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Tonight on Dateline. This is something that you watch Dateline for. About somebody else.
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Not about your friend. Not about someone you love. She was completely defenseless.
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She reached out her arms and simply said, help me. My heart dropped. I want to know why.
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Why? It's a baffling case of murder, millions, and a mystifying piece of tape. At the center, husband and wife, self-made millionaires.
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He was very caring and loving. She had a personality that just sucked you in. Together, they made a killing in the gold business.
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Then, someone else made a killing too. The only purpose of the crime was to make sure she was dead.
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His wife, ambushed by a shadowy man in black, was someone after their fortune. I called her to warn her.
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Was the answer on this tape. His wife was being killed at that exact moment. A crime of greed and gold.
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Would detectives hunting for a killer strike gold too? He wasn't someone that I would ever think could be involved in on something like this.
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I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Josh Mankiewicz with The Goldfinger Mystery.
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Take a look at this security video and tell me what you see. A woman walks alone to her car in a parking garage in Century City, California.
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Is she in danger? Same building complex, different angle. A man focuses on his cell phone, oblivious to those around him.
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Who's he calling? You are in fact watching scenes from a marriage. The final scenes, as it turns out.
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The woman is Pamela Fayyad, and the man is her husband Jim. At the time this video was
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recorded, one of them had just minutes to live. Rewind the video to just a few minutes earlier.
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The Fayeds have just had a meeting with their lawyers. They're in the midst of a bitter divorce.
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It's 6.30 p.m. The meeting is over. Pamela hurries to catch the elevator and gets off at the third floor.
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She walks to her car and reaches for the keys inside her purse. That's when she was attacked.
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Los Angeles prosecutor Alan Jackson would spend many hours scrutinizing that video.
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Tell me about the attack. Brutal. Vicious. Heart-stopping. Pamela was completely defenseless.
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She was attacked, I believe, from behind first with a knife. Somebody much larger than her, somebody much stronger than her,
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who had an absolute mission, and that was to cut her throat, to kill her. On the video, you can see people in the complex starting to walk toward the sound of Pam Fayyed screaming.
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One man ran to the scene and saw a tall man in a black hooded sweatshirt jump into the backseat of a red SUV that was parked behind Pam's car and be driven away.
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That witness then tried to help Pam Fayyed. And then as he walked around to where the attack took place, that's when he first saw Pamela.
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He said that when she looked at him, he went into a little shock, because the only thing that was not covered in blood was the whites of her eyes.
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She stood, and she walked toward him, even after having suffered these horrible mortal wounds, and she reached out her arms and simply said, help me.
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It was too late for anyone to help Pam. Paramedics pronounced her dead at the scene.
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Century City is only 176 acres. It's gleaming office towers and high-dollar townhomes
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lying entirely within the city of Los Angeles. And what makes this place run is money,
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because Century City is home to agents, film producers, and attorneys. Usually around here, when someone talks about bloody murder,
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they're talking about a deal that went south. But this time, it was the real thing.
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The lead detective for the LAPD investigating Pam Fayyad's murder was Salam Abdul-Rahman.
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Mrs. Fayyad wasn't robbed. No, she wasn't. Mrs. Fayyad wasn't sexually assaulted.
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No, she was not. So the purpose of that crime was to kill her. It was to kill her.
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That was the only purpose of the crime, was to get rid of her and to make sure she was dead.
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Abdul-Rahman says the murder was carefully planned. Mrs. Fayette comes out. It's about 6.30 at night.
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That's correct. And she's walking to her car, what, alone? By herself. And at some point, what, the killer comes up behind her?
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Well, the killer pulled up in the burgundy SUV behind Mrs. Fayette's vehicle. So blocking her.
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Blocking her so she can't move her car from the parking spot. The killer gets out of the back passenger seat and approaches Mrs. Fayette from behind.
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How long did the attack take, start to finish? From start to finish, I would say anywhere from one to three minutes.
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Police found no eyewitnesses to the actual stabbing, but there were people close by.
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There was an individual that was in a building across the street from where Mrs. Fayette was killed.
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That individual observed her grabbed the railing and then observed an arm come around Mrs Fayette and bring her back into the parking structure And at that time he didn see Mrs Fayette any longer That was the
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killer. That was the killer. Police combed the crime scene looking for answers. And they also
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started looking at the victim, Pam Fayette, and her husband, Jim. The couple had been married nine
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years. Together, they ran a gold trading business called Goldfinger. And together, it had made them
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rich. But what had been a good marriage had deteriorated even as the money came in. Now,
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it was no secret that Pam Fayyad and her husband were involved in a nasty, high-stakes divorce.
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It was also no secret that Jim Fayyad could not have committed the murder. When Mrs. Fayyad was killed, it was impossible that he was holding a knife
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because he was with his attorneys at that moment. In the same building? In the same building. He
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couldn't have gotten away from them long enough to get down to the parking garage and kill his wife?
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No. And also, after Mrs. Fayette was murdered, there was video footage that put Mr. Fayette in the courtyard, so it was impossible for him to be at two places at one time.
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That security video shows Jim Fayette trying to make a cell phone call at exactly the moment you see people reacting to Pam's screams.
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Not only that, but a tall man wearing a black hooded sweatshirt clearly was not a description of Jim Fayette.
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A woman murdered, a bitter divorce, but certainly the husband wasn't the killer.
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So who was? A very rich mystery was underway. Coming up, the hunt is on for a motive and a suspect.
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Did the secret to this killing lay hidden in the rush for gold? She wanted to make sure her friends were happy and taken care of, no matter what it took.
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Pam Fayyad was dead, stabbed to death in a Century City parking garage. LAPD detective Salam Abdul-Rahman has seen enough cases to know that in his line of work,
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murder and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. ongoing Fayed divorce therefore got his attention. Acrimonious, nasty, bitter. Mr. Fayed was really
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upset with his wife, Mrs. Fayed. And so that marriage would bear much more scrutiny. Investigators
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set about talking to friends and family to solve the mystery of Pam's death. They needed to start
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with the story of her life. Pamela had a spirit that was infectious. Carol Neve was Pam's best
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friend. She was always happy. She had a personality that just sucked you in and kept you there.
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Carol met Pam decades ago. We were neighbors and we did become best friends to the tune of every
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day we talked, every single day. That was long before Jim came into the picture, of course.
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Pam was a single mom. She and Carol babysat for each other's kids, walked their babies together, went shopping,
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shared recipes, and hung out during the holidays. Pamela was very much family to me.
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Pam was the most caring, loving, giving person you would ever meet. Life was about other people.
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Tina Holland is another friend. She and Pam met when their youngest children started attending the same school.
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They planned family vacations together and trips to Disneyland. One year Pamela bought her daughter Jeanette and Tina's sons costumes just for the sake
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of creating happy memories. Her daughter was a princess, Tina's sons a pirate and Peter Pan.
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She wanted to make sure her friends were happy and taken care of, no matter what it took.
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And I realized that when I first met her, that she was one of the people that I was
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going to have as a lifetime friend. Pam made and sold jewelry, and she worked hard at it.
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But she wanted more than that. She wanted happiness and not to be alone. Her dreams were to have a family life and find a mate to share her life with who would
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love her children. Which is why it seemed so perfect when in 1989 an electrician named Jim Fayad came into
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her life. He was single, no children. They seemed to get along very well. Pammy always smiled when she'd look at him.
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They sat close and snuggled and after dinner sat on the couch next to each other and it
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seemed to be a very good fit. But more important to Pam was that Jim treated Pam's young daughter Desiree as if she were
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his own. He came into our lives when I was about six years old. They started dating and slowly,
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you know, she started introducing this man to me and I actually, I grew attached to him. I looked
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at him as that father figure that I needed in my life. I kind of get the feeling that he sort of
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seemed to step up to the job of stepfather, which a lot of guys don't do. He did. He actually did
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want to take on that responsibility and I think he was proud to do it. We actually got really close
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to each other. He was very caring and loving towards me. What did you like most about him?
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It was funny. I just liked being around him. Funny but not nearly as social and outgoing as Pam.
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Jim was a gentle soul very quiet kind of soul very private back then She saw Jim as someone who would provide for the family Had a good honest job doing electrical work
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When they learned Pam was pregnant, they decided to make it official. Jim and Pam were married in Vegas in 1999.
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Now they were the parents of two girls, young Desiree and even younger, Jeanette.
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With more mouths to feed, the couple began to experience some rough patches financially.
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Jim often worked as an electrical contractor for the government, a job that would take him on the road for weeks at a time.
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Then there were times when the work would run out, and he would have to scramble to find more.
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It was a struggle, they argued. Pam felt abandoned a lot. At one point, Pam went on public assistance.
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It was something she'd promised herself would never happen. But now Pam had to go down that path.
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It's possible she blamed Jim for that reversal of fortune. It was a point where they would argue, and she wasn't sure she wanted to still be there.
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She would call me and ask me for help and ask me to send money. I sent her money twice or three times to start divorce proceedings.
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And then they would always make back up and move on. And that was fine. I just wanted my friend to be happy.
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Racking her brain, trying to think of ways to provide for her husband and daughters,
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Pam came up with the idea of mixing her love of working with precious metals with Jim's interest in coin collecting.
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Together, the couple started buying and selling gold and silver coins. Soon, that grew into an Internet-based company they could manage from their home,
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and it started bringing in money. They called their business Goldfinger Coin & Bullion.
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The year was 2001, and there was a new gold rush in America. The Fayeds had found their way to an online Sutter's Creek, a get-rich-quick scheme that worked.
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But as investigators would discover, what tripped them up were many of the same human frailties
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that so bedeviled those 49ers who panned for gold instead of clicking on it. lawlessness, pride, and simple greed.
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And so here's another question. If money is the root of all evil, then what is gold?
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Coming up, someone else had a close eye on this lucrative business, and the color of money was about to turn very dark indeed.
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I called her to warn her. When Dateline continues. Jim and Pam Fayette had staked their claim in the online gold trading business.
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They began by buying old gold coins and selling them at a profit. Then they expanded, setting up what was essentially a small bank,
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storing gold for customers and allowing them to borrow against it. The market grew, and so did the bottom line.
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Pam's best friend, Carol Neve. They went to gold shows, trade shows in Las Vegas, San Diego, L.A., do all the meet and greet kind of thing.
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Pam was very good at that. She was very charming. Jim was more the laid back, just stay away, sit in the booth.
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The timing was good. In 2001, gold was hovering around $250 an ounce. Then it started to take off like a rocket.
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By 2008, gold was listed at $800 an ounce. Soon, the Fyeds were getting rich just off the fees they charged for selling the gold online.
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It doesn't take much to be able to turn a profit. Every transaction, whether it's $100 or $2,000 or $100,000,
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if you're making anywhere from 3% to 5% per transaction, you've got money coming in.
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Very quickly, the Fyeds started making a lot of money. They moved their home business into this building in Camarillo outside L.A. and hired employees to staff it.
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They bought a 2,800 square foot home, a 200 plus acre second home in nearby Moorpark, which they called Happy Camp Ranch, complete with horses for Pam and Jeanette.
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They were nouveau riche, perhaps, but they were determined not to flaunt it too much.
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Even their oldest daughter, Desiree, who started working for the company as a teenager,
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did not realize how much her parents were raking in. So when you hear figures of tens of millions of dollars coming in, that's news to you?
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It is. Yeah. Did they live that way? We had an average house, a two-story home. We weren't living in a mansion.
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We had extra money to do things we wanted, but it wasn't enough to show that they were millionaires, to be honest.
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You never felt like you were rich or living lavishly. I knew that we were well off, but not to the millionaire status.
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One thing the FIED's income did mean was that Pam could be a full-time mom, something she'd always dreamed of.
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She wanted to be able to stay home and raise her kids, work if she wanted to, when she wanted to,
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which is part of owning your own company. And Jim liked it that way, too. He may have liked that a little too much.
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Though Pam was the vice president of Goldfinger Coin & Bullion, Jim Fayyad was the president.
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He seemed to like the sound of that, and he apparently loved controlling just about every aspect of the business.
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He originally was a really humble guy, and I feel like as the business grew so did his ego and basically changed the person he was into thinking almost as if he was someone who was invincible And then one day Jim discovered that he wasn
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His health started to slip. He developed rheumatoid arthritis and started taking a lot of pills to dull the pain from that.
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And perhaps a different side of Jim Fayad began to emerge. There became a point where Jim was addicted to pain medications.
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and it wasn't the same Jim that Pam knew. By this point, Jim wanted total control of her and the company
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and her job was to stay home and be a wife. As controlling as Jim was, he couldn't control the arthritis in his joints.
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It forced him to give up going to the office. Was he in the hospital or bedridden?
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He was bedridden, yes. For how long? For a couple years. Really? So he barely got out of bed for a couple years?
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Yes. I felt that as he became bedridden, he wasn't as social with us anymore. He kind of stayed in his bedroom.
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Basically, I feel like he kind of left us as a family. We didn't really see much of him at that point.
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It kind of angered me seeing the kind of person he was turning into. The year was 2006.
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Desiree says that as Jim became harder to get along with, It served to push away Pam's attempts to be more involved with the company while her
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husband was ill. I could hear him bickering about the business on a daily basis.
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Specifically? Nothing in specific, but just little things here and there that needed to be changed.
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Their disagreements grew daily and festered to the point where the couple separated.
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Jim started spending more and more time at the ranch home in Moorpark. And while the Fayette marriage was crumbling, federal prosecutors were taking a look at
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the booming online gold trading business. They were looking for evidence of fraud, of tax evasion, and of the transferring of money
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without the proper government license. Pam's friend Carol did not want to see Pam caught in a federal net.
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I called her to warn her. I told her she needed to get the money transmitter of licenses.
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you have to start that process. Once you start that process, the feds can't touch you.
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Carol says Pam agreed. All she ever wanted was for a legitimate company. That's all, you know, she just wanted to be on the up and up. And she was going to tell Jim,
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even though they were separated. Pam urged Jim to apply for the licenses. He appears to have been
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adamantly opposed to a move that would have essentially opened Goldfinger's books to scrutiny
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by the federal government. Pam decided she was not going to allow Jim to roll the dice on their
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business, the business that had let Pam live the life she'd always wanted. Pamela was a Girl Scout.
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She wanted to do it right. Pamela knew that they were making plenty of money. They as a family,
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the Fayyad family, were flush. They didn't need to worry about nickels and dimes here and there.
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And she was also aware, I believe, that at some point the federal government was going to start looking very closely at them.
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They couldn't continue building this business on this international scale without someone taking a look.
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And so Pamela's idea was, let's do it right. Let's cross our T's, let's dot our I's, let's get the money licensing.
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Her husband said absolutely not. He said absolutely not. But Pam moved forward anyway and withdrew a large sum of cash to apply for the licenses.
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And for Jim Fayette, that may have been the last straw. He called her names that I cannot and will not repeat on your camera.
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Horrible, horrible accusations about Pamela Fayette, the mother of his own child.
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And he was doing this in order to set the stage for what I believe was his ultimate goal,
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was to take all the money and to crush her during the divorce proceeding. In California, it's pretty hard to crush somebody and take all the money in a divorce proceeding.
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I would say so. She helped build the company. She was an officer in the company.
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She held half of the company's proceeds. I mean, she was half owner. It's as simple as that.
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And soon there would be another problem. What Pam Fayyad had worried about would come true.
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Federal investigators would come after Goldfinger, indicting both Jim and Pam Fayyad,
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because their company didn't have those money transmitter licenses. When the indictment came down, Pamela Fayyad was in contact with her lawyer very quickly.
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She immediately indicated that she wanted to cooperate with the authorities. That was the position that she was taking.
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I want to cooperate. I want to do whatever I can to help out the investigation. I didn't do anything wrong, according to Pam.
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What can I do to help? Did James Fayyad know that his wife was going to cooperate?
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That's the $64,000 question. Coming up, a suspect in the case, and soon an arrest.
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He wasn't someone that I would ever think could be involved in on something like this.
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But police had only just begun to solve the puzzle when the Goldfinger mystery continues.
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LAPD Detective Salam Abdulrahman was investigating the murder of a woman in a parking garage.
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Then he learned that not only was Pam Fayyad locked in a bitter divorce with her husband Jim,
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but that the gold trading company that had generated all the money they were fighting over
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was now under federal investigation and that Pam was going to turn on her husband
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and cooperate with prosecutors. She was probably gonna be a witness against him.
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He was pretty pissed off What potentially were the penalties for Mr. and Mrs. Fayette in that federal case?
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Well, potentially they could have had their assets seized, and that was huge. If they had their assets seized, Mr. Fayette wouldn't have been able to conduct business.
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After a long investigation, federal agents took Jim into custody just days after Pam was killed.
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He was charged with operating a money transfer business without a license, and he pleaded not guilty.
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At the same time, Detective Abdul Rahman continued his investigation into Pam's murder,
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starting not just with the videotape of Jim Fayette at the time of the murder, but also with some security video of the parking garage exit.
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What we did was that we narrowed it down to the time around when Mrs. Fayette was killed
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and the vehicles that were leaving the parking structure. In the minutes after the attack, this red Suzuki pulls up to the garage exit, the wrong exit.
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A man holding what seems to be a black hooded sweatshirt gets out of the back seat to check the exit gate before jumping back in.
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We ran the vehicle license check and we found that one of the vehicles that were leaving the garage was associated with Mr. Fayette and Goldfinger.
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Mr. Fayette's business? Yes. Detectives traced that red Suzuki SUV to an Avis rental car center in Camarillo.
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The car was leased by Goldfinger, Jim Fayad's company. One of Jim's nephews had recently relocated to California
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and had driven the car for about a month until just a few days before the murder.
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After that, the car was in the care of the Fayad's ranch hand, a man named Jose Moya.
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Investigators say it was Moya who was behind the wheel. But on the tape, there seemed to be three people in the vehicle.
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Who were they? A month later, Jose Moya was arrested and charged with Pam's murder.
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He pleaded not guilty. It turns out Jose Moya knew Pam. Not only did he work on their ranch, he even had his own living quarters on the property.
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Moya knew about the Fayyad's gold. He knew where they stored it. He was trusted to transport the gold back and forth from the business to the home in Moorpark.
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How well did you know Jose Moya? I knew him pretty well. He was actually, he was a really nice guy to me.
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He was a character. Every time he'd come into the office, we'd always joke around with each other.
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He was, he wasn't someone that I would ever think could be involved in on something like this.
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You liked him. I did. Your mom liked him. She was very fond of Joey. Had Moya charmed his way into the Fayyad's life as a way to gain their trust?
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Was this all part of a bigger plot to kill each of the owners and steal their gold?
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Pam's best friend Carol recalls how Pam talked during the divorce. I was on the phone with Pamela and she was really upset.
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She felt like someone was following her in a truck she did not recognize. I said, are you sure?
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She says, it's been following me for quite some time. I said, who is it? She goes, I don't know.
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It's a guy. She kept looking and watching, and they turned off into a parking lot.
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At that point, she could see that it was Jose. And she says, why is Jose following me?
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And I said, I don't know, Pam. What the hell is going on? You need to call the cops and tell the cops.
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Tina Holland's last visit with Pam was a week and a half before she was killed. and I just walked in and she was out in the backyard and she was smoking like a train
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and she honestly looked like she had lost 15 pounds since two weeks prior she was in her
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pajamas it was three or four in the afternoon her hair was all crumpled up she looked horrible
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and she said Tina Jim is gonna do it and I said what are you talking about Pam and she said Jim
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is going to have me murdered. Coming up, could her suspicions be true? Detectives take one more look at the tape,
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the exact moment of the murder. Is the answer right in front of them? When Dateline continues continues
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Jim Fayyad was in a federal lockup facing white-collar charges, operating an internet gold business without a money transmitter license.
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But LAPD Detective Salam Abdul-Rahman was investigating whether Jim had killed his wife
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to keep her from cooperating in that federal case. The detective focused on that security video
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and realized that those grainy pictures were so telling, not because of what Jim Fayette is doing,
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but because of what Jim isn't doing. It's the moment of Pam's murder in the parking garage next door,
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and everyone in the frame starts to react, to move toward the sound of Pam Fayette's screams.
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everyone that is except jim fayette he doesn't seem interested is it your belief that at the time
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surveillance cameras capture mr fayette sort of walking around the courtyard area
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that he knew that his wife was being killed at that exact moment yes the reason i base my belief
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on that is because mr fayette when he walks out of the building everyone's interested in what's
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going on in the parking structure except Mr. Fayette because he knows what had just transpired.
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But that apparent disinterest in Pam's screams wasn't enough to charge Jim with murder. In fact,
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there was little evidence he had anything to do with it. Then Detective Abdul Rahman's phone rang.
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The assistant U.S. attorney tells us that Mr. Fayette's cellmate wants to talk to whoever is
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handling the investigation of Mrs. Fayette's death. And what does the cellmate tell you?
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Well, the cellmate tells us that Mr. Fayette had confessed to him that he had hired someone to kill his wife.
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Detectives believe that someone was Jose Moya, the ranch hand. The cellmate also had other information that had not been reported in the news.
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Mr. Fayette's cellmate had told us that Mr. Fayette had tried to set his wife up to be killed four different times.
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And what was interesting about that was that on one of these occasions, he said that Mr. Fayette had set up a time when she was at a party in Malibu on the 4th of July.
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Was Pamela Fayette at a party in Malibu on July 4th? Yes, she was. And that led to his credibility.
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So at that time, we decided to try to get this conversation on tape. So they wired the cellmate for sound, and they heard Jim Fayyad talking about how he had tried to kill his wife, but how it just hadn't worked out that time.
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Prosecutor Alan Jackson. James Fayyad describes in detail how he told the killers about a party that Pamela was going to be attending in Malibu.
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According to him, they were simply supposed to carjack her and kill her. And everybody would think that it was just a random act of violence.
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Nobody would know anything the better. Now, with a confession on tape, both Jim Fayad and Jose Moya were charged with Pam's murder.
00:31:37
But there was more work to be done in order to track down the others involved. It seems like you pretty quickly fixed on Mr. Fayad as the only suspect here.
00:31:47
and the only question was since it wasn't his hand on the knife whose hand was it and how do you
00:31:53
connect that person to him correct and the first thing that we noticed was that there was three
00:31:57
individuals in the vehicle that was registered to Mr. Fayette's company so we knew we had three
00:32:01
additional suspects besides Mr. Fayette now the only question was how do we tie those three
00:32:07
to Mr. Fayette and that was done through cell phone searches and also cell site coordination
00:32:13
It would take more than a year to gather enough evidence to identify and charge two more suspects with murder.
00:32:21
In June 2010, Stephen Simmons and Gabriel Marquez were arrested. Prosecutors say Jim didn't know then that Moya hired them.
00:32:32
Investigators say Stephen was the alleged stabber and Gabriel was the lookout. Both pleaded not guilty.
00:32:39
But amazingly Jim Fayyad wasn done with the idea of murder He apparently believed his cellmate had connections and he wanted to hire a new hitman from jail
00:32:51
He wants the ranch hands taken care of. He actually drew out a map that was never found
00:32:57
depicting where he can find the ranch hand to actually carry out this murder. And what he wanted to do was have the ranch hand tortured
00:33:04
so he can actually tell his cellmate, or tell the hitman, where the other two individuals were.
00:33:11
Prosecutors say the price tag for Pam Fayed's killing was $25,000. He was bankrolling it.
00:33:21
No question. He commissioned this crime. And that's where the investigation began to lead us.
00:33:28
That's where the evidence began to lead us. We knew clearly that he had an alibi for the actual stabbing.
00:33:32
He's not the stabber. He's not the actual killer. You also knew that he had probably a bigger motive than anybody else.
00:33:38
There were always, in my mind, dual motives for James Fayyad to contract the murder of his wife.
00:33:45
One was the divorce, but one was to silence who he thought was going to be a witness against him, Pamela Fayyad.
00:33:52
Did he just give this hitman that he hired the money and say, go kill my wife? James Fayyad is a control freak.
00:33:58
If he's anything, he wants to be in control at all times, which is why he didn't want his wife, Pamela, doing anything having to do with transfer licenses.
00:34:07
The same M.O. is what drove this contract killing. And investigators believe that Jim Fayette exhibited that need for control as he planned his wife's murder.
00:34:22
He focused, they believe, on a particular fear of Pam's. It was discovered that she had a phobia about knives.
00:34:31
And she had believed that if she was killed, that she was going to be killed by someone with a knife.
00:34:37
Who expresses a belief that if they're killed, they're going to be killed with a knife?
00:34:41
I mean, that sounds like somebody who almost is foretelling their own death. It is, and it's also my belief that Mr. Fayyad knew of his wife's phobia with knives,
00:34:51
and that was one of the reasons that a knife was used. You think it's no accident that Pamela Fayyad was killed with a knife?
00:34:56
You think that her husband deliberately not just had her killed, but had her killed in the way that she was most frightened of?
00:35:02
Yes, my belief. Jim Fayyad was to go on trial for murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
00:35:09
If convicted, he was facing the death penalty. The jury would learn about all the evidence investigators collected.
00:35:16
They would hear from witnesses. And of course, from Jim Fayyad himself, in his own words.
00:35:23
In what his attorney would claim was simply a performance for an audience of one.
00:35:29
And now, you're about to hear the tapes too. She ran her mouth, she went out of control.
00:35:38
She just started running her mouth. She kept her mouth shut, yeah. Coming up, true confession or terrific con job?
00:35:48
He was conned into playing along with this cellmate in order to survive. What would a jury think about the tale of the tape?
00:36:03
On May 4, 2011, Jim Fayyad found himself in a Los Angeles courtroom, accused of being
00:36:16
the mastermind behind the plot to kill his wife. His federal charges involving financial crimes were dropped when the state of California decided
00:36:26
to try him for capital murder. Prosecutors Alan Jackson and Eric Harmon laid out their case.
00:36:33
It's not your typical love story where a boy needs girl, but instead it's a love story where a boy needs gold.
00:36:41
It's that breed, that love of gold, that caused this man, James Michael Fayette, to have his wife murdered for financial gain.
00:36:51
Prosecutors offered this snapshot of the Fayette's riches during the short time they ran their business.
00:36:56
So Mr. Fay had found a niche, which is transferring money for only a 2% fee, which was highly, highly competitive
00:37:04
and lucrative So those of you who are good at math you know that that approximately million in fees that went to Goldfinger between 2001 and 2008 making a lot of money
00:37:15
But the good times didn't last. The company was under indictment. Pam was cooperating with federal investigators.
00:37:23
And the couple were getting divorced. They were going to be divorced. So the marriage was over, no matter what.
00:37:29
And the relationship was over. Jim Fayyad's attorney, Mark Worksman, says that none of that was a motive for murder.
00:37:37
But they did have a business that was a viable, lucrative business, and it was worth maintaining.
00:37:43
And if she hadn't been murdered, presumably they would have come to some settlement over the assets
00:37:50
and some division of the property involved in the business. Jim Fayyad did not testify, and he didn't make Worksman's defense any easier.
00:37:59
The prosecution's smoking gun was that tape, made by police and a cooperative cellmate.
00:38:05
I told you she knew her boundaries. She ran her mouth, she went out of control. She just started running her mouth.
00:38:15
She got her mouth shut, yeah. On the tape, Jim describes how he hired someone to kill Pam and set up several scenarios to make that happen.
00:38:24
but he says it was one missed opportunity after another. All I had to do was sit there.
00:38:56
I was ready to get in the car. And jacket. And everybody had to party. So, yeah, she went out.
00:39:05
Jim's attorney says that conversation is all just play acting. Jim would contend that he was conned into playing along with this cellmate
00:39:16
in order to avoid appearing weak or vulnerable, and that he was simply trying to make a favorable impression
00:39:23
on this tough guy in this tough environment where he had to appear tough in order to survive.
00:39:29
But on the tape, Jim told his cellmate how he wished he could have done the deed himself.
00:39:34
Way to do it, way to do it, way to do it. I wanted to, I just wanted to do it myself.
00:39:41
I knew I'd never f***ed ever killed him. Never. You know what I mean? And prosecutors played the tape of what they said
00:39:49
was Jim trying to hire that second hit man to murder the first one. and anyone else that might have been in on the plot for what would have been, they said, another $25,000.
00:40:00
It took the jury less than three days to find Jim Fayyad guilty. He also received the death penalty.
00:40:30
Left behind are two daughters, essentially orphaned by the greed of a man they once loved
00:40:38
and trusted. I almost feel as if he doesn't feel bad or maybe he's embarrassed. I'm not sure.
00:40:47
I can't say that. I honestly feel like he lost himself as a human being. He's a shell.
00:40:54
He has no moral compass. He's completely off. He's not a person anymore. He's not a human being.
00:40:59
Anything you want to say to him if he's watching this? I just want to ask why. Why? What was he thinking?
00:41:06
Did he not think this would affect me and Jeanette? I mean, I want to know why he thought it was okay for him to do this.
00:41:14
I feel like money and power is what got to him. And he cared more about money and power than he did about...
00:41:20
His own family. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us. you