00:00:00
A doctor's wife dies after a minor fender bender. So why do her brothers believe this was no accident?
00:00:07
So I pulled my brother out and I told him, you are not going to believe what I just heard.
00:00:12
The startling news came from their sister's friend. She just kept insisting, promise me you'll get a full autopsy.
00:00:21
The brothers kept it a secret. We wouldn't tell our parents, we wouldn't tell my sister Deanna, we wouldn't tell anybody.
00:00:28
It was information about a family member they loved. Would they point the guilty finger?
00:00:33
There was no way we were going to accuse him. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.
00:00:39
Here's Dennis Murphy. So ironic that Rosie Issa was just idling away a few hours that afternoon
00:00:55
when she had only a few precious minutes remaining. But we never know, do we? It was February 2005, and she was dashing to the movies
00:01:07
to meet her sister Deanna at a matinee. At the last minute, I mean, I was already in the movie theater.
00:01:12
She had called, and she said, all right, I'm on my way. She said, I'm leaving now.
00:01:16
No one knew it then, but Rosie's nothing special trip to the movies that day from her nice home in suburban Cleveland
00:01:22
would set in motion an international manhunt. Something that became an excruciating five-year ordeal
00:01:30
that would expose mistresses, secret bedrooms, and new identities. And would involve the FBI, the Middle East, and murder.
00:01:41
And all the intrigue, and the lifetime of sorrow for so many, began on the streets of a perfectly pleasant
00:01:48
mom's, dad's, kids' and dogs kind of neighborhood. Gates Mills, Ohio. Rosie, a nurse, and her handsome doctor husband, Yacid, or Yaz, as he was known to one and all,
00:01:59
met while working at the same hospital. At 36, he was proud that he, a man of humble roots, was able to provide his family with so much.
00:02:07
The big house, the backyard pool, money for whatever they needed. Yaz was the kind of son-in-law Rosie's parents, Rocco and Gigi DiPuccio, could regard as heaven-sent.
00:02:19
She'd send him for two jars of baby food. He'd come home with 36. I mean, everything he did had to be big and lots.
00:02:27
Was it in a show-off kind of way, or was he being generous? No, he was just, you know, I used to say to him,
00:02:33
I think God is so good to you in everything you do because you're so giving to people.
00:02:42
Now, Rosie, her family would say, could not have cared less about the house, the cars, the status.
00:02:48
She was down to earth and content with what she'd always had. Not the least of it, her close Italian-American family,
00:02:56
where Sunday dinner at her parents was don't miss. And, of course, the sun and moon of her life,
00:03:02
two-year-old daughter Lena and four-year-old son Armin. Was she happy to be a mother?
00:03:07
Oh, my God, are you kidding? She would just pinch their cheek and say, I can't believe I got these beautiful kids.
00:03:14
I just love them. Her eyes lit up when she looked at her babies. They were her life.
00:03:20
In fact, Rosie and Yaz, married for almost six years, were hoping for another child.
00:03:26
She was taking prenatal vitamins. But she would never get to have another baby. Because Rosie's 10-minute drive to the movies in her black Volvo SUV was going poorly.
00:03:37
Her waiting sister had no idea what had gone wrong. I wondered, where is she? How come she's not calling?
00:03:43
I held my phone the whole time, just waiting for it to ring. As it turned out, for a few minutes anyway, Rosie was on her cell with her friend of many years, a woman named Eva.
00:03:54
She drove on Interstate 271 for just one exit to Wilson Mills Road. That's when Rosie's SUV started veering erratically.
00:04:03
Another driver noticed it. I saw a black car cross over center and go back into the lane and hit a car.
00:04:12
And the car just kept going. And I'm thinking to myself, what is going on here? What is this woman doing?
00:04:18
The Volvo eventually stopped. That's when Tara Tamski, a medical technician, pulled over and ran to see if she could help the woman in the car.
00:04:27
She found a person in desperate shape. When I got into the car, the woman was limp.
00:04:32
And next thing you know, she started vomiting. Meanwhile, patrol officer David Scissiano of the Highland Heights Police Department had happened by.
00:04:40
His dashboard camera recorded the accident. The female driver was sitting back, and she's just gasping for air.
00:04:48
Rosie was rushed to the hospital. When word reached her family, they too raced to the emergency room, worried about her condition.
00:04:55
I just prayed, you know, please, you know, let her live. If she's, no matter how bad she's, you know, broken up, we'll take care of her, you know.
00:05:03
Just please let her live, God. In the ER, the doctors working frantically on Rosie almost an hour now
00:05:11
allowed her husband Yaz, an emergency room doctor himself, to observe. Rosie's brother would be the one to deliver the bad news to his parents.
00:05:25
He looked at me, he was crying, and I just went down. It was sadly over for Rosie Issa at the age of 38.
00:05:37
The family was brought to a private room for a viewing. When I saw her, I think she looked like she was sleeping.
00:05:45
I mean, there was not a mark on her. And as the stunned family began to prepare for unspeakably sad arrangements,
00:05:53
just hours after she passed away that friend named Eva who been on the phone with Rosie right before her car crash got a hold of Dominic Rosie brother She repeated what were very probably Rosie last words
00:06:06
It was literally unbelievable what Eva was suggesting. First thing I did was I went in the house and I pulled my brother out and I told him, you are not going to believe what I just heard.
00:06:16
Repeated the story to him. We looked at each other like, now what the hell do we do?
00:06:20
What Eva said would nearly rip Dominic and his brother Rocky apart. How could they keep such a monstrous thing a secret?
00:06:28
We wouldn't tell our parents. We wouldn't tell my sister Deanna. We wouldn't tell anybody.
00:06:34
Coming up, they wouldn't tell anybody what Eva had said and what she begged them to do.
00:06:40
She just kept insisting, promise me you'll get a full autopsy. When Dateline continues.
00:06:55
The DiPuccio family turned to their church for strength in dealing with the loss of their Rosie.
00:07:02
At just 38, snatched away far too soon in a slow-motion car accident no one could comprehend.
00:07:10
Their beloved daughter and sister, mother of two and wife of Yaz. Yaz Yazid had been born in Detroit, a first-generation Palestinian-American, son of a Ford auto worker.
00:07:23
After medical school, he'd become an emergency room doctor, but one with an entrepreneurial itch.
00:07:30
He and his brother had become wealthy as partners in a satellite dish installation company.
00:07:36
And back in 1999, when they married, Rosie's parents felt it was a dream come true for their daughter.
00:07:43
In the years they were married, Rosie's mom and dad saw only a solid relationship.
00:07:48
When she had Mary, it was like a fairy tale. we loved him and we cared about him because there was nothing we could say we disliked.
00:07:58
But now, after Rosie's death, there was trouble brewing in the DiPuccio family, and it brought Rosie's two siblings, Dominic and his younger brother Rocky, nearly to blows.
00:08:08
It all started after a conversation just hours after Rosie's death that Dominic had with his sister's friend, Eva.
00:08:16
I said, Rosie died. Rosie died. She's hysterical. She proceeded to tell me that Rosie was talking to her on her way to the movie,
00:08:24
and she said Yaz had given her a calcium pill before she left the house, and she started to feel queasy.
00:08:31
Rosie told her, I'm going to call Yaz to see if maybe this calcium pill is making me sick.
00:08:37
I'm hearing about some kind of a pill. He gave it to her. She is being made sick by it as he was talking to her on the phone.
00:08:43
Right. And within an hour, she's dead. Right. After the Eva conversation, Dominic called a family council of just the two brothers and their wives.
00:08:54
They needed someplace private. So they got into one car and drove to their church's parking lot.
00:09:00
Eva's story seemed incomprehensible. Could there have been something wrong with a calcium capsule Yaz had given Rosie?
00:09:08
We talked about it and we called Eva again. And she just kept insisting, promise me you'll get a full autopsy.
00:09:13
Promise me you'll get a toxicology report. Promise me, promise me, promise me. Dominic's wife, Julie, was dumbfounded.
00:09:21
How do you have this information come to you about somebody that is family? And there was no way we were going to accuse him.
00:09:27
Let alone a guy that we knew that was in our family, that we loved. We trusted. The brothers found themselves in opposite camps as far as strategy.
00:09:38
Dominic, the lawyer wanting to go slow, first let the coroner do his report, then see where they stood.
00:09:44
Rocky and his wife, Rachel, were eager to take Eva's story to the cops. Everyone, though, hoped that Yaz was blameless.
00:09:51
I remember thinking, feeling suspicious after that phone call, feeling like we need to do something with this information.
00:10:01
In the dark of the parking lot, they made a compromise. Rocky would call the coroner the next day and ask for a thorough and full examination of Rosie's body.
00:10:11
There wouldn't be any mention of Eva's suspicions. The coroner's going to find out how she died.
00:10:16
I mean, this was a matter of two days, three days, four days. The coroner would come back and say, this is what happened.
00:10:22
And that's what everyone wanted. They were desperate to know what had happened to Rosie.
00:10:28
The two-car accident she'd been involved in had been a minor fender bender. There appeared to be no serious trauma to Rosie's body.
00:10:37
The next day, the coroner performed an autopsy. Unwelcome news reached the DiPuccios quickly.
00:10:43
Cause of death unknown. More tests would be needed. The wait would only add more stress to an already stressful situation between Rosie's two brothers.
00:10:54
Their parents felt the tension. They were going at each other. And I couldn't understand this.
00:11:00
You could see it? I could see it. They were arguing and arguing and I'm telling Rocco,
00:11:05
you know, you got to talk to Dominic and Rocco. I don't know what's going on with them.
00:11:09
But how long could the brothers keep their secret from the rest of the family? Coming up, especially when someone else was also growing suspicious.
00:11:22
As soon as I got off the phone, I think he killed her. When Dateline continues. Rosie Issa died in a low-impact car accident.
00:11:37
and almost two weeks later her family was still awaiting the coroner's final report on the exact cause of her death.
00:11:44
That's when Christine DeSillo on her own decided to get involved and it's that involvement that would later prove invaluable to the police.
00:11:53
I didn want to be the nosy neighbor in Bewitched the Gladys Kravitz of the neighborhood coming up with these wild convoluted ideas Christine is a nurse who once worked with both Rosie and her doctor husband Yaz at a hospital
00:12:06
She hadn't seen much of either of them in the previous five years. But by coincidence, Christine lived right next door to Rosie's friend Eva.
00:12:14
And Eva told her about that last phone call with Rosie, about Yaz giving her a calcium capsule.
00:12:19
It was odd to me that just prior to leaving for a movie in the middle of the afternoon, in a hurry, that that was so necessary that he'd give her the pill.
00:12:28
As soon as I got off the phone with Eva, I looked to my husband and said, I think he killed her.
00:12:32
Gut instinct. Immediately. So going simply on her gut instinct that something wasn't right and unknown to Rosie's brothers, Christine called the authorities.
00:12:44
But if you were wrong, Christine. Well, where could they take it if I was wrong?
00:12:48
There was no harm, no foul. and they could politely tell me that I was wrong and thank you for my help, and I would go away.
00:12:54
Christine's urgent request to check Yaz out made it to the desk of Gary McKee, then a detective with the Highland Heights, Ohio Police Department.
00:13:03
He was already investigating Rosie's car accident. I never had met Christine DiCello, and I didn't know if she had an ax to grind with him.
00:13:10
Whatever reason she didn't care for him may not have been a valid reason. So I wasn't approaching him as a suspect or even thinking that, you know, this guy's a murderer.
00:13:20
Still, the detective had some facts that didn't add up. A 38-year-old woman in good health suddenly dead in a fender bender.
00:13:28
What's more, the coroner couldn't give him a cause of death. At minimum, he had to find out more about those calcium capsules Christine DiCillo had told him about.
00:13:38
The detective called Rosie's husband and he agreed to come down to the police station.
00:13:43
That interview was recorded on an audio tape. The detective questioned the doctor about the calcium capsules.
00:13:50
Two weeks before I was over at my mom's house, and I thought about this as well.
00:13:54
My mom had this older lady over, and we were talking about osteoporosis and whatnot,
00:13:58
and I told Rosie was there that we should probably, you know, she's over 35, she should probably start taking a calcium supplement.
00:14:06
So she's not out of the care of any specials or anything. She didn't have any health problems.
00:14:13
Was she experiencing any unusual stress recently? No, life was good. Did you have any stressors in your marriage?
00:14:21
My marriage was fine. So what's your impression of this doctor, the guy everyone calls Yaz?
00:14:26
Well, he's clearly a smart individual, very low-key. Are the calcium pills and the prescription vitamins still at home?
00:14:35
Would you mind if I followed you back to your home and collected those? No, that'd be great.
00:14:40
Not at all. Remember, Rosie and Yaz were trying to have another child, and she was prescribed prenatal vitamins.
00:14:49
Detective McKee wanted all the pills Rosie was taking gathered up for testing, including the calcium capsules that Yaz said he bought for his wife.
00:14:57
The interview over, the detective followed Yaz home. We entered the home. There was a female seated at the kitchen counter on a stool.
00:15:06
She was Margarita Montanez. Margarita was the daytime nanny. Yaz had hired her to care for his kids after Rosie died.
00:15:14
He also hired another woman to be the nighttime nanny. At the time, the detective thought nothing of Margarita the nanny,
00:15:22
though that would eventually change. For now, he was there only to get the pills from Yaz.
00:15:27
Before he retrieved the pills, he asked me, have you found a cause of death for my wife?
00:15:33
And I said, no, we haven't. So then he reached up in the cabinet, retrieved the pills.
00:15:38
But before he handed them to me, he said, Why do you want these? And my response was, you know, I just want to cover all the bases.
00:15:46
The next day, Yaz asked Rosie's sister to watch his kids overnight. Then, in the middle of that night, she got an urgent call from him.
00:15:55
At four in the morning, he left me a voicemail saying that his friend's brother was in a bad car accident,
00:16:01
and they didn't think he was going to make it, so he was going to go to North Carolina.
00:16:06
The friend's brother was apparently in bad shape. Yaz asked the DiPuccio family to watch his children through the weekend.
00:16:13
But on Monday, when the doctor was to return, came a bombshell none of the DiPuccios could ever have imagined.
00:16:20
Rosie's brother got a call from his wife. Julie called and said, nobody can find Yaz.
00:16:24
And I said, what do you mean? She said, nobody can find him. I found his friend.
00:16:28
I found his number. I called him. I said, how's your brother? And he said, what are you talking about?
00:16:33
And I said, well, Yaz told us he was down with you because your brother had been in a really bad car accident.
00:16:37
And he said, I haven't seen Yaz. Yaz hasn't been here all weekend. Dominic went to Rosie and Yaz's house and discovered something on the kitchen counter.
00:16:47
It was an envelope that had obviously recently been opened. The postage stamp was just a couple days before, and it was an envelope that had a passport would come in.
00:16:55
I said, he's gone. He's gone. But could this father really have left behind his two children?
00:17:02
Children who just lost their mother three weeks before. The Tappuccios did have questions.
00:17:09
What killed Rosie? And why did Yaz disappear? Coming up, the autopsy comes in along with a stunning revelation about those calcium pills
00:17:23
when Dateline continues. Dr. Yazee Issa was gone. Three weeks after his wife Rosie had died a puzzling death,
00:17:41
he'd up and abandoned their two young children. His job as an ER doctor just flat vanished.
00:17:48
Rosie's brother Dominic filed a missing person report with the police, then headed down to Yaz house and started his own investigation My entire family spent the week at that house and we were playing detectives trying to figure out what happened What is the puzzle piece telling you Rosie died on a Thursday Less than 24 hours later he sends a blast email to all his friends
00:18:10
that says, just wanted to let you know that Rosie died yesterday in a minor car accident.
00:18:15
She will be missed. That's it? That was the email. His wife? The mother of his two children? That was
00:18:21
blast email. Through credit card transactions, Dominic eventually learned that Yaz had bought
00:18:26
a plane ticket. Final destination, Cyprus, the island in the Mediterranean. Dominic knew it was
00:18:34
time to tell the entire family everything he and his brother Rocky had been keeping back,
00:18:38
about the conversation their sister had with Eva just before she died. Her story about Rosie feeling sick after taking a calcium capsule given to her by Yaz.
00:18:47
Are you the family saying out loud in one voice, Yaz killed Rosie? Some of us are. It took me a while. Really took me a while.
00:18:57
Suddenly, Dominic and his wife's family had grown, caring not only for their own four children, but now Rosie's two children as well.
00:19:05
They have not a mother, not a father. We don't even know where to tell them, where he went, what happened to him, where did he go?
00:19:11
How do you answer that question? Then came even more devastating news. About four weeks after Rosie's death,
00:19:19
test results were in for the calcium pills that police took from Yaz's home. We had suspicions there, but that, of course, nailed it.
00:19:28
And what were they filled with? Calcium cyanide. Cyanide, a lethal poison. Nine pills were in the bottle that Yaz had turned over to police.
00:19:39
It's from that same bottle that he gave Rosie a capsule. And sure enough, there was enough cyanide in each pill to kill a person within minutes.
00:19:48
Rosie's death was a homicide. But how could the man the Dupugios love so much? The son-in-law they thought had a near-perfect marriage with their Rosie ever have killed her.
00:19:59
Nonetheless, Dr. Yazeed Issa was now a murder suspect and international fugitive.
00:20:05
The local police called in the FBI. Initially, he fled from Cleveland to Cyprus.
00:20:11
and then eventually we also obtained information through various sources that he had traveled to Beirut, Lebanon.
00:20:19
Phil Torsney was a seasoned FBI manhunter. The agent immediately knew he had a major problem.
00:20:27
Yaz was virtually untouchable in Lebanon, because that country doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S.
00:20:34
So Rosie's husband was living freely in Beirut. The FBI knew it, and there was nothing they could do about it.
00:20:41
Even if we have eyes on the ground, you've got an agent say, I just saw him leave his apartment, go down to the bistro, he read the paper and he went home,
00:20:47
you can't move in and serve papers on him. Right. Back in the U.S., Rosie's family desperately tried to get Yaz to turn himself in.
00:20:56
They held news conferences. What we're doing today is making a plea to Yazid, if he is watching,
00:21:01
to come back to Cleveland and answer to the charges before him. By then, the doctor had officially been charged with aggravated murder in the death of his wife.
00:21:11
But it appeared he had no intention of coming back. Officials would later learn that Yaz took on a new identity, Maurice Khalifi.
00:21:21
He was a single, good-looking guy, always up for a party. Months went by, then a year.
00:21:28
Did you ever get the feeling he was thumbing his nose at you and all the other people looking for him?
00:21:32
Yeah, I think so. And what you have to do is lure him off the security of his home base where he's safe in Beirut?
00:21:38
We hope at some point he leaves the country. In October 2006, a year and a half after Rosie's death,
00:21:46
her mom and dad got a phone call from their local police chief. And he said, are you sitting down?
00:21:52
He says, I have big news for you. He said, we got him. Yaz had finally slipped up.
00:21:59
He'd left the security of Lebanon. The FBI was aware he was going to be in a flight into Cyprus' Larnica Airport.
00:22:06
How they knew, they won't say. But Cypriot police were waiting for the doctor when he got off the plane.
00:22:12
And in Cyprus, unlike Lebanon, a person can be extradited to the U.S. But Yaz would fight every inch of the way to avoid facing aggravated murder charges in Ohio.
00:22:22
That's our guy. It wasn't until January of 2009 that Yazid Issa was finally brought back to the United States.
00:22:31
50, go ahead. And Detective McKee, the Highland Heights, Ohio officer, who first started investigating Rosie's death four years before, was waiting for him.
00:22:40
We put him in the backseat of a car, and I didn't say a word to him. You didn't say, remember me?
00:22:45
I think he did. I don't think I had to say that. Coming up, the one question no one had yet answered.
00:22:52
Why would the doctor want his wife dead? Are you asserting that there's a little love nest, a little pad?
00:22:58
Oh, yeah, there was a, I thought it was a playhouse. I was in Love Shack. I was in Love Shack, and that was it.
00:23:03
When Dateline continues. For nearly five years, the DiPuccio family had been waiting for this day.
00:23:18
Dr. Yazeed Issa would finally face a jury for allegedly poisoning his wife, Rosie, with cyanide.
00:23:25
Steve Dever and Anna Feralia would prosecute the aggravated murder case for Ohio.
00:23:30
What's the mission? How are you going to go about it? The mission is to define his character and let the jury get another glimpse of who he is
00:23:36
as opposed to how he appears there in the courtroom. As the trial started, the prosecution's challenge was to convince the jury that Yazeed Issa was a Jekyll and Hyde.
00:23:45
One face showing the emergency room doctor who saved lives and seemed the ideal husband.
00:23:51
The other, an evil poisoner who planned the murder of his wife, the mother of his two children.
00:23:57
Rosie's sister-in-law may have One of those masks slipped right after Rosie had died.
00:24:03
She testified as to how cold and disrespectful Yaz had seemed in the way he treated his wife's body lying on the hospital bed.
00:24:10
Yaz walked over to Rosie and very abruptly lifted her up and pulled the sheet down.
00:24:21
And she was naked underneath, and he exposed her breast. And he tried to get the necklace off, and he just kind of got it off.
00:24:30
And he just treated her very disrespectfully. And I remember thinking, why is he doing that?
00:24:37
Why is he treating her like that? That's his wife. State calls Eva McGregor. If the prosecution had an indispensable star witness,
00:24:49
it would be Eva McGregor, the friend who had been on the phone with Rosie just moments before her car accident and death.
00:24:56
Only Eva could point to Yaz as the source of that cyanide-laced calcium capsule Rosie had taken.
00:25:02
She had taken a calcium pill right before she left her house. She didn't really want to take it.
00:25:10
And she said as she was rushing out the door, he said, here, take it. Take your calcium.
00:25:16
Now I don't know if that's what's making me sick. The jury would get a lesson in poisoning.
00:25:22
The court was told that cyanide isn't something you can just buy over the counter,
00:25:26
but that lethal stuff, according to the testimony of a poison expert, is available only a mouse click away online.
00:25:33
There was a study done where they actually looked at eBay. There was two times when it came up that you could buy on eBay cyanide.
00:25:41
And it turned out to be a snap to shake out the calcium in the capsule and replace it with cyanide.
00:25:47
You can literally just take a pen cap, and you can scoop it with that and pour it right in.
00:25:53
That may have been the killer's methodology, but in the big picture, the most damning fact against Yaz was his decision to flee.
00:26:01
Would an innocent father have left his two children behind just weeks after their mother had died?
00:26:06
For the story, the courtroom was taken to the Middle East to account for Yaz's missing months in Lebanon.
00:26:13
Good morning, sir. Jamal Khalifi, a kind of godfather Mr. Fix-It character, testified about how he helped Yaz live on the land with virtually a new life and identity.
00:26:23
I got a phone call from my brother that there is somebody coming over to take care of him.
00:26:30
The brother of Jamal the Fixer had known Yaz's family back in the United States.
00:26:36
Jamal testified he put Yaz up in a Beirut apartment, got him a new passport and a new name, Maurice Khalifi.
00:26:43
We have over there support in Lebanon. As he got to know the American doctor better, a stunning story about Rosie spilled out.
00:26:51
He told me the whole story, that his wife was leaving the home, going, I think, to a movie.
00:26:58
He told me he grounded Sinai, refilled the pills. He gave her two pills down the street.
00:27:06
She had a car accident and she died. A severe blow for the accused, a secondhand account of a confession from Yaz.
00:27:13
And another witness was about to deliver an even more dramatic roundhouse punch.
00:27:18
Good afternoon, Mr. Issa. For Ross Issa, none other than the defendant's own brother and business partner,
00:27:24
took the stand as a prosecution witness. I asked him if he was responsible for her death, and he said yes.
00:27:32
When you found out that information, what did you say to your brother? He told me he was a ****.
00:27:37
And why did you say that? Because he took Rosie's life, and I loved her. He just ruined his whole family.
00:27:48
It was crippling testimony. The brother, once an inseparable blood friend, had given Yaz an evidentiary kill shot.
00:27:56
Nonetheless, there were still core problems in the prosecution's overall case. It was entirely circumstantial and seemed to beg for a motive.
00:28:05
Why would the doctor do it? Prosecutors answered by arguing that Yaz the family man wasn really when you took a closer look It turned out he had scads of women on the side He was a doctor with a first cheating heart
00:28:21
Every Wednesday night he would spend with his girlfriend, with his mistress at her apartment.
00:28:26
Girlfriends, mistresses, sex partners, lots of them. Jurors were even shown photos of a hidden away bedroom in the building where he and his brother had their business.
00:28:36
The love shack, that was it. Yeah, that was a place that he would use the apartment over there from time to time to bring his lady friends.
00:28:44
Good afternoon. And one of those lovers had been Margarita, the daytime nanny. She was the woman the detective saw sitting in Yaz's kitchen when he first went to collect the calcium caps.
00:28:55
Margarita, it turned out, had had a long-term sexual affair with Yaz. An affair Rosie evidently knew nothing about.
00:29:03
In 2001, we began a sexual relationship. Why did you become involved in a relationship with the defendant while you were married?
00:29:13
Me and my husband were having problems, and I thought I was going to get a divorce.
00:29:17
So did this begin an affair with the defendant? On occasion. It wasn't a love affair or anything.
00:29:25
Margarita described it as a friends-with-benefits type of relationship with Yaz, purely sex.
00:29:31
But the prosecution asserted Yaz had a deeper, more complicated relationship with another woman, Michelle Madeline.
00:29:38
Now, she was the so-called nighttime nanny for his children. Michelle was also someone, prosecutors say, who fell in love with a doctor and he with her.
00:29:48
States exhibit 125. To make the point, jurors were shown a camisole, an intimate Valentine's Day gift from Yaz to Michelle just two weeks before Rosie's death.
00:29:58
A representative of the company that shipped the nightie read the card that was enclosed.
00:30:03
Next Valentine's Day will be all ours. I love you with all of my being, yes. He's indicating to this paramour that next year is going to be all ours.
00:30:14
It's kind of a foreshadowing of she won't be around next year. The mistress, the nighttime nanny, was called to the stand.
00:30:21
I had a romantic relationship with him. Michelle testified that she was a nurse who'd met Yaz on the job.
00:30:27
He was telling me that he was so unhappy in his marriage, and I was the love of his life,
00:30:33
and I was his dream come true, and he was going to leave her so that our relationship could continue.
00:30:43
She's pushing back, saying, no, I can't be with a married man, and he can't take no for an answer.
00:30:49
And that's his motivation. That's what puts him on this path. A path the prosecution argued that led directly to murder.
00:30:56
The one time mistress shared with the court Yaz's supposed true feelings for his wife, Rosie.
00:31:02
He wasn't in love with her, according to what he told me, and that he was in love with me.
00:31:07
He would say she was a good person, but she was cold. He would call her a manna.
00:31:11
A manna. What does that mean? The refrigerator brand. Rosie's family taking in the testimony were devastated by the mistress's recollections.
00:31:19
The way he humiliated her, and on top of everything that he had done to her, to belittle her or to make fun or to mock her with his mistress is, you know, sick.
00:31:34
Your Honor, at this time, the state of Ohio would rest its case. The defense was about to rise and offer a completely different theory of the crime.
00:31:42
In fact, the jury had already met the true killer in court, and it wasn't Yaz Eason.
00:31:49
Coming up, questions about those cyanide-filled pills. If he has successfully killed his wife with him, why hold on to this stuff?
00:31:59
Precisely. When Dateline continues. What a good marriage Rosie had with Yaz. Our mandate is to do the best job that we can and to bring home that W.
00:32:22
Bring home that not guilty. The defense for Yaz Issa came down to this Sure he had lots of women on the side and he got away with it So why did he need to kill his wife His two defense lawyers Mark Marine and Steve Bradley told the jury straight out the defendant was never going to be a husband of the year
00:32:40
Yazeed Issa regularly, always, maintained numerous sexual relationships with other women.
00:32:50
But they insisted a cheater doesn't necessarily make a murderer. especially a doctor who was planning a bigger family.
00:32:58
Yazid Issa did not commit this crime. He did not intentionally poison the mother of his two young children.
00:33:09
The woman with whom he was actively trying to conceive a third child and add to their family something they both wanted.
00:33:19
If he were the heartless philanderer portrayed by the prosecution, then how come Rosie's family liked him so much?
00:33:26
Did she have a good life? Yes. It appeared that they had a pretty sound marriage.
00:33:33
Yes? Yes. The marriage to their friends and to her family is a loving, good, viable marriage.
00:33:40
By all accounts, they had a great marriage. The prosecution theorized that he killed Rosie to be with his mistress named Michelle.
00:33:47
The defense's response was that Michelle was just another take-a-number girlfriend.
00:33:53
Michelle meant nothing. Add it up, argued the defense, and you had a respected doctor with no money worries,
00:34:00
nice family, and as many girlfriends on the side as he could juggle. Bottom line, he had no reason to kill Rosie.
00:34:07
There was no reason for him to have separated his children from their mother and their father.
00:34:17
To do something as dramatic and extreme as poisoning your wife requires some strong motive, and it wasn't present here.
00:34:27
And then there was the way he behaved early on. Would a guilty man have turned over to the police that bottle of calcium capsules if he knew full well the lab would find cyanide in nine of them?
00:34:38
Maybe the biggest puzzler. Right. If he has contaminated these caplets and he has successfully killed his wife with them,
00:34:45
why in the name of all things we know from television shows would you hold on to this stuff?
00:34:49
Precisely. The defense went after the police for sloppy handling of evidence. The detective who had poured the capsules into his bare hand after collecting them.
00:34:58
Are you telling us that you made a mistake? In hindsight? Yes. Yes. The forensic expert who didn't check for prints.
00:35:06
The pill bottle itself would have been conducive to leaving Ridge Detail, correct?
00:35:12
Yes. To be clear, then, nobody ever made that request? No, sir. There was a catastrophe in terms of forensics here.
00:35:21
And even though the court had learned how easy it was to obtain cyanide, there was no evidence presented that Yaz had actually done that.
00:35:28
Still, the stark fact at the epicenter of the case against Yaz Issa was his decision to flee the country.
00:35:34
How could that be anything other than the action of a guilty man? The defense spun it this way.
00:35:41
Yaz early on had talked to a lawyer who advised him he might be facing the death penalty if charged with a murder.
00:35:47
Yaz was led to believe that he could be charged with capital murder, and he just freaked out.
00:35:54
Then, of course, his lawyers had to defuse those explosive allegations from the Lebanese fixer and his own brother that he'd admitted to poisoning Rosie.
00:36:02
I asked him if he was responsible for her death, and he said yes. Both witnesses had lied on the stand, according to the defense,
00:36:10
because each had cut a deal with the prosecution for leniency on charges they were facing.
00:36:15
It was the proverbial get-out-of-jail card. The brother, for instance, was looking at almost 12 years in prison for helping Yaz on the lam.
00:36:25
He took a deal. He's got five kids, all under the age of 12 years. He employs 100 people.
00:36:34
He's got a lovely wife, a beautiful home, and his world is about to collapse on him.
00:36:40
So is Farah well in terms of his own survival strategy to sing for a supper That what we believe Jamal the Fixer had been a fugitive wanted by the United States Were you indicted in a 29 indictment Just listen to my question
00:36:54
Listen, sir, listen to my question. The more he talked, the better off we felt we were.
00:37:03
Bad guy who's trying to cut a deal. Precisely. So if Yaz Issa didn't do it, who did?
00:37:09
The jury had already met her, argued the defense. It offered up Margarita, the daytime nanny, as the true killer.
00:37:17
She is one of the women that Yazid maintained a long-term, ongoing sexual relationship.
00:37:26
Margarita had a motive for wanting Rosie out of the picture, argued the defense.
00:37:31
She and Yaz had kept their sexual relationship going even after both had married.
00:37:35
And don't believe this portrait of her as a casual, friends-with-benefits lover, claimed the defense.
00:37:41
Margarita very much wanted to marry Yazid. And they claim Margarita was so obsessed with Yaz
00:37:49
that she scheduled her own wedding for the same day as Yaz's marriage to Rosie. Are you telling us that it is an absolute coincidence
00:37:57
that you selected the same wedding date as Yazid? Is that what you're telling us?
00:38:03
Absolutely. Margarita worked for Yaz's brother and had access to Yaz's house. The theory, did she sneak over there once, place the cyanide in the capsules so she'd have Yaz for herself?
00:38:16
The police themselves did very, very little to eliminate her as a suspect. Despite that assertion, the authorities had investigated Margarita and dismissed her as a suspect.
00:38:27
She emphatically denied having anything to do with Rosie's death. But by introducing the girlfriend theory, had the defense raised enough reasonable doubt?
00:38:36
exhibits, the defense would respectfully rest. After a seven-week trial and over 60 witnesses, the case was concluded.
00:38:45
Now it was up to the jurors. They deliberated for three days and announced they had reached a verdict.
00:38:52
I couldn't stop shaking. I got exactly the same way I did the day Rosie died. The lawyers, the families on both sides, were summoned to the courtroom
00:39:05
for the reading of the verdict by Judge Dina Calabrese. We, the jury in this case, being duly impaneled and sworn,
00:39:12
do find the defendant, Yazid Issa, guilty of a evaded murder. In violation of 29-0-3-9-1-8.
00:39:18
Guilty. It was almost over. At sentencing a few days later, Rosie's family confronted the man they'd once loved as a son and brother.
00:39:27
We lost our Rosie for no reason. The only thing I'm hoping that from now on maybe there'll be less nights
00:39:38
that my wife cries herself to sleep and I challenge him to find the courage today
00:39:45
to admit what he did to provide the apology to my mother, my father my sister, my wife
00:39:53
my brother, Rachel, deserve are you man enough? are you? it's your last chance to save your soul
00:40:01
right here, right now Yaz kept his silence I sentence you to life in prison. The judge had sentenced the doctor to the maximum.
00:40:12
All along, the detectives, the prosecutors had wondered about the ifs. If Rosie hadn't called Eva on the way to the movies.
00:40:20
If Rosie had lost control of her SUV on the freeway and not a local street. Had it been a high-speed impact on the highway,
00:40:28
the coroner and the pathologist probably wouldn't have looked any further than for some blunt force trauma from the automobile accident.
00:40:35
In a way, it could have been a perfect crime. But Yaz hadn't plotted the perfect crime as the jury saw.
00:40:42
He killed, he ran, he was caught by tenacious lawmen. Yassid Issa will be eligible for parole after serving 20 years.
00:40:53
That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us. you