and i do. i have her beautiful babies and my own. you know, you have to keep on keeping on. >> that's all for this edition of "dateline." i'm craig melvin. thank you for watching. i'm craig melvin. >> and i'm natalie morales. >> and this is "dateline." >> my dad hung up the phone. he told us jenny was gone. >> a house up in flames. the body of a woman inside. >> we have a body. i need medics. >> but it wasn't the fire that killed her. she was dead before it started. >> accidents will happen. this was no accident. >> who wanted her dead? her boyfriend say he knew. >> there's people after us. >> what does that mean? >> they're trying to get us.

>> but police knew better. >> to strangle someone is a very personal killing. that's a very angry killing. >> hello and welcome to "dateline." at first, the fatal fire that struck a young couple's home appeared to be an accident. then, investigators took a closer look. and what they discovered about this fire and this couple left them with burning suspicion. here is keith morrison. >> is everybody out of the house? >> i don't know, but it's on fire, really strong. >> the fire in the cottage on addison avenue was hungry, devoyeuring almost everything in the bedroom. >> all right. we'll have the fire department on the way. you say smoke is coming out of the windows? >> it's pouring out of some -- inside the house.

>> within minutes, firefighters knocked it down. the smoke clearing, the sooty water running in the streets. and then, as the moppup began, the word flashed out like something electric, the house was occupied. someone didn't get out. and up through the ashes, a mystery flared, like a stubborn ember glowed and smoldered and demanded an answer. the inhabitants of the rented cottage were two young, beautiful people, the sort of glossy and types you might expect to see on some reality show. their names were paul zumont and jennifer skipsy. >> she would be like, i'm knocking it out, with baby. and it's only 6:33. >> so paul seemed to be the

right kind of guy for jennifer, said roy. >> because he was an entrepreneur. and he seemed like he was a very driven person. and that's definitely a quality that jennifer was looking for. >> jordanian american paul zumot, sleek, attracted, educated, engaging, paul owned a local hangout, a cafe, unusual place by north american standards where customers could smoke flavored tobacco through water pipes called hookahs. the place, and paul, were popular. >> he's a good looking guy. you know, he looks good, he smells good, he presents well. he's witty, he's smart. and he's just affectionate. >> so love at first sight? well, maybe, said their friends. >>rom the minute that he told me about her, he always told me how wonderful she was and how

perfect. >> he was charismatic. and he liked to joke around. >> examine money? there was a lot of it around, apparently, too. and jennifer and paul, having worked hard to get it, seemed only too happy to spend it. >> when jennifer and paul first got together, paul took jennifer to new york city. >> and i remember he was like a kid in a candy store, just planning all these elaborate, wonderful things they were going to do together. >> they were passionate, these beautiful people. they both had strong personalities. their loved burned hot. jennifer was a very strong, independent woman. and she would not accept anyone disrespecting her. or even looking at her inappropriately. and work was very strong willed in that. >> me, like i always did, told him you need to be careful because girls can be evil. so he said no, she's different. i love her. i already love her. she's great.

>> and so in september of 2009, paul and jennifer moved into that charming little cottage on atson avenue here in palltyo. time to play house. paul started to think about mayorage. and for paul the's 36th birthday, jennifer planned a party full of promise. >> she invited most of his close friends to dish dash, with one of his favorite restaurants. and i think they had over a dozen people there, almost 20 people or something. and jennifer created a cute table setting. she created the perfect party for paul, cake and everything. >> in fact, people who were there described the party as almost like a wedding reception. it lasted through the evening into the wee hours of the morning. and now here it was just the very next evening and it was gone, in ashes, all of it. the excitement, the glamour, the promising future up in smoke along with the house on addison.

and the person inside -- >> we have a body. >> i need medics in place. we have a body, badly burned. >> the next day, jim schipsi was driving with his parents to a dinner engagement. his phone rang. it was an old friend. he picked it up. i said, jake, you're going to tell me something bad, aren't you? and he said, jim -- >> just kept repeating your name? >> yeah. he said it like three times i guess. i said, jake, hold on, man. i've got to pull over. i didn't want to the hear it. i didn't want to hear what he had to tell me. so i gave the phone to my dad. and he told my dad. my dad hung up the phone and he just held out his arms. me and my mom, we were all holding each other. and he told us jenny was gone.

>> it was his jennifer, his daughter who died in that fire. and now along with almost unbearable grief, something else started to burn inside jim. something searing. it was suspicion. >> you know, accidents will happen. there's a lot of tragic things that happen to a lot of people in this world. but this was no accident. it didn't have to happen. coming up, police give paul the bad news. >> i don't want how to tell you this, man, but there's a body in the house. it's been burned. >> when "dateline" continues. sm. new power... ...to fight back theraflu's powerful new formula to defeat 7 cold and flu symptoms... fast. so you can play on. theraflu expressmax. new power.

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while the deadly fire was burning at his home on addison avenue, paul zumot was at his hookah lounge just minutes away. someone called, told him about the fire. he rushed over, but could only pace back and forth as firefighters did their jobs. soon after that, he sat down with pal alto police to try and sort out what happened. though,s as you can see on the video recording of the meeting, sat is probably not the best description. paul was full of nervous energy and frantic questio. this point, nobody had told him that jennifer was in that

fire. >> i'm worried about my house. i'm worried about my girlfriend. why -- who -- what caused the fire? i don't care about this. >> i'm not sure i know any more than you do. my job is to basically talk to you and find out what exactly you know. you probably know more than me at this point. >> no, no. >> so together, police and zumot talk about the hours before the fire. where had she been? what had she and paul been doing? >> well, yesterday was my birthday. we went out. everything was fine. >> who? >> me and her and all the friends. >> who is her? >> jennifer. >> and that's your girlfriend? >> yeah. >> paul said he spent all evening in san jose at an appointment. >> then i came here. there was traffic. and i got to the cafe. that's when they open. i had to log into the computers. as soon as i sat down, i wanna

smoke. as soon as i sat down, i got called. your house is on fire. now i'm really confused, i'm really frustrated. i care less about the house because jennifer's safety. the i cannot think anything, guys. >> then paul's phone rang. it was jennifer's mother who told him she hadn't seen or heard from her daughter. you can see what happened. paul fell to pieces. >> yeah, yeah. i know, i know. i don't know. i know. i can't find her. they're not telling me anything. >> to this point, he told detectives he had been clinging to the hope that jennifer might be with her mother, anywhere, really, but at home. but she wasn't with her mother, wasn't anywhere. and that's when the officer broke this news. >> i don't know how to tell you this, man. but there's a body in the house.

it's been burned. and we have no way of knowing who that is. >> i need to get out of here. please. >> okay. and i'm trying to be as sensitive as i possibly can can be. because i derstand that this is your -- you know, i don't know that this is jennifer. >> i hope not. iope not. >> listen, we have fought confirmed who is this, okay? it's a really, really odd set of circumstances. we need to figure out, is this on purpose, is this an accident, okay?

this is just -- unfortunately, this is just the beginning for all of us, okay, to try to answer some questions. okay? >> but, of course, it had to be jennifer. and it probably wasn't an accident. as that news sank in, paul began to think about who might have wanted to harm jennifer and came up with some potentially helpful information. two brothers, hish had an and tony ganma had already threatened her, said paul. there had been a confrontation weeks earlier. >> what happened was he called me and i threatened me. i spoke in arabic. and i speak arabic fluently. >> paul said he and jennifer filed restraining orders from both brothers. >> so i know those guys like this. now, yesterday she walked home and she said, hey, somebody probably was stocking me.

>> had the brothers killed her, too? police listened, took some notes. and then, just as a precaution, of course, had paul give them his clothes for forensic testing. questioned by police, his home destroyed, his girlfriend dead, paul zumot was very much in shock said his friend. >> his mind was are they sure jennifer is gone and oh, my god, she's never coming back. >> and as the weeks went by, said nikisa, paul was in a kind of daze. >> the gists of our conversation for the first few weeks was the fact that jennifer is not coming back. he was completely distraught about the fact that jennifer was in that fire. >> meanwhile, as those same weeks went by, investigators went quietly and steadily about their task, picking through the cinders in the fire and coming to the conclusion that none of it smelled right. literally.

coming up -- was gasoline there? >> no question at all. it was in her hair. you could smell it and you could smell it when you walked in with your own nose. >> investigators now knew the fire was not an accident. what they discovered next was an even bigger shock, when "date line" continues. dixie® ultra's flexproof™ technology"dateline" c. makes it twice as strong as the leading store brand. that's strength you can count on. lackluster lips? don't think so. lips lose natural color over time. chapstick tal hydration moisture + tint. our 100% natural moisturizing formulas enhance your natural lip color. chapstick. put your lips first.

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the morning after the fire on addison avenue, the ruins

still warm, a yellow lab named rosy sniffed around what was by then a sealed crime scene. rosie was trained to identify some of the tools of arson, care seen, oil, gasoline. rosie stopped in her tracks. she had apparently found something. chuck gilliam is a deputy district attorney in paloltyo. was gasoline there? >> no question at all. it was in her hair. you could smell it. you could smell it when you walked in just with your own nose. in fact, the remnants of the gas can were found right to her next help. there were enough remnants left for us to identify the make and model of the gas began. wow. that's like somebody leaving the gun next to the body with fingerprints on it. >> well, no fingerprints. and the arson was not at issue. >> no. it was cold blooded murder that was at issue.

because jennifer schipsi did not die in the fire, according to forensic experts. she was dead before the fire started. the method, a particularly intimate form of killing. death by strangulation. >> strangling someone is a very personal killing. it's a very angry killing. it's not like shooting someone from a long way away. you're touching the person and feeling their life's blood ebb from them. >> who could have been so angry with jennifer? >> paul had told detectives he he and jennifer took out restraining orders against hisham and tony ghanma. people he once considered friends. >> harm her, harm me. >>ho ishat? >> his name is hisham. that's the guy -- >> the guy you have a restraining order against hem? >> i have a restraining order against him.

>> and just one night before, paul told police some guys in a truck tried to follow jennifer home. >> somebody was just talking to her. and it was fine. that was okay with me. but we had people threatening us in the past, okay? i don't know what's going on. and i think that's what caused the fire, i believe. >> tracking you, you said? >> somebody was threatening us. >> okay. >> so was paul zumot on to something? detectives went to talk to the brothers and, of course, checked to see where both men were the day of the fire. there was no doubt they were nowhere near the fire. they had alibis. >> one of the brothers was in their cafe and he's on videotape. the other was at home depie about 20 miles away. we have receipts and videos from both locations. >> so once the gangham brothers were in the clear, the cops did

what they always do in cases like this. they took a closer look at the victim's boyfriend, paul. and there was a curious moment in that police interview the day of the fire when paul admitted he wasn't always the best sort of boyfriend. >> me and my girlfriend, we broke up. and thanks to the san jose - sorry, paltyo pd, they put a restraining order on me in august. she said paul threatened me. i said no, she came to the cafe, broke my door. but we had these problems, me and her, but i never touched a girl in my life. you could see the police reports. >> suspicious? sure. but as they asked around among the couple's friends, police learned a few things that put paul's behavior into context. maybe he wasn't any more to blame than she was. >> their relationship was chaotic, no disputing that, absolutely. but he was no more violent in the relationship than she was.

whether it be physically, verbally, emotionally. >> as police gathered evidence bit by bit asking around about paul, one of them noticed something a little odd. paul told a friend, also a policemen, by the way, two slightly different stories about his whereabouts the day of the fire. first conversation, day of the fire, reported the.cop friend, paul said he wasn't home all day. then second conversation the next day, paul said he stopped briefly at home en route to his hookah cafe. as we say, odd. but people's memories can be tricky. was that one little difference enough to add up to suspicion of murder? police apparently thought so, especially once they added that to the rest of what they discovered. paul was arrested. >> i'm gonna wait for my attorney. >> what's that? >> i will wait for my attorney. >> okay. >> they charged paul zumot with

arson and murder, which struck some observers as strange. after all, there had been just that one little inconsistency. and though paul and jennifer did fight sometimes, they seemed crazy in love, too. paul had been shopping for a diamond can ring, for heaven sake. >> there was a part of paul that was mourning his girlfriend. and then there was a part of him that was -- he didn't understand why he was in custody. and he didn't understand why he couldn't just cry for his girlfriend and for his life that had just changed 100%. >> it certainly did. paul zumot was taken to jail to await trial on a charge of murder in the first degree. big mistake, said paul zumot. >> when i first saw him, he's -- all he was really still telling me is me being in custody, all of this is going to blow over with. they're going to realize i'm not the person who did this and this

will be over with. >> drawing back the curtain for a peek at life with paul, in jennifer's own words. coming up -- >> candles everywhere. flowers. >> when "dateline" continues. rps about type 2 diabetes. so you have type 2 diabetes, right? yeah. yes i do. okay so you diet, you exercise, you manage your a1c? that's the plan. what about your heart? what do you mean my heart? the truth is, type 2 diabetes can make you twice as likely to die from a cardiovascular event, like a heart attack or stroke. and with heart disease, your risk is even higher. but wait, there's good news for adults who have type 2 diabetes and heart disease. jardiance is the only type 2 diabetes pill with a lifesaving cardiovascular benefit. jardiance is proven to both significantly reduce the chance of dying from a cardiovascular event in adults who have type 2 diabetes and heart disease alower your a1c. jardiance can cause serious side effects including dehydration. this may cause you to feel dizzy, faint, or lightheaded, or weak upon standing.

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former fbiuty director andrew mccabe has been fired just hours before he was set to retire. attorney general jeff sessions said he fired mccabe for unauthorized disclosure to the news media. in a statement, mccabe responded i am being singled out and treated this way bus of the role i play and the things i witnessed. donald trump tweeted andrew mccabe fired, a great day for the hard working men and women of the fbi. now back to "dateline."

welcome back. i'm craig melvin. paul zumot and jennifer schpisi seemed a match made in heaven, but a prosecutor believed he had plenty of evidence that pointed to the contrary. here again is keith morrison. >> in the days after the fire on addison avenue, after paul zumot was charged with murder and hauled off to jail, events in pal alto seemed to freeze somehow. in confusion and denial from paul's point of view and unrequited grief among the people who loved jen per. >> it hurt. it hurt a lot. >> unrequited partly because, for some reason, though he had been arrested, paul wasn't enter ago plea. which is what this was all about. candlelight vigils outside paul's hookah lounge by jennifer's friends and family. >> we decided to stand in front of his establishment every night

until he made his plea. >> eventually, no surprise, paul did plead not guilty and prosecutor chuck gillingham found himself sifting through the records of a two-year romance, studded with restraining orders, scratches, bruises, 911 calls. >> these were two people that there were makeups and break-ups and she gave verbally as good as she got. >> after one of their flare-ups, paul was ordered to attend anger management classes, went to one the day of the fire, in fact. so why did two people who fought so much stay together for so long? there was, it turned out, an audio recording of jennifer herself. gillingham got hold o , listened to her explanation >> he wins your heart. so the first couple months is amazing, sweeps you off your feet. candles everywhere, flowers. not money items, but just romantic and sweet talking and parading you around and wanting to introduce you to everybody.

it gets me loving him and admiring him, that he admires me. and then it makes me trust his opinion and what he says about me and thinks about me. so then, as soon as he gets to that point, he flips it and calls me ugly, fat, a gold digger. >> by the way, the person she's talking to, hisham ganma. he's one of the brothers that zu you mot told police she was afraid of. it was recorded a few months before the fire, but then she was not happy about paul. not at that point, anyway. >> i have pictures that he did of the damage he did to all of my furniture. kicked in my car. somebody saw him at starbucks spit in my face on my way to work. >> but things clearly changed after that. remember, they were all lovie

dovy. pauls was even talking marriage the night before the fire. now here he is a year later on trial for her murder. listening to chuck gillingham take the jury through the last days before jennifer's murder. how.? most of her text message history had been deleted. but law enforcement has changed a lot. it's had to to keep up with high tech. the pal alto cops managed to find a phone expert all the way across the country in new hampshire who had a very deep look into that cell phone. and was able to pull up thousands, literally thousands of delete didded text messages between paul and jennifer in the last few months of his her life. and oh, boy. >> from jennifer, you're nothing but a selfish cold hearted ungateful human being liar.

that didn't read like any old kwarel. and the timing. jennifer sent that text to paul right at the end of the elaborate birthday party she threw for him when she had perhaps 12 hours left to live. in fact, she was so upset about something that she refused to go to the hookah lounge after the party, walked all the way home on a broken heel, texting all the way. jennifer. good. stay away from me. i just got home. paul, i'm saying away this time for good. what a way to end my birthday. >> for jennifer to walk home alone at night with a broken heel and upset, she had to have been -- i don't even know if i've ever even seen her that mad. >> but that was the night before. angry messages buzzing back and forth. then, as the cell phone revealed, the pair made love during the night before jennifer's morning text messages, again, turned red hot

angry. the subject seemed to be a debt she claimed he owed her. >> right around 10:30, 10:45 until 11 roughly 16 in the morning, she's referring back to those text messages and telling him he better bring a check and don't come back or she's going to the san jose police department to file charges by 3:00 that day. that's the last contact she has ever with anyone. >> that said, just before noon is when paul lost his temper and choked jennifer to death, then drove to a gas station, bought a can of gasoline, later returned home and torched the house. and somewhere along the way, said the prosecutor, he erased all those angry text msage she sent him. >> every single one between the defendant and her. every single one is gone. months worth. >> and paul used jennifer's cell phone to send fake texts to her friends so they believed she was

still alive. to support that claim, gillingham introduced an expert witness who testified the texts from paul's phone and texts from jennifer's phone were hitting some of the same cell towers all afternoon. so her phone must have been right there with him in his car. which is why, when she missed a meeting with her friend roy, the texts he he got from her didn't make sense. they weren't a sensible response to the message he sent her. in fact, he got the same texts twice. >> she didn't show up and her phone was off. so as soon as i got that repeat text message, i was kooird kind of worried because she wasn't respond to go what i was saying. >> jennifer was nowhere to be found. jennifer was dead. >> now what prosecutor gillingham wanted the jury to think about was what happened or didn't happen much later after the fire. here was the scene, house burning, paul standing on the street outside watching the fire. at this point, he supposedly

didn't know if jennifer was inside or outside, whether she was alive or dead. but -- >> and in the time he was there, he made 38 calls and text messages. two of which went to jennifer. on neither occasion did he leave jennifer a message. he spoke with others. he text messaged, for instance, the same friend multiple times. but in that two-hour riod, at no time does he leave that location to look for jenner, perhaps, to go to the other side of the blocked off street. >> you know, if he called her and texted her once, surely that's enough. i mean, she'll call him back. >> the cell phone records actually bear out that he's a person that would call or text her 200 to 300 times a day if he wasn't able to get ahold of her. her silence at the crime scene is telling. he stood that location because he wanted people to see him there. >> but how could the jury be sure paul was guilty? prosecutor gillingham offered

her. remember rosy, the skillful trained police dog trained to react to the whiff of accelerant? she alerted when she smelled some of paul zumot's clothes. suspicious, yes, though not exactly hard evidence. as you'll see. mark garagos. >> i've had many a client who i have no doubt was capability of acts that they were accused of. this is just not one of them. coming up, in the last hours of jennifer's life, something was caught on camera. does it prove paul is not guilty? >> so you had sex last night with her. yes. >> anybody who watches it is never going to have the impression that this was somebody who was ready to kill her. >> when "dateline" continues. feel the clarity of non-drowsy claritin 24 hour relief

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defense attorney mark garagos has made a name for himself defending clients in difficult and highly celebrated cases. not the least the scott peterson trial. but defending paul zumot would present its own challenges. he was accused of killing his girlfriend and trying to hide that fact by burning the house down. but as the trial began, he had been pegged by the prosecution as an abuser, a violent man, an image garagos set out to change.

>> they both were passionate, with romantic at times, hot at times as you would characterize it. i don't think it was a one-way street by any means. >> for a start, g a ragos started best he could to weed out jury members who might be swayed by angry text messages or stories by zumot's temper. >> what you want to get a jury to do is to want to help your client and to kind of of walk in the shoes of your client. >> and then when he presented his case, garagos set out to reframe the events after that infamous party the night before the fire. >> the party was at a place and it was for paul's birthday. and it was planned by jennifer. and the maybe 14 to 18 of their close friends that rp there. and by all accounts at the party, everything was great.

>> and the argument later, the angry texts, that was just the way paul and jennifer always were, said garagos. his proof? after those angry text message exchanges, here is what happened. as zumot described in his police interview. >> we talked. we smoked hookah. everything was type. we did what we did. she -- i think probably she already took one or -- she took two more in front of me. >> so you slept in the same bed? >> oh, yeah. >> so you guys made up. >> he yeah. i made up. and then i have a video. i mean, we video ourselves. >> you video yourself? what do you mean? >> when we have sex, we video ourselves. >> so you had sex last night with her videoing? >> yeah. >> and sure enough, when police looked at her cell phone, there was a video of she and paul

having sex. >> so enthusitically that anybody watching it is never going to take away from that that is somebody who was ready to kill her. >> as for that cell tower evidence that the prosecutor presented which seemed to show paul had jennifer's phone with him and was sending out fake messages in her name, that was nonsense said garagosp. >> we went and got the actual engineer from the carrier to come in and say he looked at the evidence and what this guy said was the phone pinging off the same towers was not. it was just merged data from the cell phone. >> why is that important? because the prosecution's own timeline should have cleared paul zumot. investigators said jennifer was strangled several hours before the fire started and it was lit no earlier than about 6:30 p.m.

but early in the afternoon, jennifer was still alive, sending real, not fake text messages from her phone. >> by all accounts, she was alive at 1:17. by 1:17, paul was not at the house. >> so where was paul? trying to pick up paperwork at the pal alto police station and then at the hookah lounge where he appears to security footage. and from there, says the dense attorney, he he headed to his anger management class. on the way, he stopped at the restaurant depot. so there simply wasn't time in between, said garagos, for paul to go to the cottage, strangle his girlfriend and douse her body with gasoline. a solid alibi, said garagos. his client simply couldn't have killed jennifer and he couldn't have started the fire.

how could he have been in two places at once? as for rosie, the yellow lab who alerted to a gasoline smell, those very close were submitted to a test on state of the art equipment on the bureau of alcohol and tobacco firearms and they showed no evidence of gasoline at all. >> the atf chemist as a protocol. one with of the things the prosecution didn't tell this jury, which we brought out, was that the atf put out a protocol that said you never take a dog alert, a single dog alert and draw a conclusion and, in fact, if the atf says me, then you should not allow in the dog alert. >> so why would people believe the dog over this attf? >> people have dogs. they ascribed supernatural power to dogs. and having been through a couple of cases with dog evidence, as

much as i love my dogs, i'm certainly not going to want to convict somebody and put their liberty at stake based on dog evidence. >> still,s as he presented his case, garagos had a problem and he knew it. >> what it came down to was the character assassination block of the case. the first two blocks of the this case resolved around somewhat scientific evidence and that was absolutely destroyed. and then you ended up with the character assassination block. >> the solution? call zumot himself appears to have dmaveemanded it, the chanc defend himself to the jury by testifying. some the believe the defense had already created a reasonable doubt and testifying was, in fact, risky, especially for paul said his friend, nikisa. >> knowing paul the way i know paul andhe way tt he could be interpreted incorrectly, i as very nervous about pl taking the stand. >> risksky or not, paul was determined to tell the jury his

side of the story. coming up -- >> i thought, you know, if there was any way this jury thought this man was responsible for this, now they know for sure that he's not. >> but what did the jury think? when "dateline" continues. what headache? advil is relief that's fast strength that lasts you'll ask... what pain? with advil liqui-gels it only takes a second for an everyday item to become dangerous. tide pods child-guard pac. helps keep your laundry pacs safe, and your child safer. to close, twist until it clicks. tide pods child-guard packaging.

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welcome back. paul zumot was on trial for the murder of his girlfriend jennifer skipsi and was

determined to take the stand with the hopes of convincing the jury that he was innocent. but would this risky move pay conclusion of "burning suspicion." >> defense attorney mark geragos had done what he could to poke holes in the case against paul zumot. arguing there was no solid scientific proof that zumot was near jennifer when she was strangled or the house was set on fire. anyway, he asked, if paul attacked jennifer, wouldn't she have put up some kind of fight? why were there no defensive marks or scratches on paul zumot's body? did the prosecution even have a case? paul zumot wasn't going to take any chances. in fact, he was determined to tell the jury his side of the story. so geragos assigned a female

colleague to question paul. a strategy, whispered courtroom observers. a way to show the jury paul could impracticnteract well wit woman. but those people were mistaken, said geragos. >> i don't think direct examination is my strong suit. i was concentrating on cross examination of the witnesses. >> so paul zumot looked the jurors in the eye and told them, i did not kill jennifer schipsi, did not burn the house. then he told them emotions burning to a fever pitch how despite their roller coaster relationship, he truly loved jennifer. his lawyer presented a love letter, in fact, she'd written to him. and he broke down then. flood of tears. >> i was so relieved and i thought, you know, if there was any way this jury thought this man was responsible for this, now they know for sure that he's not, because it's so obvious to me that he's telling the truth.

>> but listening to all of this with his experienced ear was prosecutor gillingham. you must have been rather pleased when you heard he was going to testify? >> i think that's an understatement. i was very, very pleased. >> more than that, iwas a gift, said gillingham, an unexpected opportunity. wh well, the prosecutor had paul right where he wanted him for as long as he wanted him. there were hours of questions, tough questions, baiting questions, questions designed to make paul crack and reveal what gillingham believed to be a controlling personality and a red hot temper. >> my plan was to go through how he acted when he was angry. and then asked him questions that he could have no good answers for. for instance, why all those text messages were deleted. and those were questions he could not answer because he could had not considered those questions. >> after three long days in the hot seat, paul zumot's testimony was finally over.

had he persuaded the jurors that he was innocent? do you feel he got a little bit chippy or arrogant on the stand? >> i don't think he got arrogant, but clearly he was tired and exasperated. he wanted to tell his story. he was being cut off. >> but the jurors once they got the case said they were determined to look at the evidence, not just courtroom theater. >> everyone was very committed to going over the evidence and discussing each of the witnesses and each of the crucial pieces of evidence. it was really encouraging. >> and it was crucial, they decided to compare very carefully the different timelines claimed by the prosecution and the defense. >> so we analyzed the timeline for the entire day from his testimony where he said he was and then other pieces of testimony and evidence to either validate or contradict. >> the jury took less than 14 hours and came back with a verdict. guilty. >> all i remember was i heard

that word guilty. i was just like, this release of tension. >> i was very shocked by the verdict. i think a lot of people were shocked by the verdict. because, i mean, if you sat through the weeks and weeks of trial, it's just -- it's inconceivable how they could get to the result that they got to. >> but to the jurors, the issues about text messages and whether paul had jennifer's phone all afternoon wasn't as important as zumot on the stand. that's what made the difference. his tears, for example. >> sometimes i feel like i'm too cynical, but it was universally held opinion where the entire jury felt it was a manufactured moment. >> what was the problem with his testimony? >> there were two things that struck me. one was when he broke down on the stand. and to me it didn't seem genuine. and the other portion of his testimony was when he had the

opportunity to tell us where he was and what he was doing, he chose to basically lie to us three times. and we were a i believe to prove that he lied to us by the hard evidence we had with the phone records and with the video surveillance and those items. and i just -- to me that hurt him very badly. >> if he hadn't testified, i can't say for sure, but i don't think i could have convicted him. >> at his sentencing, an angry paul zumot again protested his innocence, but he was sent away for 25 to life for murder. plus eight years for arson. after the fire at the palo alto cottage, it was prepared. new love perhaps growing in there. young people were still coming to the cafe to socialize and sme hookah. and paul? gone like the romance that rned too bright before it vanished with its victim in a cloud of smoke.

>> and i can still hear her voice. see her smile. i know she's -- i know she's here. >> that's all for this edition of "dateline." i'm craig melvin. thank you for watching. good morning. i'm dara brown in new york at msnbc world headquarters. it is 7:00 in the east, 4:00 out west. here's what's happening. fired. the former deputy fbi director gets the ax just hours to go before retirement. hear his scorching reaction and what president trump had to say about it. and the war continues. how this latest shot fired by the trump administration against the fbi could affect the russia investigation. turning up the legal heat on stormy. the trump team is getting ready to make its next move against the porn star's claims and it could cost her $20 million.