Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey everybody, welcome back to my podcast, Binged. Now before we get into it, I did want to mention two things. Number one, if you are listening to Binged and have for a while and are liking it, can you please go leave me a five-star review or turn on automatic downloads? It really helps the podcast out a lot and I would really appreciate it.
And then second, I know a lot of you came over originally from our sister show, Murder With My Husband, and we just had a brand new merch drop over there called It's Murder Mode. And if you are watching, I am wearing one of the pieces. So go check that out if you haven't already. Okay, with that out of the way, I did want to say we're going to be exploring the
some grim terrain this week and next as we take a look at a pair of cases of kids murdering other kids.
Now, the first of those, which we're covering in today's episode, is very recent. And if you follow the true crime headlines, you may be familiar with this story. The savage murder of 13-year-old Tristan Bailey just two years ago. The culprit was apprehended very quickly due to his and his family's stupidity. Not that stupidity is the worst of their flaws, but it often comes with the territory.
Anyway, pull up your chairs and let's dig in. It was on Mother's Day morning, May 9th, 2021. The Bailey family of Jacksonville, Florida had planned to gather for a special Mother's Day breakfast. The mother of honor that morning was Stacy Bailey and celebrating with her were her husband, Forrest, and two daughters, 13-year-old Tristan and her older sister, Alexis.
Brittany, the eldest daughter, was actually away at college and wouldn't be joining them this Mother's Day. Now, as 9 o'clock rolled around, Tristan still hadn't come out of her room, and her absence was holding the family up. But they thought, ah, let's just let her sleep in. It's Sunday. It's Mother's Day, you know? So they didn't disturb her. By 9.40, however, the family felt they had waited long enough. Breakfast was almost ready, and everybody was hungry.
So Alexis got up and went to her sister Tristan's bedroom door. She knocked and waited for an answer and she got none. She knocked again and then again, but she heard no movement inside. So Alexis then opened the door and found the bedroom empty. Tristan was nowhere in sight. "Mom," she called out, "Tristan's not here." The family proceeded to look around the house.
and outside the house. They searched the backyard, all around, but there was nothing, no sign of Tristan. Tristan's mother asked Alexis when she had last seen her sister. It had been about midnight, she said. She assumed she had just gone to bed shortly after, like the rest of the family. They decided to call Tristan's cell phone, and it went straight to voicemail. There was no rings. Tristan's phone was either dead or turned off.
They tried to track Tristan's phone through an app they used called Life360, which helps family members keep track of each other. And they also tried locating her through Snapchat, but both apps were turned off. And so was her Find My iPhone app.
Forrest Bailey, Tristan's father, looked at his daughter's cell phone records since they had a family plan, and he noticed that Tristan had sent a text message around 11 p.m. the previous night to a number with a 407 area code, which would be the Orlando area, which is about two hours away from Jacksonville.
Everything suggested that Tristan had possibly snuck out late the previous night and never returned home. So around 10 a.m. that morning, Forrest went onto social media to post about Tristan being missing, asking people in the community to keep an eye out for her. And meanwhile, Stacey Bailey, her mother, dialed 911 to report her daughter missing.
While on the phone, the dispatcher advised Stacy to search the house room by room. Stacy told the dispatcher, we've already done this.
In reflecting on the last 24 hours, Stacey explained to the dispatcher that although Tristan didn't seem upset before going to bed, she had become standoffish lately, which isn't unusual for a 13-year-old, to be fair. As children move closer toward adulthood, especially as they enter their teens, their attitudes towards their parents sometimes change because they're trying to break away and form their own identities.
Sometimes they want to grow up just a little too fast. In recent months, Stacey recounted, Tristan had begun hanging out more with friends in the neighborhood, which was safe, upper class community. But Tristan didn't have a boyfriend as far as her family knew. So she probably wouldn't have, you know, run away with someone.
Tristan was in the seventh grade at Patriot Oaks Academy, and she had a lot going on in her academic and social lives. She was a cheerleader on three different cheerleading squads. Her teachers and cheerleading coaches regarded her as sweet and spirited. She liked to bring the team together. She was a unifier. And Tristan never gave any indication to anyone that she wanted to run away. She wasn't depressed, as far as her family knew.
In recalling the events of that weekend, Stacey could only offer that she had dropped Tristan off with some friends Friday night for an event called Food Truck Friday and then picked her up later in the evening. On Saturday night, the family had gone out for dinner with Brittany, their oldest daughter who was attending college. They arrived home at around 11.45 p.m. And though Tristan had come home with them that night, she was now missing from her bedroom where they presumed she had been.
After the 911 call, Deputy Robert Maloney of the St. John's County Sheriff's Office arrived at the Bailey home and began to gather more information from Stacy, who, before the deputy's arrival, had reached out to friends of Tristan's and learned that Tristan had indeed snuck out late the night before. And after leaving the house, Tristan went to hang out with a guy named Trey Absher, who lived about a mile away.
Deputy Maloney was then joined by Deputy Liam Stack, and the two officers went to Trey's house to meet with the teenager. Trey told the deputies that Tristan had indeed snuck out of her house and arrived at his house at around 1230 a.m. the previous night. She snuck in through the north side of the house to avoid the security cameras and remained there only until about one in the morning, so just a half an hour.
Trey was not allowed to have friends over because he was grounded, so that's why he had Tristan sneak past the security cameras on his house. So at that point, around 1:00 AM, Tristan left in the company of a 14-year-old boy named Aiden Fucci, who was friends with Trey and Tristan. The deputies asked Trey what Tristan had been wearing when she left, and he remembered that she had on black sweatpants and a black and gray t-shirt with the word "pink" across the front.
Shortly after, a Florida missing child alert was sent out by the sheriff's office and the information was broadcast across the area. The community quickly mobilized, banding together to form search parties, scouring the neighborhood where Tristan was last seen.
Meanwhile, Deputy Maloney made contact with Aiden Fucci, who admitted to leaving Trey's house with Tristan the night before. The deputy asked Aiden to show him where he and Tristan went after they left Trey's house. Aiden led the officers north to North Durban Parkway. He said that's where they parted ways as Tristan turned onto Cloister Bain Drive in the direction of her home.
He told the deputy that he then walked along the North Durban Parkway and got back to his own house at around three in the morning, nearly an hour and a half later. Now, this was odd because the distance from Aiden's house to where he said he separated from Tristan was only a mile and a half and should have taken no longer than half an hour to walk. So what happened during that missing hour and a half?
deputy maloney confronted aiden with this discrepancy immediately so you left with tristan at one in the morning and didn't get back home until three in the morning deputy maloney asked suddenly 14 year old aiden doubled back and changed his story now he was claiming that he and tristan were walking north along north durban parkway when suddenly
Tristan grabbed his private parts. They then got into a fight, Aiden said, and he pushed her to the ground. And according to him, she then accidentally struck her head. Okay, and then what happened? The deputy asked. Aiden said he wasn't sure. He had been smoking marijuana at Trey's house and he was dizzy. He says he's not sure if he saw her get up or not. He just shouted F off to her and left the area, proceeding to just walk around by himself for a while.
At this time, after he was advised of his rights and left in the back of a police cruiser, Aiden uploaded a selfie to Snapchat. This is just the epitome of committing a crime at 14 years old nowadays. In it, he was holding up a peace sign with the text banner, "'Hey guys, has anybody seen Tristan lately?'
It was sinister and menacing and creepy and people who saw this message were freaked out by it because at this point he's the last known person to have seen Tristan and he's sending this from the back of a cop car. This message was forwarded by others on his Snapchat account and some of the responses read stuff like "WTF Aiden" and "You were with her Aiden, you know what happened to her."
Once investigators became aware of this Snapchat post, Aiden's phone was promptly seized as potential evidence. Detective Kimberly Peluso of the Special Victims Unit also talked to Aiden as well as Trey, and Aiden was seemingly changing his story once again, claiming that Tristan might be in the company of a guy in his 20s that she frequently communicated with through Snapchat, a guy who was a known drug dealer, a guy named Carlo.
Or maybe, Aiden said, she was up near the North Amenity Center, behind which there was a path known for teenage drug use. So he was suggesting that Tristan was a drug user, which didn't seem to fit. He also said he tried to call Tristan several times, but the calls just kept going straight to voicemail.
Aiden then decided he wouldn't provide any additional statements and his parents then retained an attorney. For more information, Aiden said they may want to talk to Tristan's friend, Shaila, he said. But at this point, despite all of this suspicion, he was released back to his parents as it wasn't known if a crime had been committed and whether Tristan was alive or dead, she was still just missing. Police then interviewed Shaila, who also knew Aiden and Trey.
And she told police Aiden was a bad kid. She described him as the textbook definition of what you would call a numb kid. He had no feelings towards anyone, no feelings towards himself. His eyes always appeared glossy with nothing behind them. He was the type of person she said you'd imagine as a murderer. He just didn't care. He would often take girls into the woods to vape and smoke weed with him.
Tristan told her she had planned to hang out with Aiden on Friday, but she didn't want Shiloh to come because she had a bad feeling about it. Detectives then interviewed Trey again, and Trey maintained that Tristan had left with Aiden, and he assumed Aiden then dropped off Tristan in her neighborhood. Trey said Tristan probably just got caught sneaking outside her house by her sister and then just left to meet with the drug dealer Aiden had referred to.
Trey indicated he didn't know this drug dealer personally. He'd only heard about him through Aiden.
Detective Peluso then asked Trey if he would allow her to review his Instagram and Snapchat accounts so she could access Tristan's profiles, which were private and only visible to friends. And Trey had no problem with this. And while the detective found no recent Instagram posts on Tristan's account, she noticed some Snapchat activity from about 16 hours earlier, but nothing of significance.
Police then paid a visit to two of Tristan's friends, Samantha and Linda Creel, though no one was home. The Creel's parents were then contacted and police learned from their father that Linda had talked to Trey earlier in the day and Trey told the Creel girls that Tristan and another boy had snuck out in the middle of the night to go hang out near the North Amenity Center. Trey said the two boys then went home and Tristan had gone to hang out with a 22-year-old drug dealer named Carlo.
With time being of the essence, the patrol supervisor contacted AT&T and requested that Tristan's phone be pinged. Obviously, the friends she was with the night before are changing their stories and not giving police anything concrete to work with. The results pointed to the location being a wooded area south of the Loop Nursery on Racetrack Road. And the data was historical results only, which indicated that the phone was no longer sending active signals.
Police went to the Durban Crossing North Amenity Center and obtained surveillance video footage from early Sunday morning, around the time Tristan and Aiden were thought to have been in the area.
Indeed, at 1.24 in the morning, a male and female subject were observed walking past the center. Looking at the records for Tristan's cell phone activity, it was determined that her last outgoing call was placed at around 9 p.m. on May 7th to her sister. There was no activity on May 8th, and then on May 9th at 12.25 in the morning, there was an incoming call placed by Aiden Fucci.
Since others whom detectives interviewed had mentioned this drug dealer named Carlo, detectives felt they needed to track this guy down because maybe that's whom she was talking to the night before. After some digging, they found a possible address for Carlo in Jacksonville and then they learned from the Bailey family that they had been in contact with a friend of Tristan's who reached out to Carlo and he denied knowing Tristan.
And Detective Peluso also heard that Tristan may have been involved in illegal activity and afraid of being caught, so she ran away. She and some friends had spray painted some graffiti, and one of them sprayed Tristan's name, which Tristan was uncomfortable with, fearing that it would get her in trouble. She tried crossing it out, but then she talked about running away so she wouldn't be arrested. Maybe they thought Tristan had just run away with this Carlo character.
So they decided to pay a visit to Carlo for themselves and they went out to the address in Jacksonville, but they found that no one by the name of Carlo even lived there.
They tried another address, and there they were greeted by Carlo's brother, Marco, who told the detectives that Carlo did not live with him. Sometimes, after a particularly long day, I love to play games on my phone to get my mind off things, and one game I have been loving is June's Journey. June's Journey is a hidden object mystery mobile game that puts your detective skills to the test. You play as June Parker and investigate beautifully detailed scenes of the 1920s while uncovering the mystery of her sister's murder.
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While on the phone, Carlo noted that he had been staying at his dad's place because his truck had broken down, and they furthermore learned that the truck had not been in their county since May 1st. This was corroborated, and they were able to rule out Carlo as a suspect. Shortly after this, police learned that Trey had been trying to coax a girl named Lola into sneaking out of her house on the night of May 8th.
There was in fact a video making the rounds on social media documenting this. A source told detectives that Trey also contacted Tristan that same night trying to talk her into sneaking out of her house.
At this point, it was already late afternoon. As you can tell, police have been chasing leads down Carlo, Trey, Aiden. But all they know is that Tristan snuck out of her home after her sister last saw her at midnight, went over to Trey's house and then from Trey's house left with Aiden Fucci. And they have no idea what happened to her after that.
It's already late afternoon. This investigation has already covered a lot of ground with a lot of momentum by the time evening rolled around. Tristan had been missing at this point for a little over 12 hours. And then at around 6.05 p.m., a call came into the St. John's County Sheriff's Office. It was the call everybody feared.
A guy named Daniel Hart had just finished a run when he decided to search the wooded area near his house, just east of the cul-de-sac on Saddlestone Court. And that was when he came upon the brutalized dead body of a young woman fitting Tristan's description.
He found her about 80 feet from a retention pond south of the Durban Creek Nursery. She was lying on her right side with her right leg bent slightly at the knee and her right arm extended. She was wearing black sweatpants and a shirt with the word pink on the front of it. Within 10 minutes, that young woman would be pronounced dead and identified as missing 13-year-old Tristan Bailey.
Her body was covered in stab wounds. When she was taken to the medical examiner's office, it was determined that Tristan had been stabbed 114 times, with 49 of those being defensive wounds. Tristan fought for her life. The wounds were mostly to the top of her head, the back of her neck, and the back of her arms and hands and her back. It looked as though she was attacked from behind.
A fragment of a knife blade was found embedded in the top of Tristan's skull. Handprints were found all over Tristan's body, but they could not lift any ridge detail from them. They could only determine the general size of the hands that left them. Police detectives began canvassing the neighborhood and they learned that Dr. Larry Schoenberg, who lived in Saddlestone Drive, had surveillance video footage from his driveway and he allowed the detectives to view it.
In the video, investigators saw what appeared to be a male and a female walking on the sidewalk in the direction of the wooded area where Tristan was found. Based on the clothing the subjects were wearing, they appeared to be Aiden Fucci and Tristan Bailey. The time was about 1:45 in the morning. The next time either of the subjects were seen on the video was at 3:27 in the morning, over an hour and 40 minutes later.
And this time, it was only Aiden, walking back, alone. And he was carrying something in his hands, something that appeared to be a pair of shoes.
At this time, Aiden was picked up and transported to the Central Investigations Division for further questioning. I mean, they've found Tristan's body and he's on video walking her towards she's found and then walking back alone. This makes that previous Snapchat in the back of the police cruiser all the more eerie. This time at questioning, Aiden was accompanied by his mom, Crystal, and his father, Jason. When they arrived at the CID, they were taken to an interview room and left alone, just the three of them.
except the room was being audio and video recorded. Once they were alone inside, Aiden's parents told him not to talk about any possible involvement he may have had in Tristan's brutal murder and also reminded him that the room was being recorded. Then his parents began discussing Tristan with him. They told him she was found in the neighborhood. Is she good? Aiden asked. No, his mom told him. She's dead. That's why this is very important, she said. It's all on you right now.
Aiden then asked, how is it my problem? Because you were the last one seen with her, his parents told him. His father asked him if he understood the gravity of the situation. This is your whole life, his mom said, your whole future. And those Snapchats he posted from the back of the police cruiser, that wasn't smart. As a result, the family was now receiving threats.
She probably got picked up by her drug dealer, Aiden told his parents, who in a way were essentially interrogating him. But this was probably to convince themselves their son was innocent and for no other reason. His father asked Aiden if he kissed Tristan or did anything else with her, and Aiden said he didn't. So your DNA isn't going to be on her, Jason Fushi asked. Aiden did not respond to this. His father mentioned that they saw Aiden carrying his shoes on the surveillance footage. Why were your shoes off, he asked.
because my feet were hurting aiden said adding that those shoes gave him blisters which for police monitoring this recorded conversation confirmed that aiden was the individual pictured in the video people think you murdered tristan jason said aiden didn't respond to this either he just maintained that tristan grabbed his privates and then he pushed her down on the ground and left the area his father asked him why he was damp when he got home and aiden said it was because he spilled a cup of water on himself
Then he said he fell. Crystal asked Aiden about the drug dealer, Carlo, whom he said Tristan was going to hang out with. Aiden admitted he didn't know Carlo. He'd only heard about him secondhand. And around 9 p.m. that night, after Aiden had been in the interview room with his family for over an hour, Detective Thompson entered the room to request buckle swabs from Aiden, but his parents declined and said they wanted to wait until their attorney arrived.
When the detective left the room, Aiden's parents explained to him why they wanted to collect DNA, to make sure nothing was on his clothes, under his nails, or anywhere else on his person. There will be nothing on those clothes, right? Aiden's father asked, to which Aiden responded, no sir. But then Crystal, Aiden's mother, shot Aiden an inquisitive look and leaned in, whispering, blood? When we looked on the camera, his mother then said at full volume, you were wearing khakis. Then a pause, right?
Aiden nodded, but Aiden had already indicated in a previous interview that he had been wearing blue jeans that night and detectives monitoring this conversation recognized that Crystal was trying to coach her son Aiden into giving a specific answer, knowing police were watching. They also noticed in the video that Aiden was passing a cell phone back and forth between himself and his parents to communicate via written notes so that what they were saying couldn't be picked up on audio or video.
When Aiden's dad again asked him if he was sure he didn't kiss Tristan during their walk, suddenly his story changed. How many times had Aiden changed his story by this point? And he was now claiming that he and Tristan did in fact kiss. Crystal was then like, well, if you and Tristan kissed and then she grabbed your privates, why would you push her away?
You better find your story and stick to it. Also, why did it take you so long to get home? His mother asked. Aiden claimed he was walking around slowly by himself, looking at the stars. Eventually Aiden's attorney arrived and the family was escorted to another room to consult with him. This conversation obviously wasn't recorded because that's client attorney privilege, but it must've become clear during this conversation that Aiden likely wouldn't be returning home that night.
Probably not ever. All three emerged from this meeting in tears. This was the end of their lives as they knew it. Just as it was for the Bailey family, with Tristan having been taken from them. When the Fucci family returned to the interview room after consulting with their attorney, Crystal reminded Aiden that they were being recorded and not to say anything that might incriminate himself. "'Am I gonna be coming home tonight?' he asked. Crystal said that the police were currently searching the house, so they couldn't return until they were done."
But it was unlikely Aiden would be coming home with them, his mother said. Meanwhile, as the police were searching the Fucci house, they found surveillance cam footage from inside the home. Police viewed the surveillance video from inside the Fucci home and they were treated to a surprise. This is a part of this case that has gone pretty viral. From a camera positioned above a common area on the second story landing, facing Aiden's bedroom, Crystal, Aiden's mom,
could be seen going into Aiden's room, taking out a pair of jeans, the ones he'd been wearing the night before, and carefully hand-washing them. They also obtained more surveillance footage. We really do live in a world where everywhere is documented on video 24-7. This was from other people in the neighborhood, all showing Aiden and Tristan walking together alone in the direction of the woods where Tristan was found dead.
Also taken from the Fuchi residence were one black knife sheath, wet Nike shoes with possible bloodstains on them, a t-shirt with possible bloodstains, a piece of paper with handwriting containing possible blood, a sweatshirt with possible blood on one of its sleeves, and a pair of jeans. And the drain trap in the bathroom sink tested positive for the presence of blood.
Evidence was also removed from Trey's house because at this time, Trey was still a suspect in Tristan's murder. They didn't know if both boys had done this together.
A girl named Olivia Betancourt, who went to school with Aiden and Tristan and used to cheer with Tristan, claimed at this point that she had access to a group chat between Aiden, Trey, and another kid named Aptin. And the Aptin knew what Aiden had done to Tristan. I mean, you have a bunch of 13 and 14 year olds here who live their entire lives online.
And more surveillance video from around the Fucci house showed Aiden returning at 3.32 a.m. that morning, carrying his shoes, wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt. Definitely not khakis. He then went to his bedroom on the second floor, then into the bathroom, coming out wearing a bathrobe. So basically they have video from inside the killer's own house of the killer returning home and changing. This is very unreal.
Then it was after the cops came and went to first talk to Aiden that Crystal ran upstairs to hand wash Aiden's bloody clothes. So to put this in layman terms, the morning Tristan was discovered to be missing and police followed the breadcrumbs back to Aiden. And they first came to his house, questioned him and put him in the back of that police cruiser after all of this. And they left.
His mother ran upstairs, checked his bedroom, found pants with blood on them, and immediately began washing the evidence away. She will go on to catch a ton of heat for this later. His mom can also be seen on the video from that day wiping something off the floor at the foot of the stairs. And when Verizon was subpoenaed for Aiden's cell phone records, they confirmed that he'd called Tristan at around 12:25 a.m. shortly before she went missing.
The site location data showed he was likely at Trey's house when he made this call.
Detectives obtained a search warrant for Crystal's phone because at this point they were thinking about charging her with evidence tampering. And maybe that tampering didn't stop with just washing Aiden's clothes. At this point, between the surveillance video, Aiden's statements, Aiden's changing story, Aiden's Snapchat uploads, and his mother tampering with evidence, police felt they had sufficient probable cause to charge Aiden with second-degree murder and they placed him under arrest.
The next day, a dive team mobilized at the retention pond near where Tristan was found. One of the divers found what appeared to be a Buck brand folding knife with a wood and brass handle. The tip of the knife was damaged. It was both fractured and bent. The knife was recovered about 140 feet from where Tristan's body had been found.
At the medical examiner's office, it was determined that the fragment of metal recovered from Tristan's skull matched the knife found in the pond. After Aiden had stabbed her 114 times, he threw the broken knife into the pond. The next person detectives interviewed was Zofie Bowman, who was Aiden Fucci's girlfriend. Zofie told the detectives that Aiden had anger issues and threw things when he was angry, which he wasn't proud of.
She had also seen Aiden exhibit violent behavior, and she described an incident where Aiden had gone to buy a vape off of another kid, but ended up beating the kid and taking the vape. She said Aiden always armed himself with a knife whenever he wasn't at school. One knife was a gray and black folding knife with an orange skull on the handle, which Aiden named Picker. The other was a folding knife with a wooden and brass handle, which Aiden named Poker.
Zofie revealed that Aiden frequently talked about killing people. He even said he wanted to kill Zofie. Sometimes he would pull out his knife and pretend to stab her with it. Other times she said he would sneak up behind her and put the knife to her throat, pretending to slit it. Not long before Tristan's murder, Zofie brought Aiden up to the roof of her house, and there he told her he was planning to murder someone within the next month.
He said he was going to find a random person walking at night, drag them into the woods, and stab them to death. He said that afterwards he would try to act innocent so that he could then continue killing people. He would then run away, fake his own death, and go on to keep murdering people in different places. He would also draw graphic images of dead and mutilated bodies. Zofie said Aiden seemed to know something was wrong with him and wanted help.
At this point, the charge against Aiden was bumped up to first-degree murder because this was clearly premeditated if he told his girlfriend earlier that he was planning on killing somebody.
And Trey would later tell a friend that he believed this murder was indeed premeditated. And Trey also felt responsible for Tristan's death because he was the one that invited her to sneak out that night. Okay, most beauty brands don't understand fine color treated hair, but Crows does. They have a formula that can address my specific type of hair needs, which makes sense because it's based on me.
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Let's get back into the episode. Meanwhile, Crystal and the Fucci family left town due to the nonstop death threats they were receiving. Crystal was tracked down and brought into the station and shown the video of herself washing Aiden's jeans. When she asked what she had to say for herself, she told detectives she wished to speak with her attorney before making any comment.
Before she left, her cell phone was seized as evidence. Trey was then interviewed again about his relationship with Aiden. Trey told police he first met Aiden at the beginning of the school year and became instant friends. They hung out all the time, every day. Aiden talked a lot about death and about murder, Trey said. He told Tristan that he had a crush and his crush was on the act of killing people. Such an odd way to put it.
Aiden often talked about slitting throats or stabbing people. He seemed fixated on this dark stuff, fixated on slitting people's throats and stabbing. Trey never took Aiden seriously though and believed it was Aiden's way of coping with his troubled home life. Aiden talked about wanting to slit someone's throat and watch the blood drain out. And Trey said his friend Aiden always carried a knife and described the knife that detectives recognized was similar to the one recovered from the retention pond.
When Trey was eventually shown a picture of that knife, he identified it as Aiden's. Trey told detectives that when Aiden arrived at his house that night, he skateboarded in the driveway for a while and then they played some video games. They smoked some weed and then Trey called Tristan via Snapchat and invited her over to his house. She snuck out and came over. When she got there, she told Trey she was afraid that she'd gotten caught sneaking out and that her sister may have seen her.
Aiden and Tristan then went outside to smoke some weed. Trey briefly joined them, and when he returned inside and fell asleep while watching TikTok videos. Aiden and Tristan came back inside, woke him up, and at that point, Trey told them they needed to leave. Next thing he remembered, he woke up in the morning around 9 a.m. to join his father on a trip to Home Depot, and it was shortly after they returned home that the police showed up, and Trey remembered being disoriented and confused as to why they were there.
When the cops explained that Tristan was missing, he assumed she must have run away or gone home and then gone back out. Or maybe she was still with Aiden. He had no clue. He said he then tried to contact Tristan through FaceTime and text messages, but was unable to reach her. He then called Aiden to ask where Tristan was, what had happened the night before. And Aiden told his friend that he dropped her off in her neighborhood and returned home.
Trey said he then found Aiden's skateboard outside his house, which was unusual because Aiden usually skateboarded everywhere he went. It was at this point that Trey contacted police to tell them that Tristan was at his house the previous night and had left with Aiden. Afterward, he called Aiden through FaceTime and told Aiden the cops were coming to his house to talk to him.
Aiden looked a bit nervous, Trey recalled. Later, the cops came by Trey's house and put him in the car with Aiden. Aiden talked about blood being on his pants from having cut his finger a while back. Aiden made a joke about them both going to the same prison, but Trey wasn't amused by this. When he overheard the cops talking about Aiden's claim that Tristan grabbed his privates and he then pushed her, Trey thought it was odd that Aiden never told him this because Aiden told him everything.
and when he learned Tristan had been found dead, his first thought was that Aiden strangled her or broke her neck. That he stabbed her to death was just unthinkable to him. Aiden's mother, Crystal, was arrested June 5th, 2021, less than a month after the killing, for tampering with evidence. She was released on $25,000 bail. Aiden, however, was held without bond.
After being arraigned, the judge explained to Aiden what he could face if convicted and that first-degree murder was a crime punishable by death or by life in prison. Though because of Aiden's age, he would be ineligible for the death penalty, so the maximum penalty he could receive was life. And he would be tried as an adult because of the severity of the crime. During Zoom hearings when he was in jail, Aiden tried to feign insanity,
rocking back and forth, repeating, demons are going to take my soul away. Demons are taking my soul away. And then he kept asking, what's going on? What's going on? Why am I here? He was pretending to not be aware. Pretty much everyone present recognized this to be a performance. Psychologists evaluated Aiden and found him perfectly competent to stand trial. And Aiden Fucci eventually changed his plea to guilty and finally admitted to having killed Tristan.
He was probably feeling like admitting to the crime would result in a lighter sentence, maybe the minimum sentence of 40 years.
So there was no trial because of the guilty plea. It was just a penalty hearing. And Aiden's time in lockup awaiting sentencing was definitely not without incident. In December of 2021, he was witnessed punching another inmate who then punched him back multiple times to the point where that inmate had to be tased. Afterward, Fucci said he was being extorted for commissary items and bullied.
When jail officials asked Fucci why he didn't let a corrections officer know, he replied, I ain't no snitch. He was then taken to solitary confinement.
Also during his stay, Fucci made repeated threats against other inmates and corrections officers. He was threatening another inmate that when they entered general population, Fucci was going to stab him. And when he got out of jail, he was going to find that inmate's loved ones, stab them, and photograph it. He taunted inmates, boasting that they were all lame for shooting people and he was the real deal because he stabbed a girl face-to-face.
Fucci threatened to murder corrections officers and their families as well while pounding the door of his cell. And he extorted other inmates from commissary items using threats and intimidation.
And in an incident in October 2022, Fucci lost his temper when guards tried to remove contraband from his cell and had to be pepper sprayed and placed in a restraint chair. Meanwhile, Aiden's defense was trying to portray him as a good kid who had, when he decided to stab Tristan to death, some kind of sudden change of character, but
The dean of Patriot Oaks Academy, where Tristan and Aiden both were students, testified that Aiden was more mature than most of his peers. But the prosecution were determined to see Fucci receive a life sentence, and his grandmother pleaded with court for leniency. This is not the boy I knew, she said on the stand, which was the only time Aiden, who broke down, showed any real emotion in court.
Theirs is a large Christian family, his grandmother told the court, a family that prays all the time. But Tristan's family members all gave statements on the stand. Tristan's older sister, Brittany, said, you, Aiden Fucci, decided to overpower a five foot three innocent 13 year old girl. How much more of a coward could you possibly be?
Tristan's other sister, Alexis, took the stand with an empty jar. 114, she said, as she began dropping heart-shaped stones, aqua-colored, as aqua was Tristan's favorite color, into the jar, one after the other.
One for each of the 114 stab wounds that my sister had to endure, Alexis said. And this is actually a very intense and emotional video to watch as everyone in the courtroom sits there in silence as Alexis drops 114 pebbles into the jar.
Aiden Fucci wrote a statement to the Bailey family.
Her family rejected his apology as insincere and self-serving. Fucci's father, Jason, also wrote a statement. There are no words to write this wrong. Those words don't exist in this situation.
Bucci's mother, Crystal Smith, wrote, "...I grieve for the devastating loss of Tristan. I grieve for the subsequent arrest of my son, and I grieve for the irreparable agony inflicted on the Bailey family. Most of all, however, I grieve for Stacey Bailey as a mother."
The court had in fact received hundreds of pages of victim impact statements on behalf of the Bailey family, which revealed the scope of the impact her murder had on the community. Judge Lee Smith ultimately declared that Aiden Fucci was beyond saving and sentenced him to the maximum sentence, life in prison. In a separate trial, Crystal Smith, Aiden's mom, was sentenced to 30 days in jail and five years probation for evidence tampering.
Such an all-around tragic and awful case, but I think the life sentence was completely justified here, even despite Aiden's age. The circumstances and how cold and premeditated this murder was and brutal and the way Aiden had previously fixated on killing people. This is a deeply sick young man and I totally agree with Judge Lee's assessment that he was beyond saving, at least at that point. His
His behavior and his crime suggest he's a sadistic psychopath who almost certainly would have killed again. Now changing subjects here. In May of 1964 in Seattle, Washington, a six-year-old boy named Jimmy Davis crossed paths with a teenaged boy about age 15 while he was outside playing. The older boy led him into a wooded area and then suddenly produced a knife and plunged it into the little boy's abdomen before walking off and laughing.
The knife penetrated the little boy's liver, and he almost died from this wound, but luckily recovered. At the time, the older boy was never identified, and it wasn't until nearly 40 years later that the identity of that older boy would be learned.
It was Gary Leon Ridgeway who went on to become the Green River Killer, one of America's most prolific serial killers, who murdered between 50 and 90 sex workers. No one, not even Ridgeway himself, is sure of the exact number. This all happened between 1982 and 1998.
He was finally arrested in 2001 after years of evading apprehension. When Ridgway pled guilty, one condition of his plea deal was that he was provided full disclosure and would reveal everything about every crime he had ever committed. And the first crime he admitted having committed was the 1964 stabbing of six-year-old Jimmy Davis, whom Ridgway said he had stabbed just to see what it felt like to stab somebody.
This illustrates, at least to me, perfectly why Aiden Fucci needs to be kept behind bars for the rest of his life. I hope you'll join us again next week, bingers, as we look at another case not unlike today's, but a case where the child perpetrator just finally got paroled after spending his entire adult life in prison. I'll see you then.