She Vanished in 8 Minutes - Right Outside Her Home | Jayde Panayiotou

It's a Tuesday morning and it's raining, not hard, just a soft gray drizzle that makes you want 10 more minutes under the covers. It's the 21st of April 2015 in South Africa and this particular woman doesn't have 10 more minutes. She's a teacher who's got seventh graders waiting for her, so she does her hair, she grabs her bag and her laptop and she walks out the gate of her townhouse to wait for her ride. Her name is Jade, she's 29 years old and teaches at Rebeck College, a girls school about 40 minutes away from her home. And she doesn't drive there alone, she carpools with her best friend Charisse. They've known each other ever since they were young girls. They grew up together, they studied together and now they teach at the very same school and ride in together every morning. They take turns behind the wheel every week and this week it was Charisse's turn. And this morning, Charisse is unfortunately running a little late. She texts Jade from the road and it's raining so she asks if she should pull into the complex and grab Jade right at her door. But Jade texts back with, no, don't stress about it, she'll just wait at the gate. It's only a little rain. That was at 6.25 in the morning. Charisse pulls up to the gate at 6.33, eight minutes later. But Jade isn't there. Charisse texts her to say that she's, and the message doesn't go through, which is odd. But could it be the weather? She calls her and it just rings and rings. Charisse figures, okay, maybe Jade ran back inside for something or maybe she's still getting ready. Maybe there was an emergency and Jade had to rush off in her own car. Except Jade's car is right there, still parked inside the complex. So she hasn't left, but she's not at the gate and she's not answering and the gate is locked. So Charisse cannot even get inside. At this point, she decides to call one person who would have to know where Jade is, Jade's husband, Christopher. So she calls him and he's home in bed. He just got in from a night shift. And when Charisse asked him where Jade is, he's confused because as far as he knew, Jade had already left for work. That was the whole point. She left the house to go wait for Charisse. He buzzes Charisse in through the gate and that's when he hears the door open. And he's like, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. That's when it starts to sink in slowly in that way that your brain resists. Something isn't right. Jade's bag isn't there. Her laptop isn't. And neither is her phone. Everything she would take to walk out that door and start her day was gone. Jade walked out the gate of her own home in the rain at 625 in the morning to wait for a friend that she had known her entire life. And somewhere in those eight minutes before Charisse pulled up, she vanished. I coach football. 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Let's go back to that morning that Charisse knew something was wrong before she even had a reason to. Because there wasn't anything concrete to point to yet. No sign of a struggle. Nothing had a place at the gate outside of Jade's home. Just an empty spot where her friend should have been standing and a phone that rang and rang. But Charisse had known Jade since they were little girls. And Jade was the kind of person who texted you back, who was where she said she would be, who wasn't just not going to be there. So Charisse didn't tell herself a comfortable story. She didn't decide that Jade had just slept in or wandered off or forgotten. Somewhere underneath, in the place that knows things before you let yourself know them, she understood that this was already really bad. And within the hour, she wasn't the only one. Jade's husband was calling her family. Her family was calling each other. Her father was leaving work. Her mother was refusing to leave the house in case the phone rang. This was 2015. So by mid morning, there were flyers and hashtags and strangers sharing Jade's photo all over social media and over the city. That same smiling face over and over under one word. Missing. 200 police officers would eventually work this case, which I was very impressed by, but which also shocked me. But the first day, it was mostly just people who loved her. Driving around in circles, calling a phone they never picked up, holding on to hope that there was still some ordinary explanation for where Jade had gone. And to understand why an entire city stopped for this one woman, why teachers and strangers and parents flooded the streets for someone most of them had never even met. You have to understand who Jade actually was. Something that stood out to me was that Jade was the kind of person who kept animal rescue numbers on speed dial and she used it. Charisse would drive around with Jade and she would suddenly go quiet. And then she would point and say, over there, there's a man. He's selling puppies or a dog wandering too close to the road. And Jade would already be reaching for her phone. If they passed an animal that was in trouble on the side of a road, she would ask Charisse to stop every single time. She would want to know, could they help it? Could they keep it? Could she take it home? And she had, in Charisse's words, a real heart for animals, the kind that couldn't forget. And just drive past without doing something. And that really pulled at my heart because I'm also an animal lover just like that. And at home, Jade had two Yorkies who would show up in nearly all of her photos. She volunteered at the SPCA. She was looking after cats and dogs. And these were animals that nobody had come for yet. Her little sister, Tony, rehabilitated monkeys. And there were photos of Jade holding them too. She loved owls specifically. And when she wasn't with animals, she was often with children who needed someone. She volunteered at children's shelters on top of everything else. And the reason Jade became who she was goes back to where she was from and the family she was born into. Jade Lynn Ings was born on the 22nd of November in 1985 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Her parents are Michelle and Derek Ings. And their home was at Kempha Road in Uteneg. And I'm trying my best on pronouncing all of these words. Even my nanny who's from South Africa was like, I can't even pronounce some of those. So please, please, please be patient with me. I'm trying to use the real pronunciation. So it's going to be a little hard for me. But this was just outside the city. It was the kind of place where the neighborhood kids all knew one another played outside in the street until someone's parents called them in. And a few years after Jade was born, the family got one more member who mattered more to the story than almost anyone else. Her little sister, Tony. And two of them grew up side by side. And like sisters, they did bump heads from time to time. They had silly arguments. It was the ordinary kind, the ones you forget you even had a reason to fight about. But underneath the squabbling, Tony was watching her big sister the way that little sisters do. And what she saw never stopped her admiring her. The feistiness, the ambition, the caring nature aimed at every kid and every animal that crossed her path. She was dynamite in a small package. That was Jade. That's what her sister said. And quite literally, she was. From the start. There were dogs at home. There was a family farm that the girls would visit where one of their dogs, Tika, had this habit of bolting off into the bush. And even as a grown woman, Jade would come undone with worry over where this little dog was and whether they were safe out there. That was who she was in one small example. She just could not not care, if you know what I mean. They played hide and seek in the middle of the woods with their parents. Jade went to College Hill Prep School and then to Rebeck College, the same girls' school that she would one day come back to and teach at. Afterward, she went on to Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University where she studied a Bachelor of Arts majoring in psychology and English. She earned her teaching qualification and taught for a year at Moore College and then came home, back to Rebeck, back to the hallways that she'd run through as a little girl. And this time, as a woman, standing in the middle of the woods with at the front of the classroom. And though she adored animals and children, I want to be clear, she was not a soft or timid person. The people who loved her kept reaching for the exact same words, fun-loving, sweet, with an edge to her, feisty, sarcastic, and her sister Toni called her, like I said, dynamite in a small package. And her best friend said that Jade had spunk and that she was a real go-getter, that anything she put her mind to, she simply got done. And she had a heart of gold and a great smile. And she was also completely honest with, you about where she stood. She didn't conform to the crowd. She barely drank. She never smoked. And she had her values that she held strong to. She loved tattoos and piercings. She even put that on her Instagram bio. And she was a serious reader. She had a soft spot for those little e-greeting cards that you would send someone just to say you're thinking of them. And she took after her soft-spoken father, Derek, who was gentle at the core with a little feistiness added on top of it. And then, of course, there was Christopher. Jade met Christopher Panagiotou in 2004 at a party through mutual friends, and they were both 18 at the time. He was studying business, and he came from a big, well-known Greek family in Port Elizabeth that ran all kinds of shops around the city, and they hit it off fast. Charisse remembers that when the two of them got together, everyone kind of thought that Jade had hit the jackpot because he was everything. He was ambitious. He was always thinking a few steps ahead, always the one with a plan in place for everything. And they dated for the better part of a decade. And then Christopher proposed in 2012. And in June of 2013, they got married in this Greek Orthodox church in front of 300 guests. This was a very big, beautiful Greek wedding, almost like a fairytale wedding. Now, Jade's family was Catholic, and the Greek Orthodox wedding was a compromise. But it was one that she was genuinely happy to make because she wanted to be married to Christopher. And Charisse stood up with her as a bridesmaid. And in the photos, everyone was like, oh, she's so beautiful. She's so beautiful. She's so beautiful. She's so beautiful. Everyone is just smiling and having a great time. Both families, side by side, united. And Jade's family loved Chris. Tony thought of him like a brother. The family spent time together on the holidays, at dinners. And it was just the whole blended picture, this young couple coming together. And the whole thing was just mapped out ahead of them, the way that you do when you're with someone that you're sure about. They knew what they wanted in life, and they wanted the same thing. They wanted to travel. They wanted to run businesses together. They wanted to pay off their car. They wanted to live in a home. They wanted to live in a move out of their townhouse into a bigger home and start a family. They'd actually already put money down on that bigger house. It was all right out in front of them. There was only one thing that that fairy tale kept coming up short on. And that was time. Because Chris worked constantly. I mean, it was a trade-off. If you want all those nice things, sometimes you have to work hard for them, right? And he ran a pub and a grill that kept him busy all through the nights. And he was also tied to the family grocery business on top of it. And he was also the one that kept him busy all through that. And between the two, his hours and Jade's hours ran in the complete opposite directions. He would be getting home from work around six o'clock in the morning, and she would be waking up to go teach at the school. And by the time she got home in the afternoon, he would be heading back out for the evening at work. They lived like two people working opposite shifts in the same household, passing each other in the doorway. And that can be tough. But they were making it work because they were a team working towards the same goals. But Jade missed him. It was the way that you miss someone who's technically right there, but she would stay up late so that she could catch him when he came in. And she wouldn't even change out of her clothes for that day and into pajamas first because she wanted him to see her at her best. To see her dressed up like they were dating, well put together, worth coming home to. And she would drop by his work just to be near him for a little while. All she really wanted, the thing underneath all of it, all the plans, it was just time with him. Always. When this case takes place, she taught seventh grade as a homeroom teacher and life orientation to the younger grades. And she coached hockey, which is where she overlapped with Chloe, which was her husband's sister who taught and coached alongside of her. Her students adored her. One of them called her a limited edition, one in a million. And to the girls in her classes, she wasn't just the person grading their work. She was someone they confided in. Someone who carried their pain home with her at the end of the day, because she couldn't figure out how not to. So now you know what was going on in Jade's life when she vanished from right outside her townhouse on that Tuesday morning on the 21st of April of 2015. So let me get you more context now, now that you know everything that you do. Sharice was on her way, the rain had not let up, and they'd been texting minutes before. And finally, Sharice is standing inside the complex now. She's buzzed in through the gate by Chris, who's half asleep and confused, who remembers coming home around 6 a.m. from work. And she's like, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. And the two of them are looking at the same things that worry both of them. Jade's car is there, but her phone, her laptop, her purse are not. So they must conclude she left the house because she took everything she would take to leave the house with her. But if she didn't get a ride from Sharice and she didn't take her own car, then where did she go? So they do the only thing that makes sense in the first few minutes of something like this. They start looking. Sharice and Chris get into the car. They drive the complex. They drive the streets around it, scanning. Because maybe, maybe there's still some version of this morning where Jade is just around the corner. And maybe there's a reason she left the complex. Maybe she saw a stray dog. Maybe she's walking just around the block. But there was just this other weird thought in Sharice's mind. Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's dot com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's, home of the save. Like, could someone have taken her? And then immediately she thought about it and she said, well, Jade always carries lipstick with her. So if someone did take her and she was in a car, she would have taken it. And then she would have taken it. And then she would take out her red lipstick and she would write help me on the window. Now that may seem a little weird or silly to think like that, but your mind is both scared and hopeful. But as they were driving around, she was even saying to herself, what are we even looking for? What kind of clue would help them? And Chris, he starts making calls as well. It's a little after seven. He reaches out to Jade's mother, Michelle, to ask, have you heard from her? Jade's sister, Tony, is with her. Michelle, at that point at her house, when that call comes in and she catches just enough of that conversation to understand that something is wrong, that Jade is missing. Now Jade's family does not wait. They get dressed in a hurry. They go and collect Jade's father, Derek, from work and they drive straight to Jade and Chris's townhouse to start searching. Chris calls his family as well. And they can hear it in his voice, the anxiety, the fear, and they stop what they're doing and they come to look as well. And then almost by chance, the search actually finds the police because Cherise crosses path with officers while looking for her best friend. And she explains what's going on, that Jade was gone from outside of her own home. A detective responds and arrives to find Jade's family already there, already combing the entire area, already dialing a phone that just keeps ringing and ringing. A missing person's report is opened. A case number is issued and it's official now. Jade is a missing person. Abre comes forward with one small confirmation. They had seen Jade outside the complex waiting sometime between 625 a.m. and 630 a.m. So she was there. She made it to the gate. She stood right where she should have been standing in the rain waiting for Cherise. And then in the space of a few minutes, she's gone. And they're thinking, how? By mid-morning, the missing person search is running at full speed. And it's running because of who she is. And who Jade was. And who her family was in the community. And when I say family, I'm really talking about Chris's family. We're going to get to that. When the missing person's report goes live online around 10 in the morning, Jade Panayiotou, last seen outside her complex. Please come forward with information. Well, an organization called the Pink Ladies, which specializes in missing people, puts together a reward and posters. And her face starts moving across the city on Facebook, Twitter, social, everywhere. And the family puts up a reward as well. It starts at 50,000 rand. And this is the currency in South Africa, which is approximately $3,000 in the United States. And as the day goes on and the post just spread and strangers start pitching in, that reward climbs. It triples to 150,000 rand. So about $9,000. Everyday people are donating money with hope that someone knows something and that money, it's going to shake it loose. A hashtag, even catches on and spreads. It was hashtag enough is enough. Because this is a woman taken from outside her own front gate in broad daylight. And that is the exact fear that a whole city carries around every single day in this area. And here it was happening to someone they knew. Now, I know I really didn't tell you much about this location, and I am very keen on understanding exactly where something like this takes place. I think it actually will broaden our understanding. So I'm going to briefly give you a picture of what Port Elizabeth, as it was known back then, was like in 2015. Port Elizabeth, or PE as the locals would have known it back then, was known as the friendly city. It was right along the coast where 40 kilometers of sandy beaches met the warm water of the bay. There were surfers in the water year round. Why? Because this was among the top five cities in the entire world for the most pleasant weather. It's the kind of place people go to vacation. It's warm, easygoing, a seaside city with a small town vibe. and on the surface, it's paradise. But there is another side to this city, and the people who live there know it very intimately. The wider metro area that's around it, called the Nelson Mandela Bay, is also one of the most violent places in South Africa. And in exactly these years, in 2015, and in the months around it, the violence had been climbing sharply. This was a country where at the time, the national figures put the number of murders, around 47 people killed every single day. In this area specifically, you're looking at about two people murdered every day in that area where she lived. This is a city where hijackings, armed robberies, they were not shocking when you saw them in the headlines. So if you're a woman living in this area, you carried a certain kind of fear with you everywhere. The way that you would just carry around your keys, and I know that sounds terrible, but it was true for the people who live there at this time. And for Jade, that fear was very specific. The thing Jade was the most afraid of, the fear that her whole family knew about, was being taken by a stranger, taken, grabbed off of the street. And in a city like this one, it wasn't paranoia, it was just paying attention. Chris's father, Costa, had come to Port Elizabeth as a teenager, and he built his life and success out of businesses of snack bars in the heart of the city, and he had shares in a grocery store chain. It was the kind of enterprises that put a family's name on the map there. They were well-known, and they were established, a family that had money that Jade married into. So when the word got out that a Pena Yotu wife had been taken, a member of a well-known wealthy family, a business family, in a city like that, where kidnapping for ransom was a real and present danger, it landed in a very particular way. Remember I told you, because of the family she was part of, her husband's family. The running theory at the time was that she was part of a was that Jade was taken for ransom, and she was being kept by someone. But Jade's disappearance wasn't just one family's nightmare. It was everybody's. It was the exact thing that every mother, daughter, every wife in this area had been quietly afraid of. And it was happening to someone that they could put a face and a name to. Someone respectable. They were starting to think, that could have been me, that could have been my sister, my mother. And so a city that, too often, looked away from its own violence because there just was simply too much of it for them to really take it in, they realized they had to stare it down. So this is where Jade disappears from. From this beautiful, yet could be dangerous, close-knit town on the coast. Now Chris and Jade specifically lived in Stellan Glen Complex. And I'm a very visual person, and maybe you are too. And maybe you're wondering what this area looked like, and what their town complex looked like as well, and what the gate looked like, and why Charisse couldn't get in. So if you're watching, and if you're not, I'll describe it for anyone that's just listening. It is all enclosed all the way around by a brick wall. And there are brick one-story townhouse units all inside of this. And there's an entrance with a wrought iron gate that opens for cars to get in and out. Jade would walk to that gate, come through it, and meet outside of it for Charisse. This is where she should have been on Deacon Road, right in front of her complex, in this residential area waiting to be picked up. If you're wondering what's in front of the complex on the other side of the street, well, there's a park there, and other residential complexes in the neighborhood. And if you zoom out on maps, and you look overhead, you can tell this is just a residential area, a pretty big one, tucked away, not on any major roads. And that is very important. That's why it was so frightening. Charisse even looked inside this tiny mill room that's right near the little gatehouse, because she was thinking, Jade went underneath there to get some cover from the rain. She wasn't inside. And eventually, as I told you, more than 200 police officers would work on this case. But that first day, it was just people close to Jade, on foot, and in their cars, and sharing one post at a time. Her sister, Toni, would remember it as a blur of movement. Everyone trying. They're circling, they're calling people, they're calling Jade's phone, which seemed dead or turned off. Her mother, Toni, would remember it as a blur of movement. Everyone trying. They're circling, she couldn't understand how she could just be gone. And Chris was a mess too. Toni remembered that she was just looking at him, pacing back and forth on his phone all day, trying to figure out where his wife was. She said her heart broke for him. He was crying nonstop. He was frantic. And at one point, he brought the lead detective, who was Sergeant Kuhn, something which was a possible lead. Chris told him that he had tracked Jade's phone from an app, and its last known location came back from a park nearby. So Kuhn focused in on that. It was on Morningside. And they went there to look, but they found nothing. Now, could her phone have passed through that area, because it wasn't far from the house, if she was taken somewhere further? Because that was the working assumption, that this was a kidnapping for ransom. And that any minute now, there would be a call, and a demand, and a price. It was frightening, but it was something survivable. A thing with an explanation. And it was something that was going to happen. And it was You pay, you get her back. So the detectives bring in the dogs. They brought in a helicopter. The canine units worked the complex and the surrounding ground, and the dogs just kept losing her scent. And they were coming up confused, and then they were unable to track her. And to the people who do this work for a very long time, and even some of you watching, you're going to know this. It's something specific. It usually means that the person were put inside one, and it was driven off. And the trail simply leaves the earth, leaves the ground, leaves the curb. That had already been a fear for many. But before any of that was resolved, the search started throwing up another lead. And this is where the first hours of this case get genuinely tangled up. Because in a rush to find Jade, more than one red flag went up. And more than one lead went nowhere. The first was a car, on the night of the disappearance, police found an abandoned Mazda 323 vehicle that had been reported stolen. And they found it dumped in New Brighton. I hope I'm saying that right. And in that moment, this looked like it might be something. Maybe this was the vehicle used to take her, and it fit their fears. But it turned out to have nothing to do with Jade at all. And the second clue was a possible link to an earlier hijacking at the Green Acres Mall. And that's something that the investigators have to chase down, especially when a case is this big and public. But that also went nowhere. And then there was a lead that took over everything. Because this one came with a face. Sometime on that first day, detectives learn that Jade's bank account has been accessed. Someone tried to pull money from her bank account. The first attempt came in the morning, not long after she vanished. An attempt to withdraw 3,000 rand from an ATM, which was declined. Followed by more declined attempts. The kind of pattern that you would get when you're in a car accident. And that's when you're in a car accident. When someone's trying to take too much at once, and the bank stops them. And then for hours, someone hopping from ATM to ATM across the entire city. Now this area was called Kwanabuzle, and they were taking small amounts, chipping away until they'd taken around three and a half thousand rand in total before her account was locked. Kwanabuzle is about 11 minutes from Jade's townhouse, and also close to where she taught at school. And here's where the police catch what looks like a break in this entire case. Now this clearly wasn't her using her cards. She would know her PIN. She wouldn't mess up. And at one point, somebody did mess up her PIN, and that's why it was locked. This also means someone was in contact with her in order to obviously take her cards, which is a pretty scary thought for her family. And now that search has moved to the area where residents actually say they heard gunshots, but there was still no sign of Jade. Her sister said she had so many thoughts going through her head when she realized that someone was going to be using her bank cards. She couldn't help but think of terrible things, that her sister could be hurt, that she could be forced into acts with men who probably were holding her captive, or even worse. But her loved ones just kept hoping for the best, that she was going to be okay, and they would get to her in time. Now we all know that ATMs have cameras built into them these days, so detectives hold an emergency meeting that night, and they meet with a bank technician, and they pull the machine that her card was used at, to put a face to whoever was standing there at 725 that morning, spending a missing person's money while her family was driving in circles looking for her. And the footage came up, and it was not Jade standing at that machine. It was a man. It was a man in a hat, and within hours, that image, the man in the hat at an ATM, was everywhere, printed on posters, shared across the city, put on social media. The face of whoever, might have done this to Jade. Meanwhile, out past the edges of town, I told you gunshots were heard. A woman named Rachel said that that morning, the morning that the teacher went missing, something was nagging at her. And I kind of alluded earlier, she lived on a farm out near Kwanabuzle. And that early morning, around 7, she said she heard gunshots. Clearly. Now, that wouldn't have been that unusual, but it had come from a a field near her house. It's the way it sounded. Sure, people hunted, people had guns in the area, but she heard a car that had driven up to a crossroad, stopped, and it was idling there, and then the shots rang out, and then the car sped away, and its tires kind of spun on the pavement. So since gunfire isn't exactly strange where she lives, she didn't really think twice about it, but now that there was a missing woman the same morning, not far from where she heard the gunshots, the timing would not let her leave it alone. So she reached out to the officers and told them what she heard, and by evening, the search now had that specific area. But searching that ground in the dark with that thick of brush, it was almost impossible. Even the dogs couldn't go in there and do the job. The terrain was too dense. They worked it from around 8 o'clock at night until 11 o'clock at night, and then they had to stop. There was nothing more they could do until sunlight. But Chris, he wasn't ready to stop. Late that night, right before midnight, Chris told the family he's going to go back out there, and he had an idea about how he was going to better search this area. He had an employee of his that worked as a bouncer at his club, Infinity, someone who knew the Kwanabuzle area better than anyone else, better than Chris, someone who could help him navigate in the dark. So Chris left with this bouncer guy to go look for his wife. He was gone. a couple hours. And when he came back to Jade's family's house, he was unsuccessful. They didn't find anything. There was no sign of Jade. Chris ate dinner with them. They grieved together. They cried. They stay up late, leaning on each other for support, holding each other in the worst night any of them have ever had. And that night, Chris actually slept in Jade's childhood bedroom, in the room where she had grown up. But nobody really slept. And before the sun was up, they were out there again. And when morning came on Wednesday the 22nd, the police went into the air. They put up a helicopter over that isolated stretch of ground, and they started working it from above, where the brush couldn't hide what it would hide on foot. It took the pilot only a few minutes, and a voice came over the radio. The pilot had spotted something, an object. Down in that open, out-of-the-way patch of field, something that shouldn't have been there. Officers on the ground go to take a closer look, and they realize the object in that field was not an object. It was a person. It was Jade. Right there, near a gravel road that cuts across these two intersections in this open field, her body was laying there. Now, forensics would confirm her identity, but everyone already knew. She's lying on the ground, fully clothed, still wearing what she had thrown on that day for school. A gray hoodie, sweatpants, white sneakers. And it was the school hockey hoodie, with a red R for the school's name. The sport that she coached. She'd gotten dressed that morning like it was any other Tuesday, because to her, it was. Now, Chris is called in by the police and informed they'd found his wife. But of course, not the way that her loved ones would have wanted. And then Chris calls Tony. She's out handing out fliers. She's still in motion. She's still doing the only thing there was to do at that moment. And without warning, Chris is now calling and telling her that they found Jade. And Tony asked the only question that she cared about. Is she okay? And Chris told her, I have no idea. So Tony gets in her car with her boyfriend. They drive to the scene. And when she arrives there, she gets down on her knees in front of the caution tape. And the police, of course, don't want to hear it. They don't want to hear it. The police, of course, won't tell her whether her sister is alive or dead. And while she's kneeling on the ground, not even knowing what's happening, her phone rings. And it is a message. It's a text message from a journalist giving her sympathy and condolences for the loss of her sister. And that's how Tony found out her sister was dead. Not from an officer, from a stranger's condolences. Because the media already knew before the family even did, which I think is not a good thing. It's not only really sad, but really not right. Jade's mother, Michelle, finds out the exact same way. Her neighbor, who's sitting with her, they're watching updates coming in on their phones. She's reading the news, and she breaks down. She doesn't want to say it out loud. And Michelle knows. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met Mike? Home of the save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. You get free nights every night, all year long, plus a 25% bonus toward your daytime use all summer. It's a first-of-its-kind plan created for how Texans actually use energy. TXU Energy. Rep number 1-0-0-0-4. A mother learning that she will never see her daughter again, pretty much from social media, and she blacked out. She didn't remember anything after that in that moment. And then Chris's father, arrives at the scene. And he and Jade's father, Derek, they're standing together and they're crying. The two fathers, the Greek one and the soft-spoken one, joined now by the worst thing these two families can share. And then the real work begins. The slow forensic work of this scene. And it starts to tell a story of what happened here. When they eventually move Jade ever so carefully, the officers find the physical evidence that tells them this field wasn't a dumping ground. And it's not a dumping ground. It's not a dumping ground. It was where Jade was actually killed. It was the primary crime scene. There were cartridge casings on the ground. There was a spent bullet beneath her where her head had been laying. This is where she had been shot. Now, an autopsy was done by a pathologist. His name was Dr. Kevin Fulry. Now, she had been shot three times. And the shots came from behind, into her back, through her lung, and into her spine. And they came out right through that. That red R in the front of her hoodie. The injury to her spine would have taken her legs out from under her immediately. She would have dropped to the ground. And then, with her already down there, a final shot to her head. Three rounds, all from a 9mm pistol. But it was actually two smaller findings that told investigators the most about her last moments. The first, there was gunpowder residue on Jade's hand. Her hand had been reached out to the officer. And the officer said, towards the gun. Towards the person holding it. The instant before the end of her life. To shield herself. Now, a person doesn't do that when someone's firing from a distance. A person does that when the gun is right there, close up. When they're looking at the person who's about to do this. And that is just terrible. And the second, there were no ligature marks. There was nothing around her wrists or ankles to show that she had been restrained in any way. But there were small defensive wounds on her fingers. And there were no ligature marks on her fingers. And there were no ligature marks on her wrists and on her arms. She hadn't been bound. But she had struggled in some manner. Whatever happened to her in that car that took her out to that field, Jade did not go quietly. And the people who knew her would have told you that she wouldn't have. Remember, she was feisty. But sadly, she was no match for someone holding a gun. And this bullet pattern is known as the failure to stop drill. And I had no idea about this at all. But it's the theory that if you fire twice at someone's torso and finish by shooting someone, you're going to end up with someone in the head, which is a harder shot to make. Since it's a smaller target that could be moving around, it'll be easier to kill them. Most special forces used to be trained on this in the 70s and 80s. And it also appears in a lot of action movies. Firearm qualification programs even teach this drill. They teach it to law enforcement and nearly everyone that's in the military. So this was an indication that her killer did have extensive firearm training. So hold on to that. Now the investigators have a timeline of the morning that Jade was taken. Sometime around 7 a.m., very fast, very soon after she was taken from her townhouse, she was brought to that field and killed. That witness who heard those gunshots gave them that time frame. That was not an hour's long ordeal. It was quick. Almost like the point was never to hold her captive at all, but just take her things and her cards and then end her life. That speed, that efficiency, that was strangely against the theory that everyone had been working with so far. Because the theory was a kidnapping for ransom or that it was a robbery gone wrong. Someone took her, someone emptied what they could from her bank account, and someone panicked and killed her. And they thought that someone was the unknown man in the hat at the ATM. That was the stranger that the whole city was terrified of right now. Except when they found Jade in that field. She was still wearing her jewelry, expensive items. her watch was still on her wrist and it was a nice watch her rings were still on her fingers her charm bracelet on her wrist the jewelry was all still there on her body in this open field with no one around it would have taken someone maybe five seconds to slip off of a dead woman's body so this becomes a red flag if you're a robber if money is the reason that you even did this if you were desperate enough to kidnap someone and shoot them for cash you do not leave jewelry on her body you take the watch you take the rings you take everything that can be turned into money because that's the entire point of this crime that makes sense right so whoever did this took the time to move from one atm to the next chasing 3500 ran in withdrawals but they left thousands of random jewelry sitting on her wrist and her fingers that doesn't add up it just didn't fit it's something that you cannot unnotice because it meant that whatever this was this robbery might have been the costume it was wrapped up to look like because that did not look like the real motive and meanwhile the city was grieving in the streets late that wednesday evening hundreds of people residents students they marched in the streets near the police station with candles in their hands demanding justice for jade and against the violence that made things like this possible in the first place the assumption on those streets was the same everyone had that a stranger someone faceless someone evil had reached out of the darkness that they lived in and taken one of their own enough was enough and in the middle of all that grief moving through it was this husband who just lost his wife chris put his business on hold he stayed with jade's family night after night he was there at their house grieving along with them he spoke with tony at the kitchen table about the things that people were starting to say about jade's family and about him online because there were rumors and there always are the husband is usually the first person that's going to be suspicious and tony felt really sorry for chris more than she even felt for herself she sat up with him she comforted him because he was family to her and he was hurting a facebook page called prayers for jade pinio 2 was put up and one of the admins said that everyone thought a stranger did this for money and that was the motivating factor while others really did point the finger at chris they said he was responsible because he was the husband and if the shoe fits right people always side eye the husband and one reason is because well apparently chris was on facebook all the time that people were looking for jade but he never posted anything he didn't ask for help or to find her it was only after she was found that he changed his profile picture to a photo of the two of them so people looked at it and they were like that's kind of weird but it's also hard because there's many reasons why people do the things that they do if he's in the middle of looking for his wife does he even have time to post on facebook about what's going on or will he know that people will find out and he's just focusing on finding her and on twitter facebook this was international news jade's murder was a big deal the idea that she could just be taken right out front of her own house the biggest fear her biggest fear coming sure was terrifying and of course everyone at the school was distraught and days later she was laid to rest on tuesday april 28th her casket was covered in yellow flowers and hundreds of people came her students her colleagues even some of the officers who searched for her and then chris stood up beside a photograph of his wife and he delivered a beautiful eulogy it moved the entire room to tears it was poetic it was full of grief and it was so articulate that the people who knew chris were actually astonished because sharice who had known this man who was not really especially good with words couldn't believe that in that moment he got the courage to honor his wife that he cherished in the most beautiful way he began by saying to my bride my wife my best friend and love of my life you were the salt in my sea the stars in my sky and the sand on earth you have always been and will forever be beautiful in my eyes you exuded a radiance that took my breath away you cast a glow on everything and everyone around you rendering them pure and more lovely than ever yes those were very beautiful words and then he spoke again now from his heart in an even more personal way still poetic but not so much a poem and he said i was honored to be a part of your life and i'm so grateful that you to be your husband i look forward to a life that we had ahead of us in which we worked every day to bring out the best in each other we had the potential to live full and gratifying lives to be a positive influence on those around us you were the most capable and wonderful woman i've ever known i could do nothing in life without jade by my side i was honored to be with her for the last 11 years and i'm staggered by her sudden passing she made me feel like i was a part of her the luckiest man alive and i never quite figured out why she gave her heart to me jade was my drive to do better jade kept me going jade was a master chef and a master baker who could have made gandhi break a fast she was also incredibly versatile capable and deep jade would often come home in tears as all she wanted to do was save every child and animal that crossed her path over the past 11 years that we were together i grew a profound and deep love and respect for her family who became my own she always confided in me how proud she was of her parents and how she wanted to prove to them that she was capable jade only ever wanted the best for her sister tony on behalf of our family i want to thank you all for coming here today to honor jade's life jade is not gone she's everywhere jade resides in the wind like an elemental force she can be experienced in the blooming of flowers she's the yellow and daffodils of her favorite flower she's the crust in every breaking wave she's the fertile soil she's the enduring embers of a fire today should not be one of sadness although her passing is truly tragic it should be a celebration of life for one of god's greatest creatures end quote end eulogy and those truly are beautiful words he was able to get those words out of jade's mouth and he was able to get those words out of jade's mouth out on paper and then put them out to that crowd of loved ones while grieving her loss everyone in that church just cried and cried and just held on to each other and while there is a moment to grieve the detectives don't stop the lead detective on this case was captain kana swanapool and he grew up with the prosecutor on this case advocate stander in port elizabeth stander called himself the people's lawyer and he and the lead detective were working jade's case hard together now this prosecutor said it was not in his dna to defend hardened criminals prosecuting is what's in his dna now they conferred with each other on many cases as colleagues and as friends since most of the cases that are investigated by the detective are then tried by the prosecutor and they looked at jade's case together and stander did not think it looked like a robbery he didn't think it looked right it didn't look like a normal murder his words so according to them they had to look deeper this was their expertise first who was jade she was a school teacher what motive would someone have to kill a school teacher and the area that she was taken from remember this was a suburb this was residential you don't just drive there an accident and she's outside in the rain this doesn't seem like a random opportunity she was targeted but why and that was the mystery she left her unit at around 6 15 that morning and by 6 25 she was taken so someone had to know that she stood out there during the week on certain days for a certain amount of time about 10 minutes someone had to have been watching her they had to have known her schedule so it was back to that atm footage but i've got bad news for five days everyone was looking for this stranger the man in the hat at the atm the biggest lead but it was all wrong the face that the whole city was hunting for the police concluded was not their guy but let me be really precise about why because here's what happened jade's card was used at atms the police had two clocks they were working off the bank records of when transactions happened and the time stamp on the atm's own camera footage and those two clocks didn't match jade's card was used at atms the police had two clocks they were working off the bank records of when transactions happened and the time stamp on the atm's own camera footage and those two clocks didn't match atm camera clocks are notorious for being wrong they are usually off by minutes or more so when the police grabbed footage of the man at the atm at 7 25 a.m and put it out to the public they were assuming that on its face the camera lined up with the moment that jade's car was used but when they went back and they tried to reconcile those time stamps that assumption fell apart the man that they had plastered everywhere across the entire city was not there when that specific transaction was made he was just essentially some random guy using an atm a stranger caught on camera, circulated by mistake. So the ATM man, that was a false lead that the police accidentally created themselves by trusting a camera clock. He wasn't part of this murder. So with that guy out of the picture, who was really involved? By this point, the case had that lead investigator, Captain Swanepoel, and he was running a task force. And because this case was everywhere, informants were coming to the police on their own. When a story like this is this big, people start talking. And on Monday, the 27th of April, six days after Jade disappeared, someone was already saying something. A call came in and the tip was two names. And I'm going to try my absolute best. Hank joined BJ's Wholesale Club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now Coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices. 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks. Home of the Save. Open soon. BJ's Home of the Save. There was Lutondo Sione and his nickname was Lutondo, so that's what I'm going to be calling him. And then there was his girlfriend, a woman named Babawa Gruckvist. Yes, hard to pronounce. But the tip was very specific. This man had been going around reportedly, allegedly, talking to people and asking them whether they would be willing to kill someone and whether they knew someone who would if they wouldn't do it. Now, was this related? Well, the informants thought it could be. So the detectives went out on the night of the 27th and they found Tondo and his girlfriend and they brought them in for questioning. Now, they did put them in, too, but they didn't do it. They didn't do it. They were in two separate rooms. And Tondo wasn't talking, but his girlfriend was. Now, she hadn't just heard about the murder, she said. This wasn't something secondhand. She admitted she was involved in the mechanics of it and that her boyfriend, Tondo, had been hired to do it. So, of course, they go into the other room and they start talking to Tondo about what she said and he swore he was not the killer. But he finally broke down and said he knew who was. And that there was no reason for him to do it. And he said, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't was more than one person involved. And he started to explain. He said he was merely the middleman. He didn't want Jade dead. He had no reason to. His job was to take money from someone who did want her dead and use it to find some other men who would actually do it. He was the arranger, so to speak, the go-between, the one who made all the phone calls and made all the connections. Now, the police are not just going to take his word for it, and you shouldn't expect them to. Think about it from their side. Here's a man who admitted he's involved in a murder, and he has every reason to point at someone else. Maybe he's protecting himself. Maybe he did more than he's saying. A middleman claiming that he was only paid to find someone to kill Jade, that's just a claim. It's not proof to them. They needed more. So they come up with a plan to get the person who orchestrated it to give himself up. And here's how this setup worked, and I thought this was very smart. They wired Tondu. They put cameras, hidden cameras, and microphones into a car, and then Tondu contacted the person that he said was the one with the real motive, the one who he said instructed him to find a hitman. Let's call this guy the boss, because it was his boss, and he told him a story designed to rattle said boss. He called him up, and he said the police had come to his house, and that he was scared, and that he needed some cash to get away, to leave town, to throw the police off his trail. He told his boss to meet him in a private place. The logic of this trap is pretty simple. If the boss had never hired anyone, this conversation would make completely no sense to him. He would act confused, and he would have nothing to manage. But if he was guilty, then he would have a problem that he needs to solve. A panicking middleman is dangerous, so the boss would have to handle it. And if so, the camera would catch exactly who this boss may be. So he decides to meet on the evening of April 29th, in a car, outside of a fast food restaurant. Tondo is in the backseat. His friend, it's air quotes, his friend is driving, and the guy he told police had wanted Jade dead got inside the front seat of the vehicle, except the friend driving wasn't a friend. It was actually an undercover officer. But as soon as he parked the car, he actually gets out of the vehicle to let Tondo talk to him. And he gets out of the vehicle to let Tondo talk to him. take the bags and the rings, and then they didn't take the watch or anything. They just left everything there. You see, so it looks like a hit now. I mean, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it probably is. The boss ends with everything is going to be okay, as long as they never know about us, Tondo. It was why the police off to you. I think there's a informer somewhere, somehow. Did they tell anything? No, even them, they are, you know, on the run. I mean, gonna be okay as long as they never know about it. It's time to look. I'll sort out your family, you hide low, okay? Cheers. Well, it's kind of too late for that, isn't it? You know who he is, right? Can you tell from this grainy black and white video? Did you already guess before I even played this for you? Did you have a feeling all along that maybe little rich boys always think they can pay their way out of a situation? Well, it's Christopher. Christopher, as in Jade's own husband. That's him, telling Tondo that he was annoyed with the way that the killers botched the hit on his wife. A week after Jade had been laid to rest at her funeral, her husband admitted he wanted her dead. Two hours after this conversation, on the night of the 29th, Christopher and Jade were in a relationship. They were in a relationship, and they were arrested. But you have to understand why. Like, there's even a reason that this would ever make sense, but that's what we want to know. Why? This looked like the perfect couple. Why would he do this? There's way more to the story. And this is the point where I know people sometimes tune out because they're like, okay, I know who did it. I don't even know the rest. Please stay. I'm going to tell you. In the first few days, we have to look at what was happening again. Because all of it looks different now. What Chris was doing in front of everyone while they were grieving, I'm going to start with the first morning. When Chris told Sergeant Kuhn that he tracked Jade's phone and sent them on kind of like a wild goose chase around the neighborhood in a particular direction, that was not a desperate husband using whatever means he could to find his wife. Now that you know the truth, he wasn't helping the search. He was pointing it away from where she really was the entire time. And remember how he was on his phone, and people thought he was calling everyone, trying to locate her? He wasn't. He was doing damage control with the men that he paid to kill her. Then the first night, when Chris said he was going back out to search after everyone, you know, went back in and it was dark, and then he was bringing an employee with him, a bouncer from the area. Well, that employee was Tondo, the middleman who arranged the murder. So that midnight search for Jade was actually Chris driving into the dark with his middleman towards where her body was to make sure that it had been done. And then to think that this man came back and went to her parents' house and ate dinner with them, and they held on to him. He slept in Jade's childhood bedroom, in the home where her family thought of him as their own son. And her sister sat up all night. It's disgusting to think about. She watched that movie, except this was her sister's husband admitting he planned her murder. And then there's the fear. The one thing Jade had told her family she was the most afraid of, living in that city and being taken by a stranger, grabbed off the street by someone she had never met. And that was the fear she carried. And in the end, the person that Jade had to fear most was never a man. Why would a man pay to have his own wife killed? Everyone believed that he loved her, a wife he cried over and he wrote this most beautiful eulogy for. And that answer has three parts. And they're all closing in on Chris at the same time. The first part, you could probably have guessed this, it was an affair. For years, Chris had been seeing another woman. Her name was Chanel Coates. And she worked as a manager at his family's grocery store. Now, this was not a brief little fling. And it wasn't a secret that started after their wedding. This went all the way back to before Chris and Jade were even married. Back in 2012, Chris's own father heard rumors about his son being involved with Chanel. And he asked him. And Chris denied everything. And then, partly because he wanted to put it all to rest, the dad pushed Chris to marry Jade. He thought that Jade was the better choice of the two women. In 2013. But he kept seeing Chanel the entire time. And he wasn't just seeing her. He was spending a lot of money on her. Chris was giving Chanel gifts. He paid for hotels. And he always made sure she had enough money around to keep the relationship going. And that included paying off one of her friends, Chanel's best friend, Clariska, who knew about the affair. There were details from the phone records that tell you how brazen this affair was. And it was a very, very serious affair. Chanel's phone would spend nights in the area of Chris and Jade's house when Jade was away. And when Chris was somewhere he couldn't safely call Chanel from his own phone, like at Jade's family's house, with Jade right there, he would call the grocery store because there was a landline there. And Chanel managed the store. And a call to a business landline is not going to look like you're calling your mistress, is it? So that's the first pressure. The second part is money itself. Kind of goes hand in hand with the first. But this is where it stops being just an affair and it starts being the actual motive. Chris looked wealthy. He came from a very well-known business family. He ran an entire nightclub. And he even had a stake in his family grocery business. But underneath the appearances, his finances were actually really bad. The businesses were not bringing in as much money as people thought they were, and he was also funding not only a wife but a mistress and the mistress's best friend to keep everything quiet. He already had to sell one of his cars. And on top of that, he and Jade were in the process of buying a big brand new home for 2.2 million rand. That's about two hundred thousand dollars here in the U.S., which meant he was taking on more and more debt. But here's the part that turned his money problems into something more. And it goes back to Chris's own father. He couldn't let the affair go. He had doubts about Chris really breaking it off with Chanel. And he was about to find out the truth through a police officer that he knew. Chris never actually stopped seeing Chanel. Even after the wedding, his dad was furious because this brought a lot of shame to their family and the family business. So Chris's dad gave him an ultimatum. He said, "If you stay with Jade and you end the affair, we will let you keep your inheritance. But if you don't, you lose everything." Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. "Have you met my kids?" And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. "They call me the road warrior." This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com/mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Home of the save. It's a first of its kind plan created for how Texans actually use energy. TXU Energy, energy for everything. Visit txu.com for more. And Chris's dad giving him that money was a big part of Chris staying afloat. He couldn't do it on his own. So look at that box that Chris was inside. Because this is the whole motive. He couldn't leave Jade for Chanel because that would cost him everything. All of his father's money, his inheritance. He couldn't survive without it. He couldn't openly keep both of these people because his father was watching. And divorce wasn't the only thing he could do for his family. He couldn't even afford it. It wasn't even an option. Number one, that would be a big financial burden. But number two, in front of his family and his community, it was frowned upon. Every exit had a price. And it was one he wasn't willing to pay. Except for one. If Jade didn't leave, if Jade died, then Chris would get everything he wanted. And he wouldn't lose anything from his father that he was holding over his head because he would be free. And he wouldn't be free of the marriage without divorcing her. And he'd get to keep the inheritance because in this way, he didn't leave Jade for his mistress. She died. It was a robbery gone wrong in a dangerous city. Kind of thing that happens all the time. Jade herself even said it was her biggest fear. Those close to her knew that this was something that she didn't want to happen to her. So they would maybe see it as a bad premonition that came true. And no one would look at her grieving husband. So that's the why. It wasn't a fight. It wasn't some big moment of rage. It was calculated. Chris ran the numbers and decided his wife was the cheapest thing to remove from his life. Now we will get into how much Chris paid, but the money trail proved that he acted on it. On the morning that Jade was taken, the alarm system at the grocery store that he managed and owned partially was deactivated. The alarm system was activated. The cash was taken. The cash was taken. The cash was taken. The happened shortly after this over at the nightclub, Infinity. This was during the same window when Chris told Jade's family he was out searching for her. When police searched Tondo, they found 31,000 Rand in his gym bag, and he said that was part of the money Chris had given him to pay the killer. Tondo's girlfriend told the police she personally counted out that payment. She was the one who divided the cash that Chris handed over. So we know what Chris did, and we know the why, and we know how he paid for it and who he paid for it. But there's one more thing that this investigation uncovered. It's the only place in this whole case where we finally hear from Jade herself. Because while the prosecutor is now building a case against Chris, they go through Jade's private journal. Now, her family and friends had also talked to her about the case, but they didn't know what to do. They didn't know what to do. They didn't know her marriage and what it was really like from the inside. And it turns out Jade knew something was wrong. Not that her husband was planning to murder him. Of course, she never knew that. But she knew the marriage was breaking her down emotionally. Remember what I told you at the beginning, which really should make you sad? Because it made me sad. Jade staying up late so she could see her husband come home from his long shift at work. How she wouldn't even change out of her clothing so that he'd be well put together and beautiful when he came walking in. Or how she would drop by his work just to see him. From the outside, it looks like devotion. But from the inside of that marriage, Jade was so lonely. She felt unseen. She felt like she was begging for attention of this man who was always somewhere else. And now we know where he was. She went to a doctor about all this, about the way she was feeling, and she was put on antidepressants. She tried to come off of them. And then just days before her murder, she asked to go back on them. I just felt so bad hearing that. Because in her journal, in her own words, she wrote about how she felt and the pain of it all. She wrote about wanting to be loved fully and completely. About wanting to be the person her husband couldn't take his eyes off of. And the feeling like she never was. She wrote about not understanding why he hid so much from her. Why he wouldn't talk to her. Why the life she was living was the exact life she had promised herself she would never end up in. How she didn't know how much more she could take. Not because she suspected him of anything. Just because she was lonely and confused and trying to hold on to a marriage that the man on the other side of it had already decided to end. In the worst way a person can end a marriage without her having any clue what was coming. And sometimes I just wish these men would leave. Just leave. But their egos are too big. Had he just left her, sure, it would have been very heartbreaking. But time would heal. She could be free to find someone who truly loved her. But he robbed her of that opportunity. She wrote, quote, I don't know if I can live this life. Why am I not the apple of my husband's eye? Why does he hide so much from me? And why is it impossible to communicate with him? All I have ever wanted is to be loved fully and completely. A husband who doesn't lie, hide, or cover. I wish I laughed as much as I cried. I'm jealous when I see other people living the life I so desperately long for. End quote. And that is so cruel. While Jade was lying awake at night writing about how badly she wanted her husband to love her, her husband was paying a bouncer to find someone to kill her. She spent her last months blaming herself for why it felt like she was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was falling apart. Wondering what was wrong with her, why she couldn't reach him, why she wasn't enough. And there was never anything wrong with her. She was married to a man who never loved her and was only trying to please his family so he could inherit their wealth. It's selfish and it's sick. Now, Chris was under arrest. And once he was, something else was uncovered. Remember that it's funeral? The one that moved the entire church. The one that was so poetic. The people who knew him were amazed that a man not really built for saying many words could write something so beautiful a week after losing his wife. Well, surprise, he didn't write it. He literally googled it and just copied it word for word from a tribute written by another man for his own wife. The salt in the sea, the stars in the sky, none of that was his. And none of it was about Jade. I'm sure if chat GPT existed, he would have had chat write it for him. He searched for a eulogy, he found one, and he read someone else's grief. Someone else's wife over the body of a woman that he paid to have killed. It's just so cold. Like, when I found that part out, it's a small thing, but it's really not. Chris had to stand up in front of everyone that loved this woman. And he couldn't even say true things about her. He couldn't. Not because he was too broken. He couldn't even say true things about her. He couldn't. He couldn't. can define the right words because he was living a lie. It was all a performance. Everything was. But now to his arrest. Yes, it's true. Chris didn't kill Jade himself. He paid for it. So the investigation still had to account for the men who actually did this. And this is where the full chain of this conspiracy finally comes into view. You already know the top two links. Chris paid Tondo, his bouncer, who arranged everything as the middleman, who took Chris's money and went looking for someone to do the killing. But he couldn't find anyone. He was asking around for months. He approached so many people that his mouth was so big that that's how he actually got caught. One after the other, everything kept falling through until one man finally agreed. Vumazanki. I'm just going to call him Seasway. He was the one who, actually, carried it out. Meaning, this was the one that police believed pulled the trigger. But he wasn't working alone. He brought in two other men, Sina Tempa and Zolani. I'm just saying their first names. And they were the ones tied to surveillance in the days before the murder. So the chain actually has five links to it. Chris ordered it. Tondo arranged it. Seasway carried it out. And Zolani and Sina Tempa were part of the crew who did everything else, surrounding this murder. Seasway was arrested in early May. And the way police built the case against these other men is worth understanding, because it's the part that turns suspicion into the proof. The killers actually used a rental car, a white Toyota. And that car had a tracking device installed on it. So investigators pulled the car's entire movement history. And what it showed was chilling in a very specific way. This wasn't a crime of opportunity. It never was. We know that. But the car had been tracking Jade for weeks. It had been parked outside of her townhouse complex. It had been outside of her friend's house at Sharice's house. It followed her route to the school, starting well before the murder was ever carried out. Someone in that car had been learning Jade's routine when she left, who she was driving with, where she stood to wait for Sharice. And Sharice and the students at the school had been so close to that car the whole time without ever knowing it, which is just very eerie in and of itself. And then on the morning of the 21st, the tracker showed the car going to Jade's complex, over to Sharice's, back to circle around to Jade's complex again, and then waiting there. All of a sudden, it moves really fast, it stops briefly, and it drives straight towards where her body was later found. The car's own record placed the killers at every point of this crime. Now combine that with the cell phone records, which put these men's phones at the scene at the time that Jade was shot, so that you have a clear picture of what was going on in the building, and then add up all of it, and then add up all of the evidence, and then add up all the evidence, and then add up all the evidence. These were the men, and one of them never even makes it to trial. Ciswa, the man that the police believe actually shot Jade, he got gravely ill while he was in custody. Over a period of months in prison, he deteriorated fast. He complained of feeling sick, he lost a lot of weight, he struggled to walk, and then he couldn't even speak. And eventually, this man slips into a coma and was rushed to the hospital. And died there in September of 2016, before the trial even started. Now the cause of death could not be determined for a very long time. The toxicology results took over a year, and that waiting left a real suspicion hanging over this entire case. Can you think of it? That this man, who could have said the most about what happened out in that field, had possibly been silenced, poisoned, to keep him from talking. Now that was never proven, but it's part of why this case dragged on for as long as it did. And it means the person who fired the shots never had to answer for it in a courtroom. Now there was also something else. Tondo, the middleman. Now this is important, because he was the state's key witness. Tondo had cooperated from the very beginning. He confessed, and he wore that wire, and he handed Chris over to police in that sting operation. He took Chris down. And in exchange, he was offered protection from prosecution if he testified truthfully against Chris and the other men. And he stuck to his account. But guess what? he didn't. When Tonto got up on the witness stand, he told a completely different story. Suddenly, Chris had nothing to do with anything. And the money that they found, oh, that was for gym equipment. And none of what he had told police is now what he said happened. Yep, he flipped. And the court had to declare him a hostile witness, which just means the witness turns against the side that called him to testify. He was now on the defense's side. But his deal was now off the table. His girlfriend, who backed up all the original accounts that he made, is also changing her story on the stand. And she was taken into custody for perjury. So losing your key witness like that could completely sink a case. But fortunately, it didn't. Because they didn't need Tonto. They had the videotape of Chris and his own voice. They had all the tracking data. They had the cell phone records. And they had the money trail and the alarm. That Chris used to get the cash and the cash in the gym bag. The payment to Tonto. They had it all. So Chris was still going down. Now, the trial ran in blocks across 2016 and 17. And on the 2nd of November of 2017, which happened to be Chris's 31st birthday, is when the verdict came down. Chris was found guilty of Jade's murder. And I want to tell you what the other men that helped were held accountable for. Sina Temba was found guilty of murder and robbery. Zolani was found guilty of conspiracy. And a few weeks later, the sentences followed. Chris was sentenced to life in prison. Sina Temba got life plus 15 years. And Zolani got 15 years. At this point, the judge had issued a warrant for Tonto's arrest since he was no longer protected from prosecution, remember? But now he's on the run. Of course he is. But before the sentencing was fully closed, Jade's family, got a chance to speak. And her sister, Toni, stood up. She was the one who read the statement on behalf of their entire family. She looked up to Jade her whole life. She stood there comforting Chris in those first nights because she thought of him as a brother. She stood in that courtroom and spoke directly to the men who had taken her sister, but specifically to Chris. She told him he would never be forgiven. She talked about watching her mother, father fall apart over and over. And being able to do nothing but stand and watch. And she said the thing that cut straight to the center of it all. That Jade had begged Chris for his love and his attention. And this is how he answered her. And of course, he wouldn't look at her the entire time that she spoke. He kept his head down and his face was red. And Toni actually called him out for that in front of that entire room. And he couldn't even look at her. You'd think that this would be the end of it. That Chris was convicted of murder and robbery. But he didn't. And he didn't. And he would be sentenced to life. But it didn't end. It kept going for years. Because he just kept appealing. Or trying to. I'm not going to even go into all the times he tried. But every court refused. Even the highest courts of appeals. They turned him down. He took it all the way to what's called the constitutional court. The highest court in the country. And in 2019, they refused him as well. Every court at every point in time. And he took it all the way to the highest court in the country. Every court at every level looked at this case and said no. And he had finally run out of options. And through all of it, he maintained that he was innocent. He never once admitted what he had done. Of course he didn't. These kinds never do. They're the concealment killers. I just talked about this on Dark Liberty. They kill to conceal what they have been hiding. So that their egos stay intact. And they actually feel like they're the victims in all this. And I know that's hard to believe. But they feel like everything's happening to them. He would be the type to believe that had his dad not forced him to marry Jade because, you know, he didn't approve of the other woman he was seeing, then he would not have to remove Jade from the equation. It's always someone else to blame. But then came 2021. There was one loose end in the justice system that had to be tied up. And that was Tondo. He was on the run for six months. He somehow stayed ahead of the police until they finally tracked him down. And he was arrested. And he had to stand trial for his own part in all this. And at the trial, something happened that hadn't happened in six years. Chris was brought in, and he had to testify. And for the very first time, he actually admitted it. I was surprised. But he admitted that he arranged his wife's murder. After six years of insisting he was innocent, after dragging her entire family through trial after trial, after making them sit through trial after trial, after making them sit through every appeal, he finally said he was responsible. But the reason he said it now, after he'd been denying it for so long, was not something in his conscience. It wasn't that. His appeals were done. He had nothing left to protect him. So we admitted it. And he actually said he was sorry. And he talked about how much pressure he'd been under. Right. We're supposed to feel sorry for him now, right? When there's nothing to legally serve him, he wants everyone to believe he's sorry. When he never wants to believe he's sorry, he wants everyone to believe he's sorry. When he never, ever was. He was just sorry he got caught, in my perspective. Tony's response to that apology was simple. She said, too little, too late. She said the family would never forgive him. And she was right. That it came way too late. Tonda was convicted of Jade's murder and sentenced to life in prison. Now, he could have gotten a lighter sentence, but he lied to protect his boss. He lost that deal. He ran. He got caught. And he was, to life like Chris. He talked his own way out of his own freedom, which is just ironic to me. And then there's kind of a strange part of this I wanted to share. Something that has nothing to do with the trial and has everything to do with the world that Chris came from. In December of 2019, Chris's father, the man who supposedly pushed him towards marrying Jade, who had threatened to cut him off, whose money and whose expectations sat behind so much of what Chris did. Or he said so. He was shot and killed. Chris's dad was gunned down outside the family's snack bar in the early hours of the morning in what looked like a targeted hit. His assistant was abducted and the case was actually never solved. Chris was not there to even bury his own father. I'm not going to pretend to know what any of this meant. I'm not going to try to guess at what connection was made here because nothing has been proven. But it's part of the story. And it tells you something. That all of this grew out of. The world that this family was living in. The types of things that were going on. Maybe there were more secrets. Chris's mother lost so much. After the sentencing, she said that people assumed that her and her husband didn't love Jade, but that wasn't true. That Jade's family was of course in pain, but so were they. They lost a lovely daughter-in-law that they did love. And in a different way, they lost a son. They lost a daughter-in-law that they didn't love. And they lost a son too. To prison. Two families were sitting in that courtroom and both of them lost something that they would never get back. It's just that only one family's loss was chosen for them by someone who was supposed to love her. So I just want to leave Chris there in prison where he is now, where he belongs. I don't want him to get the last word in the story. I want Jade too. Because here's the thing I keep coming back to about Jade. In January of that year, a few months before she was killed, she sat down and she wrote a bucket list. A list of things she wanted to do before she turned 30. And I just please want you to listen to this part. It really stuck with me. It's going to change something about my own life. I know it's hard to step out of our own comfort zones, right? We don't want to always change something. But maybe think about these things that Jade really wanted to do that she no longer can. And maybe think of her, and do them for her. Here's what they are. Change your hairstyle. Get another tattoo. Travel. Run on the beach. Watch a sunrise after staying up all night. Seeing a waterfall. Reading more books. Learning a little Greek. Volunteering. Doing something spontaneous and crazy. It sounds like an ordinary list. But what makes it hurt is that it's the list of things that someone assumed they had time to complete. Someone in the middle of their life planning more of it. And she didn't get to. So you know what happened? Other people did it for her. After she died, strangers who never even met her heard about her story from the news and saw her smiling photo. And they started to complete those items on her bucket list. In her honor. Running on the beach. Watching the sunrise. Doing the things that she wanted so badly to do, but she couldn't. And because it was a way to make her happy, she was able to do it. And it was a way of keeping her alive. Keeping her in the world. So I encourage you to do them too. For yourself. But also because Jade never got that chance. And there's one more moment from those years I think is worth telling you about. Because of how strange and human it actually is. On what would have been Jade's 31st birthday, Chris's mistress's best friend, so Chanel's best friend that I talked about earlier, Clariska, she posted, to Jade's Justice for Jade's Facebook page. The community page where people had gathered to support jade's family she testified at the trial about the affair about the gifts that chris had given both of them and on jade's birthday she posted a photo of a christmas tree that she decorated with yellow ribbons yellow jade's favorite color and wrote that she had done it in honor of jade and that she was keeping jade's family in her prayers now the reaction was mixed and i'm sure you're thinking the same thing some people were pretty shocked that she had the audacity to do that the mistress's best friend that she would even post there but others thought it was a good thing the friend of jade's who ran that page her name was debbie her first instinct was to delete that message but she asked jade's sister tony what to do and tony said leave it leave it up leave the post there and debbie looked at it again and she thought to herself that it actually must have taken a lot of courage for that woman to post that at all so it stayed i don't let you think about that however you want to but there's something in tony's choice that's worth noticing that in the middle of the worst thing that has ever happened to her family she was the one who chose to let a small complicated gesture of respect stay there in the public and there was something else public for jade a plaque at the spca the animal shelter where she volunteered where she had spent a long time looking after cats and dogs that nobody wanted if it's better than anything the woman who kept the animal rescue on speed dial who couldn't drive past a stray remembered in a place where she gave that part of herself to the animal she wanted to save and her family of course carries her the way you carry someone that you can never get back her little sister tony still looks for jade in the world she's written that she searches for her in the beauty of nature that she sees her in the full moon she feels her in the warmth of the sun that she loves it most of all when jade paints the sky red in the evenings jade was 29 years old when she was killed she was a teacher who carried her students sadness home with her who loved animals she wanted more than anything to be fully and completely loved and she should have been she deserved to be so thank you for being here with her story i will see you in my very next video this episode is brought to you by txu energy for the first time ever texans have an energy plan that combines free nights all year with daytime summer savings it's called free nights and cool summer you get free nights every night all year long plus a 25 bonus toward your daytime use all summer it's a first of its kind plan created for how texans actually use energy discover how much more you could save with free nights and cool summer txu energy for everything visit txu.com for more information rep number one zero zero zero four bye