335. The Aliso Viejo Spa Bombing - The Murder of Ildiko Krajnyak

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You're listening to an Ono Media podcast. Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton Moreland. And I'm Garrett Moreland. And he's the husband. And I'm the husband. Hello. Welcome back. I hope everyone's having an amazing day. Yeah. I don't know. How's our day? Good. I don't know. Working. Working, yeah. Working on the weekends like usual, you know? Yeah. Name that song, everybody. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting. We love you guys. Daisy's tired. She went swimming today. The first time in a long time. So if you're watching on video, you will see she is just absolutely a little. Zonky. Droopy. Drowsy. Zonky. But yeah, I think that's all we got. Do we have any announcements? Merch. Oh, yeah. Dude, we almost forgot. Almost forgot. We have some new. Baby merch. You guys, we're dropping some. Kind of like Mommy and Me. Spooky season baby merch. But obviously, we want you to get it now so that, you know, you can have it for all of fall. It's very much just like Murder With My Husband Basics. Nothing super true crime, obviously, or graphic on them. More just like MWMH and cute matching stuff. But we have onesies. Don't worry. 100% organic. I know none of us are putting our babies in anything less. But yeah. I'm super excited about those. And hopefully, we have one soon that can also wear them. Yeah. They're cute. Go check them out. Links everywhere. Anywhere you can find a link, it'll be there. Yeah. And we're going to get right into this week's case. I'm literally not going to get right into it. I have to say something real quick. I think we had a mishap with ads last week. Oh, okay. On a certain platform. So I just want to apologize to anyone who experienced that and was like, why the heck are we completely bombarded? Apparently, there was something going on on the platform's end. We triple-checked everything on our end. So fingers crossed that that's fixed. But I did just want to give an apology because that was obviously never. It's never intended to be bombarded like that. All right. Our sources for this episode are justice.gov, Peacock TV, bbc.com, abc7.com, medium.com, cbsnews.com, people.com, nbcnews.com, courthousenews, foxla.com, oxygen.com, ny1.com, npr.org, and lamag.com. Pretty often when we hear news of a bombing, we often think this is a random act of mass violence. That it wasn't so much about the targets themselves as it was about the message that the bomb or bombers were trying to send. So the thing that makes an act of violence like this so terrifying is anyone can literally be collateralized. And it leaves behind a crime scene that's very difficult to trace. There's usually very few witnesses, hardly any clues, and the perpetrator doesn't even have to be at the scene when the bomb goes off. They can do damage from miles away without ever leaving behind a hair, a fingerprint, or a shred of DNA. In many ways, a bomb is a good weapon for a murder. But no weapon is perfect if the bomb is not. If the person who built it can't seem to keep it a secret. Okay. So today we are actually headed to sunny California to a town about an hour south of Los Angeles called Elisa Viejo. Ooh, very familiar with this town, this city. Yes. How have I not heard of this? Because it's not as a grand scale as a bombing typically is. This is like 15, 20 minutes from where I grew up, by the way, everybody. So we're headed there to Elisa Viejo and we are meeting a 48-year-old esthetician named Ildilko Kronjak. Now, quite a name. Ildilko was born and raised in Hungary. But once she reached her 20s, she dreamed of moving to America, starting a new life for herself. So eventually she does move to California and she finds herself in a relationship with a man named Ronilo Vestil. Now, Ildilko's cousin admired this new relationship. Her cousin said that they were just so in love. They were both wonderful people who made each other happy. Everyone said Ronilo treated Ildilko well and would help her with her family back in Hungary any chance he got. So it was no surprise when they tied the knot and then welcomed a baby boy in her family. So it was no surprise when they tied the knot to their lives. Now, as the years passed and their son got older, Ildilko decided to follow her career goals and get her cosmetology and esthetician's license. And she eventually ended up owning her own spa in a commercial building in Eliso Viejo called Magia Cosmetica. And by 2018, her son was now grown and in college. And he was able to get a job And by this point, Ronilo and Ildilko, who had been so in love, had had this beautiful love story in America, they had also started to grow apart. There was a disconnect growing in their 22-year-long marriage by 2018. The two weren't quite ready for a divorce, but apparently it was enough that Ildilko started to have a wandering eye. And she began looking for love in places outside of their marriage. Apparently, this is something she and Ronilo were working on but never got to fully mend because on May 15th, 2018, the unthinkable happened. Ildilko had just come back from visiting some family in Hungary the night before. So she'd been gone for a couple of weeks but was quickly getting back into the groove of seeing clients at her spa in Hungary. In Alisoviejo. Now that day, she treated her friend, Sarah. Sarah was a longtime client of hers who was getting her lashes done. Sarah said that everything seemed to be going well for Ildilko. She spoke about her trip and her family. They caught up on their lives, just like they often did during their appointments. And then later that day, around noon, Ildilko had two other clients in her spa. It was a mother and daughter, who she was treating together. But just after 1 p.m., the city of Alisoviejo felt the rattle of what seemed to be at first maybe a little earthquake. Ildilko's friend, Holly, who lived about a mile away from the spa, had heard it. And what she recalled was much bigger than any earthquake she'd experienced. She said she heard a massive explosion. Now, within the next hour or so, in the next hour or two, the source of this explosion was all over the news. This wasn't an earthquake. A two-story office building in Alisoviejo had just exploded. How? I don't understand. What date are we in? 2018. We were living there. How did I not hear about this? Yeah, California's big. Am I just like a completely oblivious sometimes? There's no way because. Anyway, I'm not going to get into it. Like, I keep up with a lot. True crime's not one of those things I keep up with, but I don't know. Confused. So apparently bystanders were filming the damage of this building blowing up. News trucks were covering the story. And meanwhile, the Orange County Sheriff's Department was at the scene along with fire trucks and ambulances. They weren't sure if this had been a gas leak or something more nefarious. But one thing was clear. There was a loss of life at the scene. Outside of the building, severed body parts were found among the debris. And the smell of sulfur, like you would get from fireworks, was definitely in the air. Now, when Holly, Ildiko's friend who lived close by, saw the news of where the bombing had taken place, her heart sank because she knew this is the same building, that the spa is in. She had a terrible feeling. Unfortunately, she was right. When police arrived, they discovered that Ildiko's two clients, so the mother and daughter who had been her last appointments that day, they were both still alive. They were raced to a nearby hospital. But Ildiko had not survived the blast. It was her severed remains that were found scattered throughout the scene. Now, thankfully, the radius of the blast didn't injure anyone else in the vicinity. It was just the people in the building, especially because there was a preschool that was not too far away from the spa. But obviously, police are immediately like, what happened? What caused this explosion? Like, we have a fatality. Now, while teams began combing the scene, detectives spoke to the mother and daughter who were being treated for their injuries at the hospital. They both had second and third degree burns. The mother, unfortunately, had lost her eye in this blast. Her daughter, though, happened to remember something critical and useful before the explosion went off. You know, when police are like, tell us about your appointment, what was going on, what did you hear, see? She said they had actually just finished their treatments and they went out to the lobby to pay. And that was when Ildiko, picked up a package. She grabbed a tool and began opening the package, which, according to the daughter, was then followed immediately by a blinding light. They were knocked unconscious as the blast hit and the walls of the building basically turned to rubble. It was a miracle that these two had survived. Oh my gosh, this is crazy. But this immediately tells detectives something important because, obviously, this package had caused the explosion. And I think especially nowadays, when detectives hear this, their immediate thought is, is this an act of terrorism? Or was this a personal bomb intended for this spa? So by the end of the day, the FBI was also there at the crime scene, obviously. They were called in, they were collecting clues. They were trying to figure out exactly what kind of explosive device they were dealing with. And as they sifted through the debris, they found parts of a CVS-branded 9-volt battery and parts of a wire that were actually embedded into the ceiling of the salon. So they began to believe this was part of a homemade fusing system that someone had put together, which told them that whoever built this bomb knew what they were doing. Okay. Some sort of specialized skill or sophisticated knowledge of how to make something this powerful at home. For the Orange County Sheriff's Department, this sounded terrifyingly familiar because back in March of that year, just two months prior, Austin, Texas, was actually dealing with their own series of package bombs. There had been about five total bombs in Texas that had killed two people and injured seven. There had been several others, and all of these bombs, again, were package bombs. You know, honestly, this is something that I think about sometimes. Yeah. Like that, I'm glad it doesn't happen more, but I guess I'm surprised it doesn't happen more. But also, I mean, there are security systems and systems put in place so it doesn't happen. But it's scary. Like people can, you can make a bomb and just mail it. I mean, there is a series of bombs right here in Salt Lake City. Yes. Yeah. Like, it's scary. I don't know. Freaks me out. These Texas bombs that were around this same time, police eventually traced those bombs to a man named Mark Anthony Condit who died after detonating one of his own bombs inside his car. They never actually found the motive for these Texas bombs, though Condit did state in a recorded confession that he was, quote, a psychopath. And since he actually died before this, the explosion at Ildiko's spa, police were like, it can't be him, but this is so eerie that we've had a series of package bombs in Texas a couple months ago. And now we've just had our own package bomb here in Southern California. So they're like, is there a chance this is an accomplice? Is this a copycat bomber? These were all things that needed to be considered. Though they do eventually learn that the package that had, had been opened, the bomb package, was intended for Ildiko. It was addressed to her. So this makes them feel like she was probably the primary target. And that meant speaking to those closest to her to see who might've wanted her dead. It's definitely a pretty wild way to just kill one person, but that's what they're starting to think is that this was just one targeted event. So. - One of the first threads they follow is obviously Ildiko's husband, Ronilo. He said he was at work during the time of the bomb blast. And he actually rushed down to the scene this second that his brother told him about where the explosion was. But there was something a little strange about his story. He tells police, he wasn't even sure if Ildiko had come back from her Hungary trip yet. So he wasn't even sure if she was inside the spa, when it blew up. Now, Ronilo and Ildiko were seemingly, like I said, on a bit of a break at this point, separated, if you will. But they were still living together at the time. So it was odd that he wouldn't have known if she was in America. - Yeah. - Like at this point. Though to be fair, she had just gone back the night before and then went into work at the spa that morning. Still police question Ronilo, which was why that night, that night, that night, that night. They ended up placing a tracker on his car and they sent about 25 SWAT agents over to the house to search the house. And again, if you're like, whoa, this is overkill. They're dealing with a bomb, a deadly, deadly weapon. Like this weapon can kill multiple people at once, mass casualties, right? So that's why it is such an intense thing. 'Cause what if there's more? What if he has more at the house that could go off? So at the same time that 25 SWAT agents are searching their home, Ronilo is brought down to the station for questioning. And he admitted to the police, they had been living pretty separate lives recently. He told them, listen, she's my wife, but Ildiko was definitely dating other men outside of our marriage, I know about it. According to some of Ildiko's friends, she was juggling about five to six different men. - Dang. Oh my gosh. - She was definitely like, she's definitely common knowledge, even to the husband. - She's getting it. - We're separated and I'm dating. - Okay. - Like it's not necessarily that this was happening behind his back. It was just like, we're separated. And she was dating a lot at the time of the bombing. So this is not an easy suspect list to narrow down when they learn that she is dating this much. But Ronilo knows at least one of the men's name. He says it's a handyman named Max. This Max guy has a key to Ildiko's spa because he's a handyman. But Ildiko had once told Ronilo that she felt a little weird about Max because he would sometimes park overnight in the spa parking lot and sleep in his car. So when they hear this and that he had a key and that maybe him and Ildiko had some type of relationship, again, all from the husband, they bring Max the handyman in. It leads nowhere. Either the guy had a good alibi or the situation didn't match up because he was crossed off the suspect list. Which was when police moved on to another person Ronilo knew Ildiko was involved with, a man named Gabor Papp. Now Ildiko had actually met Gabor a few years prior. So back in 2015. And apparently the relationship between them had quickly become intimate, even though they both were technically married at the time. So the two got so serious in 2015 that they spoke about leaving their current partners for one another. That was until a fight happened at Ildiko's spa. Apparently, once Gabor's wife, Elizabeth, found out about the affair, she showed up at Ildiko's spa and things got heated. Some say it turned physical, but apparently this whole situation caused Ildiko and Gabor to put things on pause, at least for a little while. Two years later, Ildiko found Gabor on Facebook. Again, so that was 2015, it's now 2017. And she gave him a little poke. Remember when you can just poke people on Facebook? - Oh, I forgot about that. - Yeah. So his wife, Elizabeth, said that's when she noticed Ildiko had been driving by their home in Aliso Viejo, almost like she was looking for Gabor. she now sees this old mistress of her husband's driving around so elizabeth decides what am i gonna do am i gonna confront my husband am i gonna confront her she says i'm just gonna send ildiko some photos of me and gabor being intimate that's a okay great idea it's just she's like he's my husband this is what we do back off all right guys we're jumping into an ad real quick rocket money we love rocket money we've been doing ads for them for so long we've been using their product for so long as well if you want something to help organize all your finances cancel unwanted subscriptions rocket money is the place you put all your debit cards credit cards bank accounts everything right in there you can see all your budgets how much money you're spending what you should be spending what you shouldn't be spending it's amazing it's intuitive we need 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and i know you will too now it's not clear if you're going to be able to buy skims or not if you're going to be able to buy skims if things had picked back up between gabor and ildiko during this time like i don't know if they were seeing each other after this facebook post and she was seen driving around but elizabeth made it very clear we were over this two years ago and i'm not going down without a fight now eventually elizabeth texts ron nilo to tell him hey two years ago i caught your wife having an affair with my husband this happened a few years back and i'm not going down without a fight back i just want you to know elizabeth even said in the text quote she almost destroyed my family enough is enough i think it's safe to say elizabeth the wife is spiraling a little bit at this point to be fair but ron nilo when confronted with this information by elizabeth actually texted her back telling her to just block idilco on facebook but she found that absurd saying quote really you're so blind and accept what you're doing and i'm not going down without a fight your wife is doing instead of stepping up be a man and you know what gosh he got this text just a month and a half or so before the package bomb was sent so obviously when police learn about this whole affair situation from years back that had also trickled into the weeks before the bomb basically they decide to speak to the couple and the couple cooperated even handed over all of their electronic devices hoping to clear their names and it helped there was no indication that either of them knew how to build a bomb had ever researched how to so detectives scratch their names off the list as well and that's your your suspects that can actually build a bomb like that's not very high i'm sure pretty small police are like holy cow like we have so many potential suspects that probably have good motive and they're not working like they're not actually who's doing this which has got to be a little wild so this is when they decide to circle back to something idilco's friend sarah had said this is the one who had been treated at her spa earlier on the day of the explosion before the mother and daughter sarah noticed there was a man hanging around the spa that day the day of her appointment and the day of the bombing and she also said idilco kind of seemed a little bit unnerved about something she said at one point idilco came rushing out of a room with keys and mail in her hands and this man that was kind of lingering tried to speak with idilco but she just shooed him off and when sarah was like what was that who is that guy what just happened idilco told sarah he was just a friend but she doesn't go into any detail so when sarah tells police this she described the guy as tall and stout with gray hair police showed her some photos and they do eventually determine the guy's identity apparently it was a man who had lunch plans with idilco that day the day of the bombing and he had been seen lingering around the spa and his name was scott malali i feel like i've become like i'm skeptical of people now you know what i'm saying yeah like i'll be somewhere and i'm like that person have a gun like does that person have a bomb why is that person standing there why is that like why is that person acting weird over there yeah what are you doing you know who like i'm just i look at people now and i'm like nah you're being weird why are you being weird you know who gets the most unfair judgment of anyone who people who go alone to movies oh do not yes i agree i'm all for it because i would go alone to a movie but do not come alone to my movie don't do it do not do not come alone to my movie i'm sorry because instantly it's true someone comes in alone in a movie and i'm like you're immediately gives me eyes like you see that person they're alone there's no one with them alone but the thing is i would go alone to a movie there's nothing wrong with going alone but they really do get the worst judgment i just don't want you alone in my movie anyways okay we can keep going so the police pay scott a visit next they're like man number three you were supposed to have lunch with her that day he told them he'd met ildiko at a casino a few weeks before her death there was a spark he'd even drove her to the airport for her flight out to hungary and had picked her up as soon as she landed at lax the night before the bombing he said they spent the night together and then he drove her to the spa the next day so this actually matches up with ronny lo the husband's account that he hadn't seen ildiko because she didn't actually go back to the hospital she went to scott's house and then went to work the next morning so it actually does match up that he was like i don't even know if she's home or not but police want to obviously check this out they pull up video footage from baggage claim at lax sure enough there's ildiko and scott standing there on tape he's helping her with her bags and after doing a little more digging into scott he is also crossed off the suspect list so man number three is crossed off he just didn't seem like someone capable of building a bomb however police soon learn there's more to ildiko's last days apparently she didn't fly back from hungary alone she came back with a man who she parted ways from during their layover in san francisco before she then continued on her way to the hospital she then continued on to los angeles and met scott at lax so she actually flew home with a man now that man was named laszlo zabo so police learned that laszlo and ildiko had also been dating for a few months just kind of on and off at that point seeing each other so this is man number four and i'm not sure how the two of them met but i know he was hungarian and had traveled with her to the country on this recent trip so she had traveled with laszlo to hungary when she went back to visit her family and again before you're like too worried about remembering all of these characters i will remind you if it's important that's why i just keep saying this is man number four so they track laszlo down in his current home in the san francisco area and he says i haven't even been to southern california in months They eventually find this to be true. So Laszlo is now ruled out. ruled out okay come on it's 2018 we have cameras hey they've used the cameras to find these people how can we not find the guy or girl when someone has five or six guys that they're seeing at the same time yeah i get it girls they think it's one of them for sure they just got to go down the list i mean move we gotta move come on the list is getting smaller but there was one person police were not able to rule out someone who had actually come down to the station on the day of the bombing to voluntarily offer information about ildiko it was her business partner and apparently former lover a guy named stephen biel okay now 58 year old stephen was a grandfather who had been widowed with four adult kids he lost his wife back around 2008 he had been dipping a lot of money in the bank and he was able to get a job in the bank and he was able to get a job in the bank and he was able to get a job in the bank and he was able to get a job in the bank and he was able to get a job in the bank and he was able to get a job in the bank and he was able to get a job in the bank is a missed opportunity. Start your risk-free Greenlight trial today at greenlight.com slash husband. Don't wait to teach your kids real world money skills. That's greenlight.com slash husband to get started. Greenlight.com slash husband. So the day after the explosion on May 16th, 2018, Stephen Bale was arrested, but not for homicide. No, he was arrested for one charge of possessing an unregistered destructive device. Okay. And then two days later, prosecutors actually dropped those charges, primarily because a lab tech with the FBI said they couldn't rule out the fact that those devices might have actually been used for his rocket hobby, not bomb making, just like Stephen had claimed. So do you even have enough evidence to prove he's the one who. Who made this bomb and set it off? So Stephen Bale goes, gets out, he gets to live his life, but the police are not going to let him off that easily. They continue looking deeper into him to see if there's any more evidence there because, I mean, they've now gone through four men. This is the fifth that she has dated. This fifth one invested a lot of money into her, also found out she was seeing other men, and also was her business partner. Ann likes making fireworks. Police are like, nah, there's something going on. They just need more evidence. And one of the things they found was the stocking. Turns out in the weeks and months before the bombing, Stephen had apparently been keeping close tabs on Ildiko's online accounts he still had access to, which, by the way, was her personal calendar. Oh my gosh. Her social media account. Weirdo. You name it. He had somehow figured out how to get access to it. He also went by the spa several times while she was out of the country in Hungary, which wouldn't be that surprising, you know, because, I mean, he still owns some of it. He's still involved in it. But police also suspected that he dropped off the package during one of those visits, knowing that when she came back and returned to the spa, she would open it. But there's just not enough proof yet. It's just a theory. They have proof that he was going. While she was gone, they just don't have proof putting the package in his hands. So the police keep digging through thousands of hours of CCTV footage and other records trying to find the smoking gun. And several months into their investigation, they find something hidden in Stephen's financial records. He had bought three boxes at a store right around the corner from the spa. Just simple six by six cardboard boxes. Exactly. Okay. Now we're getting somewhere. Like the bomb was packaged in. And they had camera footage of him making that purchase just a week before the bomb went off in the spa. And then they remembered that nine volt battery they found at the scene and how it was CVS brand. So they roll the dice. They look back at the security cameras from the CVS right around the corner from Ildiko's spa. And they also do it around the same time that they know Stephen bought those boxes. And that's when they see Stephen on camera in CVS buying a single nine volt battery and paying for it in cash. Now, shortly after making these discoveries, the lab techs with the FBI also come back with some evidence of their own. They concluded there was no, quote, meaningful differences between some of the wires recovered from the crime scene and the wires that were in the devices found at Stephen's home. All of this to say to lab techs, it was a probable match. So now you have him buying batteries, boxes that the bomb was found in. The exact type of battery used in the bomb. Which, let's be honest, those are all very generic. Like what you're naming is very generic. Boxes, batteries. Not saying, I mean, he's probably guilty, but I'm just saying. The wires, matched ones found in his home. But when you put all of that together, he's buying every single supply to make the bomb. He has a hundred pounds of explosive material at his home to make this bomb. And he has more than enough motive to kill her. Police are like, we think this is enough to make an arrest. On March 3rd, 2019, this is nearly 10 months after the explosion, Stephen Beale kissed his new fiance, goodbye that morning. Oh my gosh. 10 months later, and he has a new fiance after allegedly bombing an ex. And he goes out to run some errands. And later he calls her to say, hey, I've just been arrested for murder. It then takes nearly three years for Stephen's case to get its day in court. So it's now 2022. And the prosecution reminded the jury, hey, Ildiko is not guilty. He's not guilty. He's not guilty. He's not guilty. He's not the only victim in Stephen's crime. There was also a mother and daughter who would have to live with the memory of that day and the aftermath, losing an eye, the trauma of it. Also, had they been standing in a different spot, probably would have died. And as for motive, they told the jury, let's tell you everything we know about Stephen and Ildiko's relationship. Like he's obsessed. He found out she was seeing other men. He was, he's obsessed. He's obsessed. He's obsessed. He's obsessed. He's obsessed. He's obsessed. He's obsessed. He's obsessed. He's obsessed. He's obsessed. He's obsessed. He's obsessed. And how many of the parts that he bought that were in this specific bomb or had at his home. I mean, all the signs were there, but the defense argued, listen, there was so many people with motive to get rid of Ildiko. Think of all of the men that you talked to. You have the couple who had been in this years long battle with this affair, or even Ildiko's husband, Ronilo. They also pointed to the possibility of Max, the handyman who would have access to the spa. They also said Stephen bought Ildiko that battery for her business. They were like, there's no proof. Like Garrett said, it's generic. There's no proof that he used that battery for the bomb or that those boxes he bought were used for the bomb. Overall, the trial lasted seven weeks. Seventy different witnesses were called to the stand. When the jury returned, some of them had reasonable doubt. They didn't come to an agreement. A hung jury meant a mistrial. No verdict. But the prosecution was not done. In the meantime, Stephen went back to jail because he was unable to make his bail. But as he waited for his second trial to come in June of 2023, some new information came to light. Information that suggested this might not have even been Stephen's first time dealing with a situation like this. Turns out they discovered there was some suspicious circumstances surrounding his death. Stephen's first time dealing with a situation like this. Turns out they discovered his own wife's death back in 2008. On February 16th of that year, 48-year-old Stephen and his wife, 48-year-old Christine, were carrying a heavy piece of furniture down the stairs of their Long Beach home. Stephen was carrying the top part of a 50-pound table, and Christine was on the bottom. Apparently, Stephen lost his balance and let go of the table, and the table fell on top of Christine while they were going down the stairs, and it fell on top of her. The injury was severe, but she survived. It was extremely painful, though. Christine went to see multiple doctors in the weeks that followed. Eventually, after several days of vomiting, Christine died on March 8th from what was said to be a result of her injuries from this fall. The autopsy report said her cause of death was pancreatitis or an inflammation of the heart. The autopsy report said her cause of death was pancreatitis the organ as well as an electrolyte imbalance her manner of death was listed as undetermined so this is his ex-wife this is crazy but there was something a little odd about the report it said the lead in christine's blood was four times higher than what it should have been no way they didn't catch this and the source of that lead poisoning was unknown however prosecutors found that stephen had actually purchased lead in the months before christine's death from a company called virginia pyrotechnics how do we miss this turns out detectives did investigate this death around the same time as ildikos thinking the two can now be related but according to a department spokesperson they found nothing to suggest that her death was criminal instead stephen's kids think the lead came from the renovations their parents were doing on the house and apparently stephen himself had actually gone for treatment for lead poisoning a few months before his wife died but there's obviously more to the story when people keep digging steven took out a quote accidental death insurance policy on christine through his work this is getting ridiculous just a few weeks before he then accidentally dropped the table on her i don't need to hear anymore put him in jail but when he went to claim the life insurance it was denied because they're like we don't even know how she died we can't give it to you steven eventually filed a lawsuit against both his employer and the insurance company and he won 550 000 oh my gosh now as steven's going to retrial in june of 2023 people are like we're gonna bring this up in july of 2023 after the trial his second trial he was found guilty of four finally malicious destruction of a building resulting in death use of a destructive device during and in relation to a crime of violence possession of an unregistered destructive device and using a weapon of mass destruction steven's sentencing hearing came in january of 2024 there the prosecution hoped to use the information about his wife to kind of bolster the sentence but the judge wasn't taking it into consideration still steven beal was given life plus 30 years in federal prison and he will not be eligible for parole but in the end he was given life plus 30 years in federal prison and it's hard to wonder would steven beal have ever even ended up under the microscope if not for his own big mouth probably would the police have eventually caught on after going through all the men i'm sure his name actually no i think you're right i think they were slowly going through everybody he just made it fast yeah yeah we'd hope obviously that that's true but you also have christine's death that's crazy and he'll never probably get charged for that that's crazy allegedly allegedly killed his ex-wife he accidentally took out the life insurance policy and then accidentally dropped the table on her that accidentally killed her so sad that's horrible he hasn't obviously paid the price for that at least not yet but he is in prison for ildiko's murder and that is her case that's horrible i'm i'm glad more more people didn't die right like surprisingly more people didn't die also like again out of all the ways to kill somebody a bomb like if you're trying to kill one person that seems i mean it's i guess killing someone in general also you're immediately getting the fbi involved yeah like you're asking for the most intense like you're not getting investigation if you do a bomb you are not getting away with this that's so sad it's horrible why are you buying the supplies around the corner insane crazy anyways that was our case for this week thank you for watching or listening and we will see you next time with another one i love it i hate it goodbye you're listening to this podcast so i know you've got a curious mind here's a helpful fact you may not know yet drivers who switch and save with progressives save over 900 on average pop over to progressive.com answer some questions and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by in fact 99 of their auto customers earn at least one discount visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates national average 12-month savings of 946 by new customers surveyed who saved with progressive between june 2024 and may 2025 potential savings will vary