cover of episode Lisa and Chad Cutler

Lisa and Chad Cutler

2021/9/27
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The episode begins with the tragic story of Lisa Cutler, found dead in her bathtub, and her husband Chad's insistence that it was a suicide. The narrative explores the initial police response and Chad's account of the events leading up to Lisa's death.

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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, check us out at patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. This episode of Forensic Tales is sponsored by Podcorn. When I first started looking for sponsors to feature on the show, it was really important to me that the brands I worked with were not only a good fit for me, but for my listeners. That's why I choose Podcorn to find sponsorships for Forensic Tales.

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To learn more about what Podcorn can do for you and your podcast, click the link in my show notes to sign up to Podcorn and start browsing today. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. In the middle of a peaceful night in Illinois, police are called to a family home. The husband tells police he found his beloved wife in the bathtub.

She's submerged. She's not breathing. She's dead. What happened? Was it an accidental drowning? A possible suicide? But wait, why is the husband fully dressed? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 91, Lisa and Chad Cutler. ♪♪

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.

Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.

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Now, let's jump right into this week's case. Hi, everyone. I can barely believe that it's the last week of September already. Between my wedding and our honeymoon trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, I just feel like September flew right by my eyes.

But I've got to admit, I am more than ready for it to be fall. The last few weeks here in Southern California have been somewhere in the 80s, upwards of 90s, somewhere it's been 100 degrees. So I know I'm just ready for cooler weather over here so that I don't feel so bad about putting out my fall and Halloween decorations. All right, so let's just jump right into this week's case.

Don't know if you guys knew this, but nearly 50% of marriages in the United States end up in divorce. That's one out of every two couples who tie the knot together. Couples may decide to get divorced for many reasons. Infidelity, money troubles, communication issues. A divorce usually ends up with both people parting ways and then starting new lives separate from one another.

But what happens when one person in the marriage ends up dead? Around 1.30 a.m. on April 27, 2012, the police department in Mount Zion, Illinois, received an emergency phone call. The caller told first responders that his wife was in the bathtub and that she's dead. The husband, Chad Cutler, had some explaining to do.

While Chad waited for the ambulance to arrive at the home, the 911 dispatcher asked him about what happened. He said that he and his wife Lisa went to bed around 10 p.m. that night, and they put their kids to sleep and then decided to go to bed themselves. But shortly after getting into bed, Lisa complained about her back. According to Chad, her back was hurting so bad that she couldn't even fall asleep.

So Chad told his wife that maybe she should go take a hot bath. Maybe a hot bath will help her make the backache go away so that she can finally get some sleep that night. So after Lisa got up from bed and went into the bathroom to start running the water, Chad told 911 that he had fallen asleep. So he just figured that his wife would be in the bath for maybe 20, perhaps 30 minutes and then come back to bed.

But after he fell asleep, he said he woke up a little after one o'clock in the morning and said that when he rolled over to hug his wife, Lisa, she wasn't there. So he decided to get out of bed and see if maybe she fell asleep while taking the bath. But when he got to the bathtub, he saw her submerged underwater and she wasn't breathing.

As the 911 dispatcher continues to ask Chad questions about what happened, the dispatcher instructs him to pull Lisa's head out of the water and drain the bathtub. Once her head is out of the water, he's then told to begin CPR until the paramedics arrive. But by this point, it was far too late, and Lisa was already dead.

Paramedics and police arrived at the home minutes later. When they got there, they found Chad on the phone with 911 while performing CPR and Lisa lying on the bathroom floor.

When the first responders arrived, they didn't know what type of call they were walking into. Sure, they knew that a woman was found unresponsive in a bathtub, but they didn't know whether this was an accidental drowning. Maybe this was a case of suicide. Anytime you've got a case involving an adult drowning in a bathtub, the authorities are going to have their suspicions.

If this were a child, this would be a completely different story. We know that unsupervised children drown in the bathtubs far too often, to be honest. So while working on this story, I saw how common drowning in a bathtub really is.

And from this information, I found a published journal article in a medical journal that on average, one person a day drowns in the bathtub in the United States alone. In fact, it's more common for people to drown in the summer and spring months compared to the winter months.

Now, I found this pretty interesting because I would have thought that people are more likely to take baths in the wintertime when it's colder than in the spring or summertime when it's warmer. I'm sitting here again in Southern California and I can't even imagine getting into a hot bathtub. So I found this surprising that more people actually die in the spring and summer. But according to this study, it's the opposite.

Now, most of the time when adults drown in the bathtub, it's for a couple of reasons.

If the person has a history of slipping or falling, they can slip and fall down. Or if a person has a history of seizures, they can have a seizure in the bathtub and then die. And then sometimes adults have heart attacks. And sometimes adults are under the influence of drugs and or alcohol. And if they have too much of a controlled substance, they can fall asleep and then ultimately drown.

We've seen this particular instance with a couple of celebrities. So when law enforcement responded to Lisa and Chad's home, they had no idea what to expect.

So after Lisa is officially pronounced dead at the scene, first responders move Chad to a different room in the home. Not only do they want to get his side of what happened, his wife just died. They don't want him around and having to watch his wife just lie dead on the bathroom floor.

And as Chad is escorted into a different room of the house, the police begin their initial investigation. And there's a couple of things that caught their attention. Number one, they noticed that Chad was fully dressed when they arrived. He wasn't wearing pajamas or boxer shorts or really anything to suggest that he had just woken up.

And he also didn't appear to have been sleeping. Now, not to say everyone has bedhead when they wake up. Chad seemed, well, he seemed overly dressed and overly aware. Like he'd never been to bed at all that night. Number two, there was the bedroom.

The master bedroom that Chad and Lisa shared, in their initial search of the home, the police noticed that someone made the bed. The covers were pulled up. All of the pillows were still there on top of the comforter. So unless Chad slept on top of the comforter, it was undeniable that the bed hadn't been slept in.

Now, this observation is a problem because according to Chad in his story to 911 and the police that night, he and Lisa did go to bed that night. She got up to go to the bathroom to take a bath and he stayed in bed and ultimately fell asleep. But if the bed was made and didn't appear to have been slept in, well, that doesn't make much sense.

Number three, which is purely circumstantial, the police believed that Chad's demeanor and behavior were just odd. According to the police officers, Chad just didn't act like someone who had just found his wife dead.

Now, I'm a huge believer that there is no one right way to act, especially in situations involving trauma and or death. I think everyone reacts and behaves in their own way and that their behavior or demeanor shouldn't be considered a sign of guilt or anything else in the case.

But in this particular story, in this situation, the police seem to think otherwise. They truly felt that he was not acting as a grieving husband should, or at least like a husband who just saw his wife die. But again, someone's behavior like that isn't going to be something that I personally put too much weight on.

So the police are better off sticking with their first two observations than simply relying on how Chad is acting. Now, after the coroner removed Lisa's body from the home, the police continue to question Chad. And as they're asking him, he does something that they don't expect. He starts offering up a possible explanation for his wife's drowning.

He tells the police that Lisa took prescription medication for depression and anxiety. He said that she has suffered from both of these conditions for years and that she has regularly taken this medication to help deal with her symptoms.

So Chad's initial assumption with the police was that she probably took too much of her medication and passed out while in the bathtub. Or maybe the pills just made her sleepy and she accidentally closed her eyes a little too late and then drowned.

Chad was very matter-of-fact about this explanation. The police, well, the police didn't even ask what he thought might have happened to Lisa. He was swift to say that the anxiety and depression medication is what caused the accident. He also commented to the police that he thought she intentionally took too many pills and may have killed herself.

Now, Chad's theory here isn't really too far-fetched. There are many side effects to prescription pills that treat anxiety and depression, and some of the common side effects include drowsiness and dizziness.

So let's speculate for a moment that Lisa became drowsy after taking her medication. She then got into the bathtub and accidentally fell asleep. Once she fell asleep, her head dipped below the bathtub line and she accidentally drowned herself before her husband got to her. Or let's say that she experienced dizziness, another common side effect.

We already mentioned that a common cause of adult drownings in bathtubs in the U.S. is slips and falls. She could have easily become dizzy and then accidentally slipped while getting in or out of the bathtub. And then finally, we can then speculate that maybe she took too many pills that night, whether that was by accident or she took them on purpose.

And if she took too many, they would also cause an accidental drowning. A key discovery that seemed to actually support Chad's theory that maybe Lisa intentionally overdosed on medication was that there was a Bible in the bathtub next to her.

Now, it's entirely common for people to commit suicide and then have a Bible right there next to them. Or sometimes they're even holding on to the Bible. So this key piece of evidence seemed to suggest to the police that maybe their initial suspicions were wrong about Chad. And perhaps he was telling the truth.

It's entirely possible that Lisa intentionally overdosed and brought the Bible with her in the bathtub because she knew she would kill herself. According to Chad, his wife Lisa struggled with mental illness for years. He even said her anxiety and depression had worsened in the weeks and months leading up to her death.

She seemed to be sometimes crippled by this condition, and it was so bad some days she couldn't even leave the house. Some days she would just stay in bed all day long because her symptoms were just so, so bad.

This incident wasn't even the first time that Chad recalled his wife taking too much of her prescription medication. He said that she's been seeing a psychiatrist about it for years, and on several occasions, more than once, she took more pills than what she was prescribed. But he also said that he could not remember if Lisa had taken any pills the night before going to bed.

So after hearing Chad's theory of a possible suicide, the police wrapped things up at the home for the night. They had no solid evidence to arrest Chad or any real reason to suspect that he had anything to do with Lisa's death. All they had was circumstantial evidence.

Chad's theory of suicide may be plausible, especially when you consider the Bible in the bathtub, as well as Lisa's prescription medication. But the Bible didn't seem to support any other part of Chad's story or what the police first observed while in the home. There was still the fact that someone made the bed that night and

And there was still the fact that Chad wasn't wearing pajamas. He was wearing regular clothes when first responders got to the house that morning. So if Lisa decided to kill herself, where was Chad? Why wasn't he in bed? Or at the very least, why was he laying on top of the comforter in his regular clothes?

These are all really valid questions the police were asking themselves. It just didn't seem to make much sense. About 12 hours after Lisa was pronounced dead, a forensic pathologist performed her autopsy. Everyone was eager to find out exactly what the cause of death would be.

One of the things the forensic pathologist noted during his autopsy was that Lisa had a good amount of bruises on both her head and on both of her elbows. And based on the coloring of these bruises, it appeared to the forensic pathologist that these marks were relatively fresh, that they occurred within the last 12 to 24 hours.

Now, the bruising is significant because if she sustained bruises around the time of her death, this suggests maybe she fell and then got the bruises on her head and elbows after she hit the side or maybe even the inside of the bathtub.

which would support a suicide theory because maybe she was standing up when she felt the side effects of the prescription medication as she overdosed, which then caused her to fall and hit her head and elbows, causing the fresh bruising. But another thing that the forensic pathologist noted was that there was a good amount of water in her lungs.

which isn't uncommon for drownings or suicides involving water. But he noted in his report that the amount of water, that the amount of water was, quote, excessive.

It was like she was attempting to breathe or she was attempting to try and get air while she was submerged underwater, which would be slightly unusual if she was intentionally trying to kill herself. Now, unfortunately, the forensic pathologist ruled that Lisa died from drowning, but, and this is a huge but,

left the manner of death blank. He left it unspecified, meaning he didn't rule her death as either an accident, homicide, or suicide.

The only thing that seemed to be the trouble the pathologist was, was the unexplained bruising to her head and elbows. This discovery made him unable to determine whether she died accidentally, whether someone killed her, or whether she took her own life. So the day after Lisa died, the police brought Chad back in for some more questioning.

But this time, the police did some homework into Lisa and Chad's marriage. It turns out, even though their marriage looked perfect from the outside looking in, as things usually do, things weren't necessarily rainbows and butterflies behind closed doors.

Court documents revealed that Lisa filed for divorce from Chad just a couple of weeks before she died. In the divorce paperwork, Lisa cited, quote, irreconcilable differences for why she wanted to end her marriage with Chad. Then there were rumors that Chad was possibly seeing another woman.

A search of Chad's text messages revealed that shortly after Lisa was pronounced dead, he sent a text message to a woman telling her that she was, quote, good to move into the house with him. So now things are starting to change. The police sat down with Chad and during their conversation, he started to open up more about his marriage.

While he maintained that their marriage was fine and he claimed that he knew nothing about Lisa filing for divorce, he did admit that life was a little rocky when she died. Chad said that he just lost his job, which was causing a lot of financial and emotional distress in the marriage. Remember, Chad and Lisa also have two young kids to look after for.

So for Chad to lose his job would naturally cause stress in the marriage. It would cause stress to anyone's marriage. Chad also said that losing his job made Lisa's anxiety and depression worsen, especially in the days leading up to her death. But as the conversation continues, the police learn a little bit more. Not only did Chad lose his high-paying job as a supervisor for an agricultural company,

The bank foreclosed on their house because they were behind on their mortgage payments. So minute by minute, practically, it seemed like Chad and Lisa's perfect marriage seemed to have crumbled leading up to her death, which gave investigators enough probable cause to get a search warrant for Chad's person.

So a search warrant of a person allowed investigators to see if there were any physical marks on his body to suggest that he was in a recent physical altercation. They're going to be looking for scratches, bruises, any sign on his body that he was in a physical struggle.

And when the police search him, the police do observe several fresh scratches on his upper arm, scratches that look like they came from another person. But when the police ask him how he got these scratches on his arm, his explanation to the police was that he scratched himself. He said that, quote, he had really dry skin and he was the one who caused the scratches.

But the police didn't seem to buy his story of simply dry skin. But once again, Chad was released and freed to go home. Like the day before, the police had no solid evidence to hold him or prove that he may have killed his wife. Even though most of the officers suspected Chad wasn't telling the entire truth about this suicide theory.

The following day, the police returned to Chad's home, this time unannounced. At the house, investigators went through a garbage can that was left outside of the garage. They wanted to see if they could find any evidence to support their theory that Chad might have killed Lisa.

Now, this is a really smart move by the police because it becomes public property once something is thrown away in the garbage. You don't need a search warrant to go through someone's garbage. Once it's thrown out, it's free to be searched. No legal or constitutional issues there. So the police rummage through the trash can. And what do they find?

Well, they find the divorce papers that Lisa filed with the court. Not only was it true that Lisa filed for divorce, but this discovery right here in the garbage can proved that Chad was lying to the police when he said he didn't know that his wife filed for divorce.

And besides the divorce papers, the police also found a handwritten list compiling possible life insurance payouts in the event of Lisa's death. Now the police really had their suspicions about Chad. But the biggest obstacle to making an arrest was the fact that there was no physical or forensic evidence linking him to the murder.

All they had really was a mountain of circumstantial evidence. They knew Chad was seeing another woman. They knew Lisa filed for divorce shortly before her death.

They knew what the house looked like when they arrived that night and how the house didn't match up with Chad's story. But all of that, all of that is circumstantial. This type of evidence isn't enough for an arrest warrant. And it's certainly not enough. And it's not the right amount of evidence that they're going to need to secure a murder conviction in a criminal courtroom.

So the police decided that if they were going to get what they needed to arrest Chad, they needed some forensic evidence. Investigators requested a second autopsy be performed on Lisa's body. They hoped that the first forensic pathologist missed vital evidence during the first autopsy and that this evidence would ultimately prove a homicide occurred.

Now, drowning is one of the most challenging homicides to prove. Drowning causes a lot of potential physical or forensic evidence to simply wash away, which can make the collection of such evidence very difficult for investigators.

And because most drownings are accidental, that's what the police usually assumed what happened. Most of the time, homicide is never even considered. In most cases, a forensic pathologist can only determine drowning as the cause of death after ruling out any other possible cause.

They already checked the toxicology for an overdose. They checked the heart for a possible heart attack. They checked the brain for a stroke. After the forensic pathologist checks off all of these boxes on his or her report, they can then rule drowning as a cause of death. It's kind of like a last resort cause of death once they rule everything else out.

The pathologist can perform tests to show water in the lungs, but there isn't a specific test to determine drowning. Then, the pathologist has to figure out whether the drowning was 1. intentional or 2. accidental. Did someone cause them to drown by intentionally holding them underwater, or did they legitimately accidentally drowned?

So in Lisa's case, Chad was saying that she intentionally drowned, but that's because she committed suicide. So this makes it difficult for a pathologist to know exactly how many drownings are homicides. Now, generally speaking, homicidal drownings are very rare.

In 2017, the FBI's Uniform Crime Report listed only a total of eight homicidal drownings that year. Just eight. But because it's so difficult to determine, that number may be much higher. We just don't know.

So to better identify homicidal drownings, the Forensic Technology Center of Excellence, a National Institute of Justice project, created best practices as well as training for investigators. Their goal is to teach law enforcement ways to determine if foul play is involved in a drowning.

Investigators can apply these best practices to open water drownings, like in cases involving lakes or the ocean, as well as contained drownings, like in bathtubs or swimming pools. So one of the best practices that this institute teaches law enforcement is to secure the crime scene right away.

Now, I know that sounds like criminal investigation 101, and it kind of is. But when it comes to homicidal drownings, the preservation of evidence is key. We already know that a lot of valuable forensic and physical evidence is washed away when it's in water.

So the first thing investigators absolutely need to do when responding to a drowning is secure the scene and to do their very best to preserve whatever evidence may be left.

So in Lisa's case, securing the scene is relatively straightforward. The crime scene is a bathroom. Securing a crime scene is much more complicated when police officers respond to a drowning at a lake or in the ocean. But the problem in Lisa's case was that the location wasn't secure at all.

Chad removed her body from the bathtub to perform CPR as he was instructed to do so by 911. Then you have paramedics and first responders who entered the bathroom to work on Lisa. Finally, you've got the same people transporting her body to the hospital. So by the time the police actually begin their investigation, the scene is already compromised.

Now, the problem with the first autopsy was that the forensic pathologist couldn't determine if Lisa's death was accidental, suicide, or homicidal. So when the investigators ordered this second autopsy, they wanted a fresh set of eyes to look at the case. And luckily, this strategy paid off big time.

The forensic pathologist who performed the second autopsy noticed things that the first pathologist missed. This included several injuries and hemorrhaging underneath Lisa's skin that wasn't consistent with an accidental drowning. These injuries to Lisa's body suggested that she was in a physical altercation before she drowned.

and they're completely unrelated and inconsistent with a fall. In other words, these injuries to Lisa's body were caused by something else, and this pathologist believed that these injuries were consistent with a struggle. The second pathologist also recovered DNA from underneath Lisa's fingernails.

Another common practice is when a struggle is suspected. We always want to check underneath the victim's fingernails to see if we can extract any sort of DNA or trace evidence. That's because when we get into physical fights, especially fights for our lives, we use our hands and our fingernails to scratch and to hit at our attacker.

So when the pathologist swabbed Lisa's fingernails for possible traces of DNA, he found some. And he identified two potential matches. The DNA sample was consistent with two individuals' DNA profiles. Chad was one and the couple's 11-year-old son was the second one.

Meaning the DNA found underneath Lisa's fingernails belonged to either Chad or their son.

This discovery was a bombshell for the police. Not only did this mean that Lisa was in a struggle before she died, they now know that the struggle was either with Chad or their 11-year-old son. There's no other likely explanation for why their DNA would be found underneath her fingernails if she didn't scratch them. Now, you're probably wondering,

How come the forensic pathologist is saying the DNA either belongs to Chad or their son? Well, in this case, they weren't able to pull a complete DNA profile from the sample. They could only pull a partial profile.

and this partial profile suggests that either one of them was the contributor. And since Chad and their 11-year-old son are biologically related and share DNA, the profile matched both of them. Now, armed with this new evidence, the police sit down with Chad yet again and confront him about the DNA sample. And what does Chad do? Well...

Chad implicates his 11-year-old son in his wife's murder. If you're like me, you're a bit overwhelmed by all the teeth whitening products on the market today. This next sponsor has provided me with some very interesting facts to pass on to you. Did you know that teeth whitening doesn't actually whiten your teeth? It removes the stains and restores the tooth to its natural color.

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Once again, that's smilebrilliant.com. Be sure to use the promo code TAILS at checkout to get 30% off your entire order. Smilebrilliant.com, promo code TAILS to get 30% off. Chad tells the police that he and Lisa's 11-year-old son might be the person responsible for her death.

Because according to Chad, he didn't kill his wife. And if he didn't kill her, then their son must have. Now the police suspect that Chad is not only lying, but is also a murderer. But they also know they need to tread lightly with this investigation. The DNA sample isn't their nail in the coffin.

That's because the sample doesn't definitively prove that Chad killed Lisa. The sample is also consistent with their son. So even though this piece of evidence is damning, investigators believe it's still not enough. After Lisa's funeral, the police receive an explosive tip. A Walmart employee contacted the police and said that Lisa purchased a track phone the week she died.

A search of the track phone revealed that Lisa was communicating with a male doctor. A male doctor she was reportedly dating at the time of her death. Phone records showed that when Chad found out about this doctor and his wife dating, he sent a long, threatening voice message to him. As if the track phone wasn't good enough,

The police found even more proof of Chad's guilt. After executing a search warrant on Chad's cell phone and computer, they found insurance documents that revealed he opened multiple life insurance policies out on Lisa just days before she died. And he made himself the policy's sole beneficiary.

They also discovered that the email used to create the insurance policy was created at Lisa and Chad's home at a day and time in which Lisa would have been at work. In other words, Chad created the email address and applied for the life insurance policies while Lisa wasn't even home.

In October 2012, nearly six months after Lisa's death, the police called in aquatic death expert Andrea Zafaris to look at the case. After reviewing all the details and evidence gathered, Zafaris believed that Lisa's death was in fact a murder. It was not suicide, and it certainly wasn't an accident.

In her own words, she said, you don't die and flop around in the bathtub, end quote. This expert speculated that Lisa was likely killed somewhere else outside of the bathtub. Then her body was placed in the tub to make it look like it was a suicide or accident.

The piece of evidence that seemed to support this expert's theory was the report that Lisa's skin didn't have any wrinkles to suggest that she had been in the water very long. About a year and a half after Lisa's death, the police arrest and charge Chad with first degree murder for his wife. Then six months later, he went to trial.

At trial, Chad maintained his innocence. He stuck to his story that her mental illness caused his wife's death and that she decided to take her own life that night.

The prosecution's strategy to combat this was toxicology reports that showed Lisa didn't have many prescription drugs in her system. In fact, this report demonstrated that she had a typical range of all the medications she was taking. She certainly didn't have the levels that would reach an overdose. During the criminal trial, the prosecution made a very bold move.

They decided to bring in the actual bathtub that Lisa died in. They brought it right there in the courtroom. They did this to show the jury in a very dramatic fashion how it would have been impossible for Lisa to sustain the injury she had if her death was an accident or a suicide. Again, you don't die and flop around in the bathtub.

After the case was handed to the jury, they only took two hours to deliberate before coming back with a verdict. Guilty. Guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced Chad to 45 years in prison without the possibility of parole on June 25, 2015.

The judge seemed to sentence Chad somewhere between what the prosecution wanted and what the defense asked for. The state asked the judge for the maximum. They wanted Chad to receive a life sentence, while his defense attorney argued for 20 years. After his conviction, Chad appealed his case. After he was sent to prison, he maintained his innocence.

And in a sick, sick move, he even still implicated his 11-year-old son in the murder. In December 2018, the state's 4th District Appellate Court unanimously rejected Chad's appeal and affirmed the Maycomb County Circuit Court's guilty verdict.

Chad argued in his appeal that his constitutional rights were violated when the court illegally admitted hearsay evidence against him. In his appeal, he also cited prosecutorial misconduct as well as ineffective assistance of counsel by his defense attorney.

It seemed like through his appeal, he was just throwing the kitchen sink at the judge at the court, just trying to see what would stick and what would get him a new trial. But the appellate judges didn't buy it.

They wrote in their opinions that most of Chad's claims are forfeited. That's because he didn't bring them up at trial and were therefore procedurally forfeited.

If he thought that during the trial, the court erred in admitting hearsay evidence, then he should have raised this concern at his trial. Same thing with prosecutorial misconduct. If he thought the prosecutors acted unethically, then he should have brought this up to the trial court judge.

And if it's not, then the appellate court isn't going to agree with the defendant. It's almost like too little too late. Now, the appellate court also found that the evidence presented at trial stood on its own merits, regardless of hearsay accusations.

They specifically pointed to the proof that Chad purchased over $700,000 in life insurance policies without Lisa's knowledge. This evidence, according to the appellate court, stands on its own merits because Lisa didn't purchase the policies as Chad claimed. Chad did.

evidence presented persuaded the jury that Chad's greed and hatred towards his own wife caused her death. The forensic evidence obtained in the second autopsy confirmed that Chad's DNA was found underneath Lisa's fingernails. Lisa's death wasn't an accident. It wasn't suicide. It was cold-blooded murder.

To share your thoughts on the murder of Lisa Cutler, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at Forensic Tales. What do you think about Chad implicating the couple's 11-year-old son in Lisa's murder? And do you think he received a just sentence? Or do you think he should have received a life sentence? To check out photos from the case, be sure to head to our website, ForensicTales.com.

Don't forget to subscribe to Forensic Tales so you don't miss an episode. We release a new episode every Monday. If you love the show, consider leaving us a positive review or tell friends and family about us. You can also help support the show through Patreon by visiting patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. Thank you so much for joining me this week.

Please join me next week. We'll have a brand new case and a brand new story to talk about. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.

Forensic Tales is a Rockefeller Audio production. The show is written and produced by me, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola. For a small monthly contribution, you can help create new compelling cases for the show, help fund research, and assist with production and editing costs.

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