True Crime Vault: Burning Bed
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This is Deborah Roberts. Welcome to the 2020 True Crime Vault. Each week, we reach back into our archives and bring you a story we found unforgettable. He broke her teeth. He broke her bones. Poisons that you could use that would be undetectable. Oh my goodness! What have you done? Take a listen. Coming up...

They were hungry for success. A roller coaster couple spinning out of control. Their ups and downs all on record in their own voices. He flips it and calls me ugly, fat, a gold digger. Until an explosive relationship. Don't ever threaten me again or I will seek ultimate justice.

ended in a fiery death for one of them. But which? So what finally lit the match? And whose body was on the burning bed? Nobody had to tell me. I knew it was my child.

I'm John Quinones. Most couples have fights now and then, but the high-voltage couple you're about to meet, Jennifer Skipski and Paul Zumott, took fighting to a whole new level. But did it lead to murder? As Jim Avila first reported in 2011, they left a trail of angry texts and vicious phone messages until one of them was silenced permanently.

Nice, John. A young California couple living the golden life of sunshine, high hopes, and champagne taste in the heart of wealthy Silicon Valley. Jennifer Skipsy, a budding real estate agent collecting commissions and awards. Please help me welcome Jennifer Skipsy. The Northern California's booming housing market.

I was very impressed by her passion for becoming a great real estate agent. Drew Holderman was her manager. When she first started, she took off. She was very well-spoken. She presented herself well. She had that look that it takes. A shining star who lit up a room wherever she went, work or play, says her sister Shelby Skipsy. You could meet her and she would instantly just act like she's known you for years and she'd make you feel really comfortable and she was...

bubbly and outgoing and you just wanted to be around her all the time because she would just always be happy. She always had a big smile on her face all the time. It was contagious to be around her.

Her Jordanian-born boyfriend, Boulos Zouman, now an American citizen and known as Paul, forever cruising the hotspots in his fancy Range Rover. Funny, life of the party, entertaining friends at his thriving Palo Alto hookah lounge, smoking the flavored tobacco through a water pipe late into the night. The good life on a prime corner in one of America's richest communities, home to Stanford University and Facebook. Jennifer's best friend, Roy Endemann,

One of the first things I remember Jennifer saying about Paul was that, you know, she just met this guy and he's so funny. Anytime you were around Paul, he would always just try to keep people's morale up by making jokes and doing things that were funny, kind of like a class clown maybe.

Paul and Jen were a rollercoaster couple, two years of passionate make-ups and break-ups. And in October of 2009, right around Paul's 36th birthday, he was summoning the courage to take their courtship to the next level. Paul's family and friends watched him fall in love.

Paul says he had shopped for rings and bought plane tickets to Palm Desert for a romantic weekend where he would pop the question. He's talking about he's excited he's going to propose to her.

And I was like, wow, that's great. And my mom said, Paul is going to come. He's going to bring Jennifer with him. He loves her. He already said he's going to marry her and they're going to be engaged when they come here. But first, a month before Paul's planned engagement trip, Jen and Paul were looking for a new place to live. She told a friend the breakups were part of the past and she had a good feeling about this next phase of their life. New landlord John Eklund.

What was your impression of this couple? They were just a nice couple and they fit right in with the neighborhood. It was only a mile from the hookah lounge and near Jen's new real estate job. Jennifer seemed anxious to move in. She just looked like she was content with the place and she just seemed at home, you know.

Jen and Paul had lived in their little cottage home just over a month when in the middle of an October week in 2009, just before sunset, disaster. 911. Is everybody out of the house? I don't know, but it's on fire, really strong. That's the voice of Darren Beaumont on the 911 call, a random passerby who first spots the flames.

Then I ran back to the main house back here and banged on the door there and got the occupants out and told them the cottage was on fire. We came racing up to the windows and then all of a sudden this crackling noise appeared. It started going...

All these particles of glass came out, and then these huge orange flames proceeded to shoot out, and they were going up under the eaves here as well as into these redwood trees. There's people with fire hoses. There's several people that are looking into the house. How big is the fire? Oh, I hear a fire engine coming right now, but the whole inside is burning. Palo Alto Fire Captain Carter French.

We knew we had to get there, we had to get in there and make a fast attack. Engine 3 on scene. There was a lot of smoke and there was very limited visibility. Give me a walk around the structure and let me know what you see. Copy. Now when you're looking in these windows, Yes. what could you see? Could you see the bed? No. Everything was just so black.

But it was Captain French's job to make sure no one was inside. We crawled along the floor and we had to stay very low in order to escape the high heat and to be able to see where we were going. The fire was hot and fast, but the only room that actually burned was the one bedroom and the contents within that room.

Still in all fours, Captain French makes it to the center of the fire, a burning bed where he is shocked to find signs of life. We searched the bed. I found a body. I grabbed the body, preparing to remove it from the bedroom. Be advised, we have a body. We have a body, family, parents. As I grabbed it, there was a sound.

Who was the body in the fire? Could it be Jennifer or could it be Paul? It made it sound like, ugh, like I was hurting him. So my initial reaction was we had someone who was alive and badly burned. I need medics.

Within a very short amount of time, the words coming out that, hey, there's gasoline all over this body. We know we've got a big problem on our hands. The secret someone wanted to hide in a burning bed. It was by far the worst burnt body I had ever seen. Stay with us.

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When firefighters find a body atop a burning bed in a small Palo Alto cottage, they first think accident. And their first call goes not to police, but for medical help.

But within moments, Captain Carter French sees what he's been touching and changes his mind about the need for medics. The body was extremely burned, very deep burns throughout the whole body. It was by far the worst burned body I had ever seen.

As he lifts the body, he smells a strong gasoline odor and with his flashlight sees powerful evidence that this blaze looks like arson. The fact that the fire burned hot and fast told me that this could have been an accelerant fire. Like someone sprayed the room with gasoline and lit a match.

Fire Captain Dennis Johnson and his arson detecting dog Rosie were called to the scene and determined the accelerant wasn't just poured indiscriminately around the room. It was targeted. She alerted to where the victim's head was. Rosie was telling you that some accelerant was poured on the victim's head? Most definitely, yes.

But who is the victim? Neither Paul Zumott nor his girlfriend Jennifer Skipsey are anywhere to be found. Until the landlord's phone rings, eliminating one possibility because on the line, alive and talking, is Paul. When he called you, did he express concern about Jennifer? Do you remember that? Yes, he did. Paul is at his hookah cafe when he learns that firefighters are at his home. In fact, surveillance tapes show him hustling out of his business.

Moments later, as the sun is setting, police video shows Paul arriving at the scene. According to his landlord, he's desperate to know about Jen. I don't know where she is, and I said, well, she's probably all right. You know, I said that, and that everything will be okay. He seemed exceedingly worried about her. And since the body on the bed was burned so badly, no one could say if it was truly Jennifer on the mattress. Still, she couldn't be reached.

This is like an accomplished real estate agent who's constantly on the phone. Her phone was off. Jen's mom, Jamie, to whom she spoke every day, can't reach her either. She never turns it off. Period. Bottom line. So that alarmed me. And then around 9 that night, Jen's mother is given crushing news by police. I know. I immediately dropped to the ground, started crying.

Nobody had to tell me the identification. Every fiber in my body felt it. I knew it was my child. I already knew the answer. A mother knows. At least this mother knows. Roy and Jen's still close ex-boyfriend Jake rushed to Jamie's side. I just looked at her once and I mean I hit the floor. It was, it was just really hard.

Jennifer Skipson, the fresh-faced California girl with humble beginnings, a high school dropout who made it to the top of the booming Silicon Valley real estate world, is dead at age 29. Her first serious boyfriend and longtime close friend Jake Allen, seen with Jen in these home videos, watched her rapid growth.

from riding in his big wheeled trucks to partying in the Silicon Valley's hottest spots. When she would put her mind to something, you better stand back. She would absolutely conquer that goal and make it her own. So she was determined. Oh yeah. She wanted to be a real estate agent. I mean, within a year she was a real estate agent. She went to school every day. She worked at nights. I mean, she did everything she could. One out of 20 people passed that state exam. Well, I mean, she was one of the 20, you know.

Jen and Jake bought this house where he still lives. He gave her a ring, working long, hard hours at the body shop. But not long after the engagement, he could see her racing out of his life. Jen was moving too fast for Jake. We didn't have a lot of money. And then for her to see all these people with really nice things, a lot of money, and then she would look at me, you know, covered in grease in the garage, going, hey, you know, this guy doesn't really fit that persona. ♪

Jen moved in to some of that expensive California real estate she's been selling. This was her unit up here. Her world now centered around a high-end shopping mall called Santana Row. Drew Holderman was her boss at the realty. If people don't live in the Silicon Valley, what is this? Well, the center itself, I mean, you could consider it Silicon Valley's version of Rodeo Drive.

And it's here at Santana Row in the health club that Jennifer Skipsey meets the man who would change her life, Paul Zumad. She liked him because initially he kind of portrayed himself as somewhat of an entrepreneur, I guess. She kind of liked that about him because he had his own businesses, local businesses. He's already kind of a part of the community. He likes to be socializing in the scene and stuff. And she had a good time with him. He made her laugh.

He just swept her off her feet initially. Put her on a pedestal? Yeah, I think that he put her on a pedestal to a point because he would put her on a pedestal, but then the next day he would knock her off the pedestal and throw the pedestal in the trash. The high-achieving Jennifer had met a man with similar ambition and fiery temper.

But Roy is alarmed about the way Paul treats Jen. One moment stroking her ego, the next exploiting her vulnerabilities. He would say things that were completely unrealistic that didn't even make sense. Like, you're getting fat or you're a horrible real estate agent. You're not going to sell a house today. He had broken her down to think she had no self-worth left. He was a master at that.

My daughter weighed 105 pounds and he said to her, "You're not wearing a bikini. You're too fat."

She didn't wear a bikini. Paul is very manipulative and he knows how to use his words. And she, she wore her heart on her sleeve. She wanted to be in love and she wanted somebody to care about her and somebody to appreciate her. Not just for her outside but her inside as well. Can you hear me okay like this? In a chilling phone call to her friend made and recorded on her laptop two months before her death,

Jen describes how her affair went from love to sadistic nightmare. He's a pro at manipulating. He wins your heart, so the first couple months is amazing, sweeps you off your feet, candles everywhere, flowers. It gets me loving him. So then, as soon as he gets to that point, he flips it and calls me ugly, fat, a gold digger.

Just being there at her house with her and listening to her phone go off numerous amount of times and all being from the same person and half threatening, half degrading, half apologetic. It was just up and down and it was emotionally wrecking her.

Jen's life seems to be spiraling downward. The real estate market is crashing. She can't pay her property taxes. Things are so bad she even fills out a Hooters application.

To top it all off, she's stressed about her parents' divorce. I had that family tragedy and the market crashed. He came in and made me start to believe that I would never succeed and that I will never find another man and that I'm this and I'm not a good catch. I mean, I started to believe it and I got so depressed. I couldn't go to work. I couldn't function. I lost my self-passion just to be alive.

Jen's father, Jim, never knew what was happening to his daughter until she died. Jennifer's my baby. And to find out that someone was doing those terrible things to her was very difficult to hear. He destroyed her from the inside out. At work, her boss, Drew Holderman, says he saw a huge change inside and out, to the point his once-rookie Realtor of the Year stopped coming to work for more than a month. The new Jennifer was not only physically different,

but mentally a different person. She was very unfocused. I think everybody within our firm was really rallying around her in hopes that she would break out of this funk that she was so clearly in. I mean, it was clear that she was slipping. He put me through a depression. This is not me. I'm an independent woman. I'm an object to him. I'm not a human to him. I am a little, I'm a trophy.

What is going on? Is destroying the psyche of the California girl with a winning smile just the first step on the road to murder? And we take you inside the police interrogation where Paul is told it could be his girlfriend on the burning ban. When we continue.

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29-year-old Jennifer Skipski has been found dead. Her body badly burned in a cottage she shared with her boyfriend, Paul Zubat. Their relationship was hardly a fairy tale, but could Zubat be a murderer? Here again, Jim Avila. Hard to believe the last night of Jennifer Skipski's life would start with so much joy.

A playful Jen and her boyfriend Paul Zumat on his 36th birthday. And Jen has gone all out, inviting more than a dozen of his best friends to his favorite Middle Eastern restaurant, Paul's twin sister Susan. He said, I found out that Jennifer is having a birthday party for me. It's going to be a surprise party. He goes, I'm going to surprise her and not show up. But everyone does show up, and they are happy as they leave, including Jen and Paul.

who ride with a friend back to the hookah shop for more celebration and a communal smoke of flavored tobacco. But on the way, Paul's jealousy flares when Jen gets this seemingly harmless text message from a mutual male friend. Paul accuses Jen of hiding the communication from him and suspects she's flirting, texting her an angry message even though they're sitting in the same car. Why you gotta lie? Just say you deleted. End of subject.

Jen is hot and it's off to the races with this volatile couple. These are her actual texts. Selfish a**. Jen tells her friend by text they won't be stopping by on this night. I can't. My phone was just thrown at me. Someone can't handle me texting you. Sorry. When Paul and Jen arrive at his cafe, Jen refuses to go inside and sends another text to their friend dramatically announcing she's going home alone.

Walking home from cafe. It was the last time Jennifer Skipsy was seen alive by anyone other than Paul. And the next day, at the smoldering fire, police take him into the station for a few questions.

What you are watching is Paul's out-of-control and apparently painful reaction when detectives deliver the news that a so far unidentified female body has been found on a burning bed in the cottage home he shared with Jennifer. What are you doing here? You're not going to do it, are you?

It's the night of the fire, just four hours after it started, and police do not have a positive ID, but Jennifer cannot be found.

You know, you wait for everybody. Please, man. Get down here. Wait, Paul. Paul. Paul. No, don't tell me that. Listen, man. We need to talk about some things, okay? No, it's not yet a prevention problem. We don't know who it is at this point, okay? But we need to talk about a few things, okay? Go ahead.

Inconsolable or not, genuine grief or not, the police are about to turn this conversation from death notification to murder interrogation. It's a really, really odd kind of circumstance. We need to figure out if it's on purpose, if it's an accident. Paul seems quite willing to answer police questions. He volunteers several incriminating facts, including how his birthday the night before ended in such a big fight.

Paul admits that when Jennifer gets home, she wants him to stay very far away and angrily texts him some pretty mean things.

Actually, it was worse than that. Jennifer's phone records show an all-out assault on Paul's character and even his manhood.

By the way, your birthday is over. 36. Time to act like a man. You are nothing but a selfish, cold-hearted, ungrateful human being. Scam artist. Liar. F***. Thanks. Go f*** a cousin or two while you're at it. Such a p*** you are. Just banish from my life.

If you don't understand my words, invest in a Webster dictionary. This is the m****** USA. We speak English here and treat women with respect. Only a little b****** talks to a girl the way you do. I love you too. Go f****** yourself all the way to Palm Desert if you can last that long, limp b****.

Paul tells police this exchange is nothing unusual, that Jennifer routinely flies off the handle, and he unloads a history of domestic violence that includes restraining orders against each other. And police reports accusing her of hitting the then-blonde Paul with keys, leaving these marks on his face. The worst of it resulted in a domestic violence conviction for Paul on charges of sending her harassing phone messages. He's sentenced to a year of domestic violence classes.

fallout from an ugly dispute outside the Santana Row Starbucks where he spit in her face and kicked in the grill of a Mercedes. Jen's friend and lawyer, Dawn Sweet, remembers. She was hysterical. She goes, "Well, I'm at home right now. I have to take a shower."

He spit on me so much. It was such a large amount that got in my hair, it was on my clothes, and she said I just, she was literally disgusted. Jennifer told another friend about that humiliation in her laptop-recorded phone call two months before her death. He hawked such a huge spit right in my eye. My mascara was running down. But Paul tells police their epic arguments are frequent and quickly forgotten.

And on this, the last night of Jennifer's life, Paul escalates things by choosing to ignore her angry text messages to stay away. I will be home soon.

No, you won't. Stay away from me. I will not leave this house until all your things are gone. You owe me $10,000 for car work. Don't ever threaten me again, or I will seek ultimate justice.

It's only day one of the investigation into Jennifer Skipsy's death. Police don't even know how she died. But already things are not looking good for Paul Zumach until he drops a bombshell about a sex tape made hours before Jen is murdered. He says the tape clears him. After that supposed argument, they had sex and everything was fine. Because every time someone has sex and they're angry, it makes everything better.

That's the argument. Next. For Paul Zuma, October 15, 2009 is a frantic, horrific day. His house has burned down with his girlfriend in it. And now Palo Alto, California police are focusing on him. Is there any chance that you had anything to do with that fire tonight? Me? Yeah. No.

But Palo Alto police detectives are not convinced and ask Paul for permission to begin an extensive search at his hookah lounge,

in his two cars and... Okay, so if you wouldn't mind, I'm just standing over here against the blue wall. ...a detailed look at Paul himself, his clothes taken away. He's in that paper jumpsuit. And then I'm just going to take an overall of your body. Seven snapshots in all. Close-ups of Paul's chest, each hand, arms, neck, his pants. Next, investigators pull in their secret weapon, Rosie.

The fire sniffing dog is called back and this time she's asked to go over Paul's clothing. When she went by the top part of the pants. Rosie finds the only piece of strong physical evidence tying Paul to the crime. The distinct smell of arson. Kind of took a step towards the next piece of clothing and she turned back around and

She banged her nose right, she whacked right down by the waist area. To me, that's a very good indication that she smelled it, and that was a good strong alert there. You want to go? Paul is released for the night, but kept under surveillance while the medical examiner reveals a stunning finding.

Jennifer did not burn to death. Her throat was crushed and she was dead perhaps hours before she burned. Leading Santa Clara County Assistant District Attorney Chuck Gillingham to a simple conclusion: murder at the hands of her boyfriend. There's a fight and there's an argument and he strangles her to death. Paul Zermatt is arrested at gunpoint at his hookah lounge and charged with the first-degree murder of his girlfriend Jennifer Skipsey.

When Rosie found the accelerants on his clothes, the police said, "We got our guy." At that point, we believed no alibi. And the nature of the killing, which is strangulation, which we understood was very personal, and then the dog hitting on the clothes, absolutely. But the Zumott family calls the investigation "knee-jerk," targeting Paul from the beginning. This is not a person who would do something like this, and I know Paul very well.

Paul cannot handle seeing somebody bleeding, let alone kill somebody. We see it on TV all the time, how someone dies and the boyfriend, the father, the husband gets arrested. I also looked at every single evidence and I read the police reports, every single one of them. There is not one thing that tied my brother to the crime.

The Zumonts, five brothers and sisters in all, mortgage houses and decide to hire one of California's most expensive, high-profile attorneys, Mark Garagos, who represented Michael Jackson, Winona Ryder, Chris Brown, and perhaps most famously, Scott Peterson.

with a mixed record. We, the jury in the above entitled cause, fix the penalty at death. Now, Garagos mounts a million-dollar spirited defense of a man he tells the jury is incapable of murder. This guy is kind of a lovable goof. At the end of the day, and I've defended countless murder cases, this is not somebody who I genuinely believe has it in him. Was he a threat to her, though?

I didn't see him as a threat to her. I don't, you know, there's nobody who knows him, who really knows him, who saw him as a threat to her. In fact, Paul has some pretty strong evidence on his side, starting with those police pictures of his body, which when developed, show no evidence that Paul was involved in a life and death struggle. The prosecution points out that he was wearing a hoodie.

long-sleeve sweatshirt that might have protected him from any kind of injuries. Oh, that's silly. His face, his hands. I mean, the hands are what it is. When you choke somebody, the first thing you do is grab their hands. That's what you're going to do. Or you're going to scratch at the face. You're going to do something to fight back. And she's got nails. And there wasn't a single mark on him. How strong should that be, in your opinion? To me, that's game over.

It's not, and prosecutors press on, even after they lose the key piece of evidence that led to Paul's arrest. Remember Rosie's strong alert to an accelerant on Paul's clothing? It turns out the crime lab says Rosie's findings are not up to sniff. The ATF chemist conclusively showed that there was no accelerant on his shirt, on his pants, on his socks. Why should it be so important that

Paul Zumont did not have gasoline on his clothes. This was a hot, quick fire that enveloped this room virtually immediately. Virtually impossible for somebody not to have trace evidence of gasoline on them after that.

But Garagos knows he still has to fight the biggest presumption in a domestic violence case. Who else could have done it? But the defense had a bombshell it hoped would blow up the prosecution theory that Jen was murdered after their terrible argument on the last night of her life. Paul dropped it when police first questioned him. He said he and Jen made up after the fight, and he has dramatic, even cinematic proof.

Paul came home when Jen said don't. And what did she do? Made love to it. You guys made up? I mean, yeah, I made up and then I have a video. I mean, we video ourselves. Video yourself, you mean? We have sex, we video. We had sex last night, we started videoing.

A Paul and Jennifer sex tape, that the defense would argue takes the sting out of the night's caustic text messages. And when police checked, it was right there, taken by Paul with her cell phone camera. Less than a minute of Paul and Jen. She dressed in a sexy outfit, he showing no murderous intent. After that supposed argument, they had sex and that was at 3:42 and everything was fine. Do you think it was genuine? Was it what we call makeup sex?

It was good, healthy sex. When the case goes to trial, the defense calls only five witnesses. But one of them is a huge surprise. Paul takes the stand.

With Jen's dad staring him down from the front row. I saw a monster. I saw a person that was continuing to hide his tracks. It was very difficult to find out the specifics that were brought out in the trial, especially because the person that was doing it was sitting right there.

But it's Paul's turn to give his story, his alibi. He was very busy that day, much of it captured on surveillance video, showing him around town the day after Jennifer is last seen. He testifies that Jen was still alive when he last saw her just before 1 o'clock in the next afternoon. She was in bed, awake and texting.

Paul says he couldn't have killed her because her phone records show a "Gen Text" after he was gone at 1:01. At nearly the same time, he is actually seen on a surveillance video at the Palo Alto Police Department on unrelated business. He says he never returns to the cottage and is seen on video at his hookah lounge and at a restaurant depot store before heading to San Jose for, ironically, one of his final weekly court-ordered domestic violence classes.

She's alive at 101. He's the only guy in America that couldn't have killed her because he's on tape at four different spots and sitting in a batter's program after that. Could Jen have been killed before he left the cottage? With Paul sending that one o'clock text from her phone as cover? Leaving her dead body there while he ran errands?

only to return later and set the fire. He says there's no time for that. The class ends a few minutes before 6:00. He cannot drive the 15 miles to his cottage home, set to blaze, and still be seen on this tape inside his hookah shop 45 minutes later. It's an impossibility. You can't do it. It's the cornerstone of the defense case, Paul's life in the balance. Is it really impossible?

Coming up, we decided to take the exact same trip on a weekday afternoon at the exact same time. Stay with us.

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Hey, why your phone is off? I didn't call you all morning, babe. 8 o'clock, I'm going to my... What? Where are you? On the afternoon Jennifer Skipsy's body is found, her boyfriend Paul, who routinely called and texted her up to 100 times a day, uncharacteristically left her only two short voice messages. His silence, and this is what I told the jury, it was just deafening. And it just screamed out that I killed her.

It's the launch point, even the core of the prosecution case against Paul Zumont, his character and demeanor. When Jennifer is nowhere to be found, Paul's lack of effort to find her, says prosecutor Chuck Gillingham, is the sign of a guilty man. He makes 38 calls and text messages from the fire scene and only to her to her. What would Paul Zumont do routinely? Paul Zumont would blow up her cell phone.

He would call her repeatedly, text her repeatedly. That was completely out of character. Now, if your loved one, you haven't been able to find her and you have a house fire, wouldn't you be calling that person constantly and everybody that they knew to find out where she might be? Her mother, her friends, her sister, Roy, anybody that she knows, has anybody heard from her? Especially in light of the fact that she had a fight that day. She could be anywhere, but none of those people were called.

Lacking physical evidence, DNA, scratch marks or eyewitnesses, the prosecution relies on Jen and Paul's volatile, threatening relationship. A suspect with a criminal record of threatening and harassing her. This is Jennifer's own voice. He throws stuff at me and hurts me and bruises me. If he comes near me, the police said he will be arrested instantly. He is not allowed near me. He spit on me. You cannot spit in someone's face.

She also left key evidence behind on her cell phone the morning after the fight and the lovemaking. And Prosecutor Gillingham does not believe the sex tape means there was peace between the couple. Doesn't this almost exonerate this guy? Because every time someone has sex and they're angry, it makes everything better. That's the argument. And I would suggest that human behavior is to the contrary. In fact, Jen herself made clear later that morning the argument was not over. 11-12, the day of her death, 2-Paul.

I'm serious. Bring me my f---ing check. Police department to file charges by 3 if my check is not here. I think that that is the trigger to this whole thing is the threat of the police. The prosecutor believes that was the motive. But what about opportunity? Paul based his defense on the notion that he had no time to set the fire and burn the murder scene.

Perhaps the most hotly contested piece of evidence in the entire trial was the timeline. Could Paul Zumont make the 15-mile trip from his domestic violence class in San Jose to his cottage in Palo Alto where the fire was set and then to the hookah spot where he's seen on camera?

We decided to take the same exact trip in a weekday afternoon at the exact same time. Northbound traffic at rush hour is not that difficult going north. It's the southbound that is congested and packed. We're taking the same route Paul Zumont testified he took, and we're driving under the speed limit. There's no way for him to have set the fire and been in the hookah store with the fire truck driving by. Just couldn't happen.

But prosecutor Gillingham does have his own theory, a possible explanation for what happened. He feels Paul could have turned on the stove in advance to set up an explosion. My personal belief is that the stove is set before he leaves for his domestic violence class. I think then when he goes back,

He's close enough as he's driving back to his house that he can look and see whether or not there's fire trucks or whether or not there's some type of police activity. There is not. And I think he then goes back then and has to set the fire. This is the street where they lived.

And here we are. It took us 28 minutes to get from the domestic violence class to the cottage. That means Paul could have arrived in plenty of time to light a match on an already gasoline-soaked Jennifer and then rush to his hookah spot in time to be seen on surveillance cameras, as the fire engine lights can be seen faintly through the doors.

Well, he had at least 45 minutes. And that's plenty of time. We thought it was, yeah. That's the jury forewoman interviewed alongside one of her colleagues exclusively by 2020.

That timeline, they say, is a key reason 12 men and women, some of them quite familiar with the route, took just eight hours and one vote to find Paul Zumont guilty of all charges. He was probably back at the house setting everything up so that when he came back, all he had to do is stop and light the fire. A jury in San Jose today found the owner of a Palo Alto hookah bar guilty of first-degree murder and arson. I don't have any doubt about whether he did it or not.

I truly believe beyond reasonable doubt, beyond any doubt for me. Prosecutors say the murder capped off a two-year relationship that was filled with domestic violence. Paul's family heard the guilty verdict as injustice and quickly rushed from the courtroom. The jurors told us Zumont practically convicted himself. And when he broke down and cried for five minutes, his tears seemed fake. It didn't seem genuine.

For me, it seemed staged because there hadn't been any particularly emotional testimony leading up to it. I really felt like there was no evidence introduced that showed that it

wasn't him or that it could have been somebody else. Of course, it's not the defendant's burden to prove that it could have been somebody else, but when the defendant chooses to testify on his own behalf, you expect to hear something more than what we heard, and I felt like what we heard was not truthful.

And they didn't believe him when he told them he only got upset at Jennifer, but never angry. The ridiculous testimony that he never got angry about anything. He clearly got angry about things. I mean, he got so angry that he kicked her car, and he got so angry that he spit. It's unbelievable. Well, here's some of my favorite days.

For the Skipsey family who sat and listened for three days to a man they now call a monster, the verdict finally brought them a memorable moment of relief. I remember watching two of my children be born. I remember finding out Jenny had passed away and I'll always remember hearing that word guilty.

When he murdered my daughter, he might as well have taken half of my soul and my heart with him because that's what he did. For veteran prosecutor Chuck Gillingham, who every day took the time to brief the Skipsy family on strategy, it was a special case that touched him deeply. You know, I cared a lot. She didn't deserve to die. She didn't need to die. And certainly not in that fashion. And the family, quite honestly, didn't need to go through what they had to go through. There was no reason for it.

This could have ended much, much differently. What kind of person does this? It's a person that sees that other person as garbage. Somebody who could spit in somebody else's face? I can't think of anything that is more disrespectful. A strong, independent woman battered from real estate superstar to hidden abuse victim. Jennifer Skipsy warned us about it herself, in her own voice, just two months before her murder. I knew that this would never last, but...

I was procrastinating. I was putting it under the rug. I was ignoring the reality because I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want to believe that the man that I sleep next to would ever want to hurt me so bad. So I was in denial.

This is Deborah Roberts. Paul Zumote was later sentenced to 33 years in prison. However, nearly a decade later, a federal judge overturned his conviction, ruling that prosecutors failed to disclose evidence supporting Zumote's alibi, including additional surveillance video from the hookah lounge. Zumote is scheduled to be retried in late October.

Thanks for listening to the 2020 True Crime Vault. We hope you'll join us Friday nights at 9 on ABC for all new broadcast episodes. See you then. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her, and she wasn't the only target.

Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders. This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. And it turns out convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy.

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