Carole Gold

A wild west performer lies dead on his kitchen floor. 911. I need ambulance real fast. There's blood all over. There were eight entrance wounds. Four in the head, three in the upper chest. He was dressed as a cowboy, dressed all in black, from his boots to his hat. He was known by Black Bart. His grieving widow has a colorful past. She was one of the few after her first playboy bunnies. She taught ethics school by day and playboy by day by night. She had a double life. The investigation into her husband's murder reveals they had plenty of enemies. They would do gunfight shows on property on the weekends. I did ask him if he ever had his ass kicked and I offered to do it. Her husband didn't know about it and she didn't want him to know about it. The question is, which of their foes killed Black Bart? His attitude, I have said, someday somebody is gonna shoot him. They just eventually led into now we'd like to see him dead. There's nothing worse than being betrayed by a loved one. And that's what it was. [Music] Desert nights outside Phoenix, Arizona are normally quiet and peaceful. But at 10.30 p.m. on October 20th, 1992, a resident in an upscale neighborhood comes home to violence. 911 with a Sherry. Yeah, my name is Um, it's Carol Gold. I need an ambulance real fast. My husband's having a kitchen flutter and blood all over. I think he's dead. Officers get to the scene and the woman who called Carol Gold. She leaves them inside the house and they find her husband on the ground. He was dressed as a cowboy, going black from his boots to his hat. It kind of jumped out at you. And he had a western style belt with a big buckle on it that said Black Bart on it. The victim was identified by his wife Carol. He was known by either Chuck or Black Bart. After securing the crime scene, Phoenix police officers notified the homicide division. The first detective on the scene is Joseph Petracino. When I got there, there really wasn't a lot of blood. There were eight entrance wounds, four in the head, three in the upper chest. And one which was through the wrist, one of the wounds is behind the ear. I suspect that that would have been one where he was down on the floor. And we're just going to make sure that he doesn't get up off the floor, execution style. As Detective Petracino moves into the living room, he notices a strange detail. I had a chair in the living room and I can see that the chair has been moved. And I can see that something had been behind the chair, which appeared to be super intense. And it's right close to the entrance to the kitchen so that when if you came around that corner, you would have immediately been able to see who's in the kitchen. I suspect that once he went into the room, he was confronted almost immediately and the shooting began. It could have been the robbery going wrong. The robbery broke in and the chucks scared him. He died the way a lot of Old West criminals died. Gunned down, he was ambushed. They're looking at the crime scene trying to figure out footprints, fingerprints, anything that was left behind. So you're left with all these questions. Was this somebody that broke in? Was this a targeted attack on Chuck Gold's life? Chuck Gold was born in March 1941 and grew up in Illinois as one of four boys in a close knit family. He grew up in an area of Chicago called Rogers Park and with very loving and doding parents, they were very good close brothers. They were raised in a coach or home in this Jewish neighborhood. Growing up, he was very much interested in the West and the Cowboys. He rode horses a lot, every chance he had and worked pretty close with them. What kid in the '40s and '50s wasn't drawn to gunfights in Cowboys? As a teenager, Chuck traded his Western wear for an army uniform, serving several years in Germany. He joined the four he graduated high school. I've been told he did cross paths with Elvis around the time that Elvis actually was leaving the army. My dad was out in '61, I believe. My parents met shortly after. Chuck met his first wife in 1961. The two married soon after and had one daughter, Stephanie. My mom was young. They separated when I was nine months old and they were divorced by the time I was two. After that, my father was married five times. My mother was his first wife. So I didn't know two and three at all. Four, I knew because she was the mother of my half sister. But no relationships whatsoever with any of them. Though Chuck's marriages didn't last, his love of the Wild West stayed true. He turned that passion into a career, managing horse stables near Chicago and putting on gunslinger exhibitions with staged battles, fashioning himself after the famous outlaw, Black Bart. They got a stage coach and they got horses and they would do gunfight shows on property on the weekends. In 1977, after 16 years working the Western show circuit, 36-year-old Chuck met the woman who would become his fifth wife, Carol Cattini. Carol was always in the horses. We're dead, Carol Matt. Was it on her show? She actually worked in the playboy gift shop in Lake Geneva and then she went and worked on the stables in Lake Geneva Club. Carol had a 20-year history with the playboy organization, starting with its first club in Chicago. They opened the first club in 1960 and they needed bunnies and Carol was one of the first rounds of girls hired. She was an original bunny. Carol was trying to get a teaching degree. She wound up teaching at a Catholic school. Now her Chuck was, she taught Catholic school by day and played by by day by night, so she had a double life. By the time she met Chuck at a horse show, Carol had treated in her bunny ears for motherhood. She had two children from a previous marriage, including a son named Ashton. After a whirlwind romance, she and Chuck tied the knot and decided to open horse stables of their own. They were doing very well. Lake Geneva in the summer months, Lake Geneva, my lord, it was a very busy, busy town and they did a big business. Carol also supported Chuck in reuniting with his estranged daughter. My dad was not part of my life when I was a child growing up. When I first reestablished my relationship with my father, they were running the stables at a playboy club in Lake Geneva. Carol was very open, very loving, very, very accepting, very sweet. I also met Ashton. He wasn't quite ten yet, so it was his nine-year-old little kid. I said, "Do you mind having an older sister?" So they became my other family. The playboy club closed in 1983, which put an end to Chuck and Carol's business as well. So they started over again in Phoenix, leasing stables at the upscale Hilton Resort. The stables did tremendously well financially. They were the single most financially successful stable of any of the valley bags. then. I was 21 years old. My vacations were all in Arizona. I wound up working at the stables. I need to follow that with Carol. So my relationship was she was my other mother. I called her mom. The dynamic between my father and Carol was amazing. Carol ran the stables, kept the books, and my father did the gunfight shows. He would go play and be Blackbird and try the stagecoach. Whenever he was at the stables, he was always dressed as Blackbird. He was very happy. Now the man who spent years staging fake gunfights seems to have become the victim of a real one in his own kitchen. Carol Gold is the one that made the 911 call. And immediately officers and detectives need to ask her questions about Jack. Did he have enemies? Was somebody possibly out to get him? Based on everything they learned, they start thinking, "Well, maybe we do need to look more into the family. Maybe there was a little more there than people were letting on." Coming up. Evidence suggests the crime scene isn't what it appears to be. The scene didn't look like a robbery. And an old grudge lends the investigation a suspect. We had words or argument kind of and trying to explain my side. He didn't want to hear about it. Detectives are less than two hours into the investigation of the death of Chuck Gold. Before questioning his widow, police collect evidence at the crime scene. We recovered eight spent 22 caliber shell casings scattered about the kitchen. There are two guns found in the kitchen, a 32 caliber pistol in a bag on the countertop, and a 22 attached to Chuck's belt buckle. The weapons don't appear to have been fired. Suggesting to police, the shooter had caught Chuck by surprise with their own 22 caliber weapon. We also found the back door was not blocked. That meant either somebody went out the door before I got there and unlocked the door and left it or the door hadn't been locked in the first place. How could this be a robbery when it seems so personal? With no signs of a break in, a botched robbery seems unlikely. We never found a wallet, but as you go from room to room and look at stuff, there's nothing disturbed. Nobody's pulled out drawers and thrown stuff around. So somebody that's in there isn't looking for anything. With no evidence of a burglary, detectives surmise this was likely a targeted execution. While detective Petracino continues searching for clues, his partner Ed Reynolds questions Carol Gold. She basically says they fight like normal people do, but in general, it's just a real good relationship. They had been married for 14 years. Carol tells police that she had been working at the tables all day, started early in the morning, got off later and then decided to go have dinner with her daughter from a previous marriage. It's at 1030 that she arrives back at home and that's what she tells detective she found. Check. Carol's alibi should be easy enough to check out, but Detective Reynolds is also interested to know if she has any possible motives. He asks about life insurance. In this particular case, Carol says that there is no big policy to her knowledge. Another area that gets touched on during that initial interview is fatality. Is there any possibility that Chuck's got a girlfriend? Carol tells officers that, yes, Chuck had had girlfriends in the past while they were married. She knew about it, but said it had been years since that had happened. According to Carol, Chuck only had one enemy she knows of. She tells police that they did have a former employee who did not get along with Chuck. His name was James Long Jr and he went by Jimbo. It's the guy that chose the horses and at some point, after he's there, some materials get stolen from Chuck, a saddle, some guns. Jimbo was fired because of this, but there had been some rumors among the employees at the horse stables that Jimbo wanted to get back at Chuck. He'd made some threats and the debate is where they threats are, where he'd just shoot in his mouth off. Before they follow up on the lead, they want to speak with Carol's 20-year-old son, Ashton, who also lives in the house. They've been paged that something happened to Chuck. He immediately came home and met up with a family of sister's mother. It talks to Ashton about, you know, what's the deal between you and Chuck, you know, how do you get along? Ashton tells investigators that his dad had passed away years earlier when he was four, so most of his life, it was Chuck Gold that had raised him, he'd referred to him as his dad, not his stepdad. Ashton admits he hasn't always been the ideal stepson. Ashton admits to the fact that he was on probation for a drug issue, but since he had been on probation, he had really gotten his life together and he was working and there hadn't been any issues since. Ashton says he's been working as a driver at the Stables and he agrees with his mother. If anyone wanted to hurt Chuck, it was Jimbo. Ashton goes into a little more on Jimbo's criminal history that he'd made some statements about he was going to take care of Chuck, so we now know Jimbo was a possible suspect. We're going to have to track down Jimbo. Carol Gold and her son, Ashton Katini, have just given detectives a possible lead. Chuck Gold's blacksmith, Jimbo. But before detectives move on to Jimbo, Ashton offers one last insight into Carol and Chuck's relationship. They asked Ashton Chuck got a girlfriend and he goes, yeah, her name's germane. She's married. He's seen him together at the at the Stable, but when there are other people around, they don't act like boyfriend and girlfriend, but everybody knew about it. Ashton mentions the fact that his mother doesn't seem to be upset by the girlfriend. But Carol is telling detectives that Chuck hasn't had any girlfriends for at least a year. So that's definitely a break in what Carol knew to be true. Now we have to talk to Jimbo and we have to find germane and see what she's got to say. Investigators track down Jimbo the next day and question him about the allegations that he stole two of Chuck's pistols. Chuck did try to accuse me of taking the guns. I told him that I didn't take him. It could have been a variety of people, but there was only two people with keys to that room. It was Chuck and Carol and Ashton had access to either one of the sets of keys. I think I got arrested and I was in jail for three days and got out and there was no charges brought against me after that. They had no evidence that I did it. Jimbo had a temper too. I know a couple times I talked to him. He was not happy at all that Chuck hired him. Jimbo admits he was angry at Chuck, but says he would never seek revenge. When I met with Chuck, we had words or argument kind of and trying to explain my side. He didn't want to hear Chuck didn't want to hear my side. There was never no threats. After all the squabble overall of that me and Chuck ended up getting along again. What would you call it? That by the way? by guns, be by guns. - But according to Jimbo, there were any number of other people who didn't feel the same way. - Chuck's attitude, the way he went around people, just the lifestyle he lived of, being a gunslinger black bar. I have said, someday somebody is gonna shoot him. Chuck didn't have a problem of telling people off, not saying, "Wished it up on him or nothing," but there's a lot of people dislike Chuck. - Other things that Jimbo responds to, he's able to verify that germane and Chuck have some type of a relationship because he's seen Chuck kiss her at the stable. - Detectives also confirm that Jimbo was miles away at the time they believe the shooting took place. - I couldn't have done it. - I was at dynamite arena for like five o'clock that evening until about 11 o'clock that night. Never left the premises. - He was in a public place. He's really got a good alibi. Following the interview, we go down the list to all the things that Carol and Ashton told us that we have been able to verify we're untrue to some extent or other. So at this point in time, you have to go back and look at Ashton and Carol as being primarily suspects. The other investigative lead would be germane. We have to track down germane and find out what her situation is. - Coming up, investigators discover the cracks in a seemingly happy marriage. - She says that at one point Carol told Chuck she didn't want to have sex with him anymore. And a son's secret comes to light. - Apparently he'd owed some drug dealers some money. - Following the interview with Chuck's former enemy, Jimbo detectives track down Chuck's alleged girlfriend, germane, to confirm there was an ongoing affair. - On 27th of October, they had an interview. Similar to the one they had with Jimbo, she eventually verifies the fact that she and Chuck did have a sexual relationship. That her husband didn't know about it and she didn't want him to know about it. They'd known each other since her son had taken writing lessons. They socialized the four of them. She and her husband Chuck and Carol. - Germane tells police the main issue she knows about between Carol and Chuck is their sexual relationship. She says that at one point Carol told Chuck she didn't want to have sex with him anymore and so that became almost platonic. According to Germane, she and her husband were together the night of the murder. Detectives follow up on her alibi and are able to rule her out as a suspect. Investigators ask her when she last spoke to Chuck. Her answer seems to shockingly cast suspicion on his stepson, Ashton. - Chuck had called her just prior to the day of the incident and was angry complaining about Ashton. The fact that Ashton is not carrying his part of the load. He's not working. He's a financial drain. - Germane says she doesn't have the details but knows someone who might. - She told Ed that he needed to get with Richard Feingold, who is Chuck's right hand man at the stable. He would know the ins and outs the day to day of the stable and he would be able to answer questions reference their relationships between Chuck and Carol and Ashton, that kind of information. They head back out to the stables at the point and meet up with Richard Feingold. - He describes himself as this kind of best friend called Fedon of Chuck Gold. - Richard says that Ashton is costing Chuck a lot of money for school he's not going to, that he's got a criminal history that Chuck's trying to deal with. - I was at the stables quite often when Ashton smoked pot at the stables, Chuck would catch it and they didn't get along very well at all. Ashton's smoking pot on the premises of the reserve is against law for one. They could have lost everything they had just the wrong person walked into wrong time. The resort would have canceled the contract. - Richard also tells police that at this time, Ashton had this long-term drug problem. - Apparently he'd owed some drug dealers some money and Carol and Chuck, quote, "building out." - Richard says the name of Ashton's main drug dealer is Bob. - Richard says Ashton's not a reformed drug user. He's still doing drugs, her stepfather has a problem with him and they aren't working through it. They are at odds. - Carol would act as a mediator as best she could between the two and if push comes to shove, she would always stand up for her son. Pretty much all the time. - Chuck had basically reached the end of his rope and wanted him out of the house. Richard says Chuck had given Carol an ultimatum. Ashton either goes or the both he'd go, he told her that he had to be gone by October 31st. They could both go because he was going to divorce her. - This information comes as a shock to detectives because this is the first time they're hearing this. When they interviewed Carol and when they interviewed Ashton, none of this came up and they both made it seem like things are pretty good between Chuck and Ashton. Investigators discover Carol was also withholding information about something else. There's an $150,000 life insurance policy on Chuck Gold and Carol Gold is the main beneficiary. - Which goes back to why is she telling the detective, I don't know anything about that insurance policy. That forces the needle from next to kin grieving widow to somebody that's lying to me and I want to know why. - Coming up, will the true culprits face justice? - There was hope that my dad would get justice that we would all be able to close that door. - And Ashton's dealer offers another side of the story. - Like you're saying, I'm not shooting. I'm not shooting. - The revelations about Carol Gold and her son Ashton have put them in detectives crosshairs to find out why they've been lying. Investigators bring Ashton in for another round of questioning and confront him about what they know. - Sometimes we lie to suspects. The story is that we have an anonymous informant that said that you stole the guns and gave them to Bob. And Ashton was dumbfounded that we had the name Bob. - Ashton came off very concerned about his probation to detectives and admitted he had been using drugs up until Chuck's dad. - Ashton still denies knowing anything about Chuck's murder, but he tells investigators if they're looking for Bob, they'll find him at the fitness center where he works. - We reach out to the drug enforcement unit and they know who Bob is. His last name is Pryor. He's a known distributor of synthetic heroin. - Detectives learn Bob Pryor is out on bail after agents raided his home during a recent drugstang. - When they served the search warrant, they found a box of 22 stingers, which is the brand of showcasing that we recovered from the crime scene. And he was known to be imposition or the owner of a Ruger 22 semi-automatic pistol. So at this point, we now have a lot of circumstantial evidence the ties. "Prior to pestion." Because Bob Pryor was in possession of the same type of ammunition used to murder Chuck, police consider the possibility he was the one who pulled the trigger. "Bob could be the weak link. If we can get enough on Bob, you can flip on who paid him or who hired him. Or who can best seem to do it." The Drung Unit involved in the raid informs detectives about an associate of Pryor's named Dan Goddard, a career criminal who is currently working for them as an informant. If Pryor was involved in Chuck's shooting, Goddard might know. "Goddard comes down from an interview because of his relationship with the police department. He's trying not to go back to prison. That's why he's working as an informant. And so they ask him about, you know, what does he know about Pryor?" Investigators get far more out of Goddard than they hoped for. He claims Pryor hired him to be his driver the night of the murder. He outlines the fact that he got a call from Pryor who offered him $50 to drive him around and he takes the money and Pryor directs him as to where he wants to go. They do a drive-by on the house and Pryor tells him to stop and let him out, tells him that he'll pay Jim when he needs him to pick him up and where to pick him up at. Goddard's belief is that Pryor's probably going to go and collect money that's owed to him. Goddard drives around waiting for the page and he gets the page, he picks Pryor up and then they drive to a location where there's a canal and Pryor gets out. The real aha moment is when Dan Goddard actually drives detectives to where he went that night and it's Chuck Gold's house. After the fact, he put together that Pryor most likely killed Chuck Gold and he got rid of the gun by throwing it at the canal. And immediately after that interview, Ashton jumps to the top of the list, could this murder have been a motive of Ashton being angry at his stepdad for wanting to kick him out of the house and was carol covering for her son? Detectives are now putting these puzzle pieces together that the two hired a hitman for the job. Goddard's statement gives detectives probable cause to arrest Bob Pryor, Ashton Cotini and Carol Gold. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence that showed that Carol was involved. Now it's, you got to prove it. When Carol and Ashton were first arrested, I was crushed and he and I had already lost my father. Now I've lost my family. I've been betrayed. Unfortunately, the DA doesn't think they have enough to charge Carol. They booked Ashton for first-degree murder along with Pryor, but they let Carol go and the prosecutor said, "All we have is the word of a known drug dealer criminal and we don't have enough to tie her to it." Carol gets within attorney and she's able to get the charges dropped after spending just a short amount of time in jail because she's released, she's able to cash in on that life insurance policy. Carol ends up spending most of the six figure payout on defense attorneys for her son. This December of 1994, Ashton and Bob are both on trial for first-degree murder and conspiracy. When Ashton and I went to trial, they called Dan Goddard because he was the one that snitched, but he was also under snitch agreement and was supposed to have done, you know, told on all this stuff before it had happened. Dan Goddard was given immunity because he agreed to testify against them. They kept coming to me, wanting me to confess to being the shooter and they would give me a deal to testify, and I kept saying, "I'm not a shooter, I'm not a shooter." The defense that is put up is that Chuck was sick and was dying and he hired a headman, so that would be a assisted suicide. I love it out of the 12 jurors rejected that and felt that they'd actually committed murder for hire, but one juror hung the jury, so a miscrow was declared. I was numb. I mean, there's no other word to describe it. The thing that I took and stride was the fact that the state still planned on pursuing further charges and would try them again. So there was hope that my dad would get justice that we would all be able to close that door. Prosecutors are gearing up to retry Bob Pryor and Ashton Cattini for the murder of Chuck Gold, but Detective Ed Reynolds still believes Carol Gold also needs to be charged. He obtained the original documentation from the insurance company on the insurance policy. They actually bring in a handwriting expert to say, "Hey, does this signature look like Chuck's signature?" Because they thought maybe it was forged or maybe there was some fraud there. The insurance policy was drawn up and taken out by Carol, and she signed his name to it. But investigators need more for the DA to charge her. Out on bond awaiting his new trial, Bob Pryor is the one who delivers it. Shortly after being released, Pryor got arrested again for selling drugs, and he made a deal with the prosecutor to testify against Carol and Ashton for a reduced sentence. They asked me if I would take a plea, and I said, "What are we getting in return?" And he gave his carol, and I said, "done." One year after the shooting death of Black Bart, Bob Pryor sits down with investigators to give his version of events. Ashton started telling me about how much he did not like a stepfather Chuck, I just figured it was a rich kid complaining about a stepfather. But it just eventually led into, "Yeah, we'd like to see him dead." He's been cheating on Carol. She wasn't young anymore. I guess she was one of the UF's first playboy bunnies, and she didn't have that to fall back on. Ashton was young during this time, I just assumed that Carol was the one running everything. Carol had the ultimate plan; there was an event that Chuck was going to, and when it was over and then he could come home, all we had to do was be waiting and shoot Chuck. But Bob alleges that it was actually Dan Goddard who played the role of Trigger Man. When they told me what Dan Goddard said, what Dan did was he told the story and just switched the roles, me and him, and so I was like, oh, hell no, this isn't the way it went. Regardless of which man actually pulled the trigger, Bob's statement finally gives investigators enough evidence to arrest Carol. They charge her with first degree murder and conspiracy. but she maintains her innocence. Both mother and son are tried together on August 5th, 1997, nearly five years after Chuck's death. When I was brought in to testify at their trial, that's when Ashton realized he hasn't got a prayer. Mid trial, Ashton decides he wants to take a plea deal and gets 18 years in prison. Carol, however, proceeds to trial. Carol is eventually found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy in the death of her husband Chuck Gold. She was sentenced to 25 years to life with the possibility of parole after 25. I think that Carol and Ashton got exactly what they deserved. Carol is the worst kind of mother there is. Evil, lying. Carol didn't pull the trigger, but she is just as responsible. I think that Chuck should be remembered as having fulfilled his dream. He died of cowboy. His headstone says Charles Blackbart Gold. His parents have proved that. I can't imagine anything else explaining more who he was. [MUSIC PLAYING]