him, they're more and more worried about leaving him in mid office. some of these are patriots, but also, they don't want to be keeping him in office if he is really destroying the party or the country. >> all right. elizabeth drew, thank you for joining me. great pleasure. that is "all in" for this evening.

>> the fire in the cottage on addison avenue was hungry, devouring almost everything in the bedroom. >> we'll have fire department on the way. do you see smoke coming out of the windows? >> it's pouring out of the house. >> within minutes, the

firefighters knocked it down. the smoke clearing. the sooty water running in the streets. and then as the mop-up 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 that glowed and smoldered and demanded an answer. the inhabitants of the rented cottage, as investigators soon learned, were two young, beautiful people. the successful glossy types that you might expect to see on a reality show. their names are paul zumot and jennifer schipsi. jennifer, an ambitious, award-winning real estate agent who lived like a rock star, or so said her buddy roy. >> she's like, i'm knocking them out like dominos.

i just worked out, went to starbucks and on my way to a meeting, 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, attractive, educated, engaging.

paul owned a local hangout, a cafe. unusual place by north american standards where customers could smoke flavored tobacco pipes called hookahs. this man was a fan. >> he's a good-looking man. he looks good, smells good, he's

witty, he's smart and he's just affectionate. >> so love at first sight? well, maybe. said their friends. >> from the minute he told me about her, he always talked about how wonderful she is and how she's perfect. >> he definitely was very charismatic and liked to joke around. >> and money? there was a lot of it around apparently, too.

and jennifer and paul worked hard to get it. they 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 of these elaborate, wonderful things that they were going to do together. >> they were passionate, these beautiful people. they both had strong personalities. their love burned hot. >> jennifer was a strong, independent woman, and she would not accept anyone disrespecting her or even looking at her inappropriately. and she was very strong-willed. >> 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 2009, paul and jennifer moved into the charming little cottage on addison avenue here in palo alto. time to play house. paul started to think about marriage. and for paul's 36th birthday, jennifer planned a party full of promise. >> she invited most of his close friends to dishdash, one of his

lounge just minutes away. someone called, told him about the fire. he rushed over but could only pace helplessly back and forth as firefighters did their job. soon after that, he sat down with the palo alto police to help sort out what happened, though, as you can see on the video recording, sat is probably

not the best description. paul was full of nervous energy and frantic questions. at this point, nobody had told him that jennifer was in that fire. >> i'm worried about my house. what about my girlfriend? what caused the fire, and i don't care about this. i just want to know about jennifer right now. >> i'm not sure i know anything more than you do. my job is to talk to you and find out what exactly you know because you probably know more than me at this point.

>> no. no. >> so, together, police and zumot talked 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, and everything was fine, you know. >> who's "we"? >> me and her and all of our friends. >> who is her? >> jennifer. >> your girlfriend? >> yeah. >> paul explained that he spent the afternoon at an appointment in san jose and got back in time for his cafe to open in the evening. >> there was traffic, i got to the cafe because that's when they open. i had to log into the computers. as soon as i sat down -- i have a hookah lounge. my landlord calls and says your house is on fire. i flew through the red lights and i'm here. i'm really frustrated and confused and exhausted and i want to know what happened. i care less about the house but jennifer's safety. i cannot think anything right now. i just cannot think anything. >> then in the middle of his conversation with detectives, 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, i know. i know. i know. i can't find her. they're not telling me anything. >> to this point, he told detectives that he had been clinging to the hope that jennifer might be with her mother. anywhere 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 that's been burned. and we have no way of knowing who that is. >> i have to get out of here. get me out of here, please. >> okay. and i'm trying to be as sensitive as i possibly can because i understand that this is your -- i don't know that this is jennifer. >> i hope not. i hope not. >> listen, we have not confirmed who this is, okay? >> it's a really odd set of circumstances, okay? 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, hisham and tony ghanma. they'd already threatened her, said paul. ed their there had been a confrontation just weeks ago. >> what happened is, he called me and said he was going to kill me. he spoke in arabic. i speak it fluently. so we called the police. >> he and jennifer filed restraining orders against both brothers. >> now she was scared from him.

literally scared from him. i'm scared from the guy. so i know those guys like this. now yesterday she walked home and she said, hey, somebody probably was stalking me. >> had the brothers killed her, too? police listened, and then had paul give them his clothes for forensic testing. questioned by police, his home destroyed, his girlfriend dead, paul zumot was very nearly in shock, said his friend. >> his mind was, are they sure jen for the gone and, oh, my god, she's never coming back? >> as the weeks went by, paul was in a kind of daze. >> the gist of our conversations for the first few weeks is that jennifer's not coming back. he was completely distraught about the fact that jennifer was in that fire. fire in terms of treating sensitivity, 3 days is really fast. sensodyne rapid relief is a game changer. it's going to let the dentist offer their patient sensitivity relief in 3 days. say over the course of a weekend you're going to start feeling significant results. i need a new book for my son. stories. stories or quotes? time for a rhyme? or not rhyming's fine. no rhymes. skivvies. gadgets or skivvies? boxed set? perfect! nobody knows young readers like we do...

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>> meanwhile, as those same weeks went by, investigators went quietly and steadily about their task, picking through the cinders of the fire and coming to the conclusion that none of it smelled right. literally. coming up -- >> was gasoline there? >> no question at all. it's in her hair. you can smell it, and you can smell it when you walk in just with your own nose. >> investigators now knew the fire was not an accident. what they discovered next was an even bigger shock. when "burning suspicion" continues. welcome back to "dateline extra." investigators believe the fire

that killed jennifer schipsi was no accident, but who would have wanted her dead and why? here again is keith morrison. >> the morning after the fire on addison avenue, the ruins still warm, a yellow lab named rosie sniffed around what was by then a sealed crime scene. rosie was trained to identify some of the tools of arson -- kerosene, oil, gasoline. rosie stopped in her tracks. she'd apparently found something. chuck gillingham is a deputy district attorney in palo alto. was gasoline there? >> no question at all. it's in her hair. you can smell it when you walked in just with your own nose, and the remnants of the gas can was found next to her right hip. there was still enough remnants of the gas can to identify the type and make and model of the gas can. >> wow. that's like somebody leaving a gun beside the body with their fingerprints all over it, isn't it? >> no fingerprints and no physical evidence beyond that. >> but it was so clear that it was an arson? >> correct. 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, i don't imagine. 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 that he and jennifer had taken out restraining orders against those brothers, hisham and tony ghanma. men part of his inner circle who he had considered former friends. >> they're trying to get us. they are trying to harm me. >> who is that? >> hisham. >> the guy you have a restraining order against? >> several restraining against him. he hit me. he has a restraining order against me. >> and just one night before, after paul's birthday celebration, paul told police some guys in a truck tried to follow jennifer home. >> she had broken her heel and she says somebody was stalking her. it's fine. it's okay with me but we had people threatening us in the past, okay? i don't know what's going on. i believe that's what caused the

fire. i believe somebody was threatening us. >> 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. and there was no doubt they were nowhere near the fire. they had alibis. >> at the time of the fire, we know exactly where both of them were. one of the ghanma was in their cafe, and he's on videotape and the other was at fry's electronics and home depot 20 minutes away. we have videotape and receipts from both of those locations. >> so once the ghanma brothers were in the clear, cops do what they always do in cases like this.

it's practically police work 101. 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 were broke up, and thanks to palo alto pd, put a restraining order on me because they said paul threatened me, blah, blah, blah. i said, no, she came to the cafe and broke the door. we always have problems like this. i never touched a girl in my life. you can 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. there's 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 policeman, 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, 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 going to wait for my attorney. >> what's that? >> i will wait for my attorney. >> okay.

welcome back to "dateline extra." i'm craig melvin. on the surface paul zumot and jennifer schipsi. >> in the days after the fire on addison avenue, after paul zumot was charged with murder and hauled off to jail, events in palo alto seemed to freeze somehow. in confusion and denial from paul's point of view and unrequited grief from the people who loved jennifer. >> it hurt.

it hurt a lot. >> unrequited partly because for some reason, even though he'd been arrested, paul wasn't entering a plea, which is what this was all about. candlelight vigils outside of 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, bitter quarrels, scratches, bruises, 911 calls. >> these are two people who had makeups and breakups 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, as a matter of fact.

so why did people who fought so much stay together for so long. there was an audio recording of jennifer herself. gillingham got hold of it. listen to her explanation. >> he wins your heart so the first couple of months is amazing. sweeps you off your feet. candles everywhere, flowers, not money items but just romancing,

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 is hisham ghanma. one of the brothers he told police she and jennifer were afraid of. here she was confiding in him. mind you, it's a phone conversation that was recorded a

few months before the fire, but then she was not happy about paul, not at that point, anyway. >> i have pictures of the damage that he did to all of my furniture. he 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 lovey-dovey and paul was even

talking marriage the night before the fire. and now here he was not more than a year later on trial for her murder, listening to the prosecutor take the jury inside the last days of paul's relationship with jennifer. how did gillingham do that? jennifer's cell phone. detectives discovered -- and this was rather curious -- that

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 palo 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 deleted text messages between jennifer and paul in the last few months of her life. and, oh, boy. from jennifer, you're nothing but a selfish cold-hearted scam artist liar. furious. that didn't read like any old quarrel.

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 to live. 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 staying away this time for good. what a way to end my birthday. ? or not rhyming's fine.

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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 set of

challenges. zumot was accused of killing his girlfriend jennifer schipsi and then trying to hide that fact by burning the house down. but as the trial began, he had also been pegged by the prosecution as an abuser, a violent man, an image geragos set out to change. >> they both were passionate, 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, geragos tried to weed out possible jury members who might have been unduly swayed by angry text messages or stories about zumot's temper. >> what jurors do or what you

want to get a jury to do is to want to help your client and to kind of walk in the shoes of your client. >> and then when he presented

his case, geragos 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 -- and maybe 14 to 18 of their close friends that were

there. and by all accounts at the party, everything was great. >> and the argument later, the angry texts? that was just a way that paul and jennifer always were, said geragos. his proof? after those angry text message exchanges, here's what happened, as zumot described in his police interview. >> we talked, we smoked hookah. everything is fine. we did what we did, you know.

and we slept together and we took two xanaxes. she took two more before me and we went to bed. >> so you slept together that night? >> oh, yeah. made up and then we video ourselves. i mean, honestly, i probably shouldn't be saying that but that's -- her phone, her video. >> so you had sex with her last night and videoed it? >> yeah. >> sure enough. when police looked at jennifer's cell phone, there was a video. she and paul having sex after their fight hours before she was murdered. >> so enthusiastically that anybody who watches it is never going to have the impression or take away from that that this was somebody who was ready to kill her. >> and as for that cell tower evidence that the prosecutor gillingham presented that seemed to show that paul had jennifer's phone with him and sending out fake messages in her name? that was nonsense, says geragos. >> that was one of the pieces of information that was imploded. we went and got the engineer, 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, says geragos, the prosecution's own timeline should have cleared paul zumot. >> the solution? paul zumot himself appears to have demanded it. the chance to defend himself to the jury by testifying. some courtroom observers believe the defense had already created a reasonable doubt that testifying was in fact, risky. especially for paul, said his friend. >> knowing paul the way i know paul and the way he could be interpreted incorrectly, i was

very nervous about paul taking the stand. >> risky or not, paul was determined to tell the jury his side of the story. >> 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. what did the jury think? i've always looked forward to what's next. and i'm still going for my best even though i live with a higher risk of stroke due to afib not caused by a heart valve problem. so if there's a better treatment than warfarin, i'm up for that. eliquis. eliquis is proven to reduce stroke risk better than warfarin. plus has significantly less major bleeding than warfarin.

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defense attorney mark geragos had done what he could to poke holes in the prosecution's murder case against paul zumot, arguing the prosecution had no scientific proof or clear evidence zumot was anywhere near jennifer when she was strangled and when the house was set on fire. anyway, he asked, if paul attacked jennifer, wouldn't she have put up some kind of a 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 gerados assigned a female

colleague to question paul. it must have been a strategy, whispered courtroom observers. the way to show the jury that paul could, in fact, interact well with a woman. but those observers were mistaken, said geragos. >> well, i generally -- i don't think direct examination is my strong suit and i was concentrating on cross-examination of the witness. so paul zumot looked the jurors in the eyes and told them, i did not kill jennifer schipsi, did not burn the house. then he told them how despite their roller coaster relationship, he truly loved jennifer. his love letter presented a letter she had written him and

he broke down then, a flood of tears. >> i was so relieved. 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 he'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, it was a gift, said gillingham. an unexpected opportunity. why? well, the prosecutor had paul right where he wanted h imfor 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 are deleted. and those are questions he could not answer because he 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 chippy or arrogant on the stand? >> i don't think he got

arrogant, but i think 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 theatre. >> 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 time lines 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, man. and it was just like, this . >> i'm craig melvin. >> i'm natalie morales. >> and this is "dateline." this is something that you watch "dateline" for about somebody else. not about your friend, not about someone you love. >> she was completely defenseless. she reached out her arms and simply said, "help me." >> my heart drochltd i want to know why. why? >> it's a baffling case of murder, millions and a