paid in cash to avoid taxes.
Speaker 1: You have ripped carpet. It's a work van that got
Speaker 1: ruined by a chemical spill.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah, everything had a plausible, innocent explanation if you
Speaker 2: just tilted your head and look at it from the
Speaker 2: defense's angle.
Speaker 1: This entire debate perfectly illustrates the complex mechanism of circumstantial
Speaker 1: evidence and how a nobody homicide actually has to work
Speaker 1: in a courtroom to be successful. Circumstantial evidence is so
Speaker 1: often misunderstood.
Speaker 2: You know, oh, absolutely, people expect a smoking gun, right.
Speaker 1: It isn't a movie where they find the murder weapon
Speaker 1: with his pristine fingerprints on the hilt. I like to
Speaker 1: think of circumstantial evidence like pixels in a digital photograph.
Speaker 2: Well, that's a good analogy.
Speaker 1: If you zoom all the way in on one single pixel,
Speaker 1: like the Walmart receipt for sardines. It's just a meaningless, blurry,
Speaker 1: gray square. The defense can easily point out it and say, look,
Speaker 1: it's just a gray square. It means nothing.
Speaker 2: That is a phenomenal analogy, because if the prosecution stays
Speaker 2: zoomed in, they lose. The prosecution's entire job is to
Speaker 2: zoom out. Yes, they have to arrange ten thousand of
Speaker 2: those blurry pixels together. The Walmart receipt, the ripped carpet,
Speaker 2: the daughter's testimony about the window, the burner phone under
Speaker 2: the booster seat, the complete lack of cell phone activity
Speaker 2: from the victim after eight point four nine pm, the
Speaker 2: cadaver dog alerting on the burn pit exact right on
Speaker 2: their own. Any single pixel is meaningless, but when you
Speaker 2: zoom out and look at the whole image, you can
Speaker 2: clearly see the high resolution picture of a murderer. You
Speaker 2: can't argue with the composite image.
Speaker 1: And the prosecution's goal is to make that image so
Speaker 1: clear that it convinces a jury of one inescapable truth.
Speaker 1: Rosilio Gatiraz did not just walk away from his thriving life.
Speaker 1: His beloved children, and his church community and his construction job. No,
Speaker 1: he didn't, And Zacharia Anderson is the only person on
Speaker 1: earth who had the obsessive motive, the timeline window, and
Speaker 1: the physical skills to ensure he never came back.
Speaker 2: But taking a fragile, purely circumstantial web of keixels to
Speaker 2: a jury in a murder trial is a massive gamble
Speaker 2: with justice. You are rolling the dice with a family's closure,
Speaker 2: You really are, And that tension sets the stage perfectly
Speaker 2: for what happened next the court room, theatrics, the legal maneuvering,
Speaker 2: and ultimately the verdict. Because this case didn't just go
Speaker 2: to trial. Once it went to trial.
Speaker 1: Twice, the first trial collapsed, didn't it.
Speaker 2: It did, and it classed entirely because of that fragile
Speaker 2: timeline mathematics we mentioned earlier With Neurotomchias.
Speaker 1: The woman who went to the wrong apartment building.
Speaker 2: Right, she took the stand to testify, but her testimony
Speaker 2: on the stand about the exact sequence of events and
Speaker 2: exactly what she saw and heard that night shifted subtly
Speaker 2: from what she had previously stated in police reports. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the defense attorneys instantly pounced. They argued that they were
Speaker 2: totally blindsided by this altered account, and worse, they claimed
Speaker 2: the prosecutors had known about this discrepancy in her memory
Speaker 2: for months without properly disclosing it to the defense.
Speaker 1: Team, which is a huge deal.
Speaker 2: Is a massive violation of the Brady rule regarding the
Speaker 2: discovery of evidence. The judge agreed that this sudden shift
Speaker 2: compromised the fundamental fairness of the preceding and he declared
Speaker 2: a mistrial. They had to pack up all the evidence
Speaker 2: and start all over.
Speaker 1: Again, which is psychologically devastating for a victim's family. You know,
Speaker 1: to gear up for a murder trial, sit in the
Speaker 1: gallery and watch it evaporate on a procedural technicality.
Speaker 2: It's agonizing.
Speaker 1: But the state regrew refines their timeline and the second
Speaker 1: trial kicks off roughly a year later. And if the
Speaker 1: first trial ended in a procedural fizzle, the second trial
Speaker 1: was absolute, unbridled chaos.
Speaker 2: Pure chaos.
Speaker 1: It featured a vicious battle of jail house informants. The
Speaker 1: prosecution brings forward an inmate named Markwan Washington. He takes
Speaker 1: the stand and testifies that while they were incarcerated together
Speaker 1: awaiting trial, Zachariah Anderson explicitly confessed to him, describing in
Speaker 1: graphic detail how he repeatedly stabbed Rosolio.
Speaker 2: Jail house informants are notoriously tricky pieces of evidence, and
Speaker 2: prosecutors use them at their own peril. Juries are inherently
Speaker 2: deeply skeptical of them because they understand the prison economy right.
Speaker 1: They know people trade info exactly.
Speaker 2: Inmates often trade fabricated testimony for lighter sentences, better sell conditions,
Speaker 2: or cash in their commissary accounts. The defense anticipated this beautifully.
Speaker 1: How do they counter it?
Speaker 2: They didn't just cross examine Markwan Washington the point out
Speaker 2: as incentives. They brought in another inmate to actively testify against.
Speaker 1: Him, the counter informant.
Speaker 2: Yes, this second inmate took this stand and declared to
Speaker 2: the jury that Washington was a chronic, pathological liar who
Speaker 2: had a known documented habit of trying to insert himself
Speaker 2: into other prisoners' high profile media cases, specifically to gain
Speaker 2: favor with the guards and prosecutors. Wow, it was a
Speaker 2: complete muddying of the waters, turning the trial into a
Speaker 2: referendum on who you believe less, the alleged killer or
Speaker 2: the snitch.
Speaker 1: And the drama wasn't just confined to the inmates on
Speaker 1: the witness stand, it bled over to the prosecution table itself.
Speaker 1: At one point in the trial, the district Attorney himself,
Speaker 1: Michael Gravely, was actually removed from the courtroom during testimony.
Speaker 1: That is almost unheard of, right because DA Gravely had
Speaker 1: been personally directly involved in interviewing Murta mckeas early in
Speaker 1: the initial police investigation. The judge determined that there was
Speaker 1: a legal risk the DA might have to become a
Speaker 1: witness in his own case to clarify what she said,
Speaker 1: so he had to physically step out of the room.
Speaker 1: That was wild, and later the tension reached a boiling
Speaker 1: point when the defense explicitly accused Dia Gravely of literally
Speaker 1: mouthing words to the informant, Mark Jan Washington while the
Speaker 1: informant was on the stand struggling with his testimony.
Speaker 2: The DA vehemently denied the accusation on the record. Of course,
Speaker 2: of course, the judge ultimately allowed the jury to weigh
Speaker 2: the accusation themselves, rather than throwing out the informant's testimony entirely.
Speaker 2: But that moment paints a vivid picture of an incredibly tense,
Speaker 2: combative almost toxic courtroom environment. Every single inch of legal
Speaker 2: ground was being violently contested by both sides.
Speaker 1: Amidst all this aggressive legal maneuvering, the shouted objections over informants,
Speaker 1: of the debates over bleach chemistry, we have to bring
Speaker 1: the focus back to the deeply human element of the strategy.
Speaker 2: We really do.
Speaker 1: The emotional core of this trial wasn't the blood spatter
Speaker 1: on the ceiling or the ripped minivan carpet. The absolute
Speaker 1: emotional core was Zachariah Anderson's teenage daughter taking the witness stand.
Speaker 2: That was just heart wrenching.
Speaker 1: Imagine the crushing psychological weight on this young girl sitting
Speaker 1: in a packed courtroom, testifying in a murder trial against
Speaker 1: her own father. And while she is up there speaking
Speaker 1: to the court about the window incident and the burner phones,
Speaker 1: prosecutors observe Anderson sitting at the defense table, actively making
Speaker 1: facial expressions and gestures stored.
Speaker 2: Her, seemingly trying to intimidate her or influence her answers
Speaker 2: in real time.
Speaker 1: Yes, the judge actually had to stop the proceeding and
Speaker 1: address his behavior on the public record.
Speaker 2: It is a profound, chilling continuation of the exact control
Speaker 2: dynamics we discussed at the very beginning. Even in a
Speaker 2: courtroom with his life on the line, surrounded by armed
Speaker 2: bayliss and a judge, he is still fundamentally unable to
Speaker 2: let go.
Speaker 1: He still thinks he's the warden exactly.
Speaker 2: He is still attempting to manipulate his child's narrative. But
Speaker 2: despite his staring, her voice could not be silenced, and
Speaker 2: her statement at his eventual sentencing hearing was perhaps the
Speaker 2: most devastating piercing analysis of his character heard throughout the
Speaker 2: entire multi year proceeding.
Speaker 1: She stood up in that courtroom, looked at the men
Speaker 1: who raised her, and questioned the fundamental nature of their
Speaker 1: entire relationship. She asked out loud to the judge if
Speaker 1: her father had ever truly loved her as a human being,
Speaker 1: as an independent daughter, or if he had simply viewed
Speaker 1: her as an extension of himself upon on a chess board,
Speaker 1: exactly a tool to be used to maintain surveillance and
Speaker 1: control over her mother. She told him directly that she
Speaker 1: had lost all confidence in him as a parent. It
Speaker 1: absolutely breaks your heart listening to a child vocalized the
Speaker 1: realization that her parent weaponized her innocence for a vendetta.
Speaker 2: It strips away all the complex legal jargon, the Brady violations,
Speaker 2: and the forensic chemistry, and he gets down to the
Speaker 2: absolute rot at the center of the case. The tragedy
Speaker 2: wasn't just that he took Rosalio's life. It was that
Speaker 2: he was entirely willing to destroy the psychological well being
Speaker 2: and fundamental trust of his own children to satisfy his
Speaker 2: obsessive need for control.
Speaker 1: The jury absorbed all of this. They sat through the
Speaker 1: circumstantial evidence, the chaotic shifting timeline, the dueling jailhouse snitches,
Speaker 1: and the heartbreaking family dynamics. When they finally got the case,
Speaker 1: it took them roughly ten hours of methodical, intense deliberation
Speaker 1: in that.
Speaker 2: Jury room, which is a decent amount of time.
Speaker 1: And you can tell they took their duty incredibly seriously
Speaker 1: because on the very first day of deliberations, they spent
Speaker 1: five full hours just asking the judge complex legal questions,
Speaker 1: specifically about the stocking charges.
Speaker 2: Right, they were working through the pixels.
Speaker 1: They weren't just rubber stamping the homicide charge and going home.
Speaker 1: They were building that composite image themselves. Pixeled by pixel
Speaker 1: thread by thread. Ultimately, they returned to the courtroom and
Speaker 1: found Zacharai Anderson guilty on all counts, first degree intentional homicide,
Speaker 1: hiding a corpse, and stalking both Sadie and Rosalio.
Speaker 2: The sentence handed down by the judge reflected the absolute
Speaker 2: severity of the complete, zoomed.
Speaker 1: Out picture what was the breakdown.
Speaker 2: The judge gave him consecutive sentences for the stalking and
Speaker 2: corpsegighting charges, culminating in a mandatory life sentence for the
Speaker 2: first degree homicide. Crucially, the judge structured the penalties so
Speaker 2: that Anderson is not even legally eligible to seek a
Speaker 2: release petition until he has served forty full years of
Speaker 2: that life.
Speaker 1: Term, meaning he will be well into his nineties before
Speaker 1: he even sniffs the air of a parole board hearing.
Speaker 2: If he makes it that long, the gavel.
Speaker 1: Falls, the courtroom clears out, the news cameras pack up,
Speaker 1: and a man is locked away in a concrete cell
Speaker 1: for the rest of his natural life. But that brings
Speaker 1: us to the agonizing transition of this reality. What happens
Speaker 1: after the gavel falls and the legal system declares a victory.
Speaker 2: Right, Because the story isn't really over.
Speaker 1: The state has its hard fought conviction. The architect of
Speaker 1: the crime is in a cage, but a family in
Speaker 1: Kenosha is still missing their son.
Speaker 2: And that is the haunting, unresolved reality of a nobody homicide.
Speaker 2: The legal system has reached a definitive conclusion, but the
Speaker 2: physical world has not caught up.
Speaker 1: Let's look at the aftermath where crently sitting in today,
Speaker 1: Zacharai Anderson maintains absolute, unwavering denial of all charges. He
Speaker 1: denies killing Rosalio, He denies ever stalking Sadie. He denies
Speaker 1: hiding a body.
Speaker 2: He hasn't yielded an inch from.
Speaker 1: Behind the walls of a state prison. He is still
Speaker 1: actively fighting the narrative. He recently filed a staggering ten
Speaker 1: million dollars civil lawsuit against the city of Mikuan, claiming
Speaker 1: his original arrest was procedurally improper.
Speaker 2: Acclaimed the city swiftly and aggressively rejected in court filings.
Speaker 1: By the way Right. His family is running a very public,
Speaker 1: vocal campaign declaring his absolute innocence, arguing he was railroaded
Speaker 1: by a corrupt tunnel vision justice system, and journal entries
Speaker 1: attributed to him are still making their way out to
Speaker 1: the public sphere.
Speaker 2: He's still trying to control the story.
Speaker 1: He even reportedly complained, according to a recorded jailhouse intercept
Speaker 1: mentioned by the DA during hearings, that he was furious
Speaker 1: he had to spend nearly four hundred thousand dollars on
Speaker 1: his defense team.
Speaker 2: Complaining about the financial cost of a legal defense team
Speaker 2: while the family is completely bereft of their loved one's
Speaker 2: physical remains, shows a stark, almost clinical lack of empathy.
Speaker 1: It's unbelievable.
Speaker 2: It highlights a man who is still entirely exclusively focused
Speaker 2: on his own perceived victimhood, completely blind to the devastation
Speaker 2: he cosed.
Speaker 1: It is maddening to listen to, which brings us to
Speaker 1: a final provocative thought for you, the listener to mull
Speaker 1: Over as we conclude something that builds on the tension
Speaker 1: between the law and reality that we've discussed, highlighting a
Speaker 1: deeply chilling bureaucratic paradox.
Speaker 2: This part always gets me.
Speaker 1: The jury of his peers handed down a guilty verdict
Speaker 1: for first degree murder. The judge sentenced him to life
Speaker 1: in prisons, specifically for taking a human life. Legally, the
Speaker 1: state of Wisconsin formally recognizes and enforces the fact that
Speaker 1: Rosalio Gutiraz Junior was murdered by Zachariah Anderson.
Speaker 2: But if you go to the state's official missing person
Speaker 2: registry today, you will find Rovalio Gutierrez's face staring back
Speaker 2: at you from the screen.
Speaker 1: Still there.
Speaker 2: His case is officially listed in the database is open.
Speaker 2: His physical location is listed as unknown. He is, on paper,
Speaker 2: simply a missing man. I want you to ponder that chilling,
Speaker 2: bureaucratic limbo.
Speaker 1: It's a massive contradiction.
Speaker 2: What does justice actually mean when the highest courts in
Speaker 2: the state declare a man murdered, severely, punish his killer,
Speaker 2: and close the legal book, But the administrative paperwork of
Speaker 2: that exact same state still waits for him to walk
Speaker 2: through the front door and come home. The family has
Speaker 2: no physical grave to visit on holidays. They have never
Speaker 2: been able to hold a proper funeral to say goodbye.
Speaker 2: The legal system packed up his briefcases and moved on,
Speaker 2: But the physical reality of the family remains suspended forever
Speaker 2: in that dark, unresolved void.
Speaker 1: It is a massive echoing gap between legal truth and
Speaker 1: physical truth that a family is forced to wake up
Speaker 1: and live in every single day. I want to sincerely
Speaker 1: thank you the listener for staying with us until the
Speaker 1: end of this incredibly heavy, complex exploration of human behavior.
Speaker 2: And the lawe It's a tough one to sit through.
Speaker 1: Cases like this require immense patience and a willingness to
Speaker 1: look closely into the dark corners of the justice system,
Speaker 1: and we deeply appreciate you taking that long journey with
Speaker 1: us today.
Speaker 2: If this breakdown of circumstantial evidence, the mechanisms of coercive control,
Speaker 2: and the complicated pursuit of a convition resonated with you,
Speaker 2: we encourage everyone to subscribe to the show so you
Speaker 2: don't miss our next conversation.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? It means there's always
Speaker 1: more to uncover beneath the surface of a verdict. We
Speaker 1: bid you a fond farewell until next time, and as
Speaker 1: you go about your day, think back to that cold night.
Speaker 1: We started with a breath held tight behind a small
Speaker 1: hand so the glass wouldn't fog, a child forced to
Speaker 1: look into the darkness by the very person supposed to
Speaker 1: keep her safe. The fog eventually clears on the glass,
Speaker 1: but the chill of what was seen through it never
Speaker 1: truly goes away,