Episode 2: The Unraveling of Uncle Paul. Long before the murders that rocked Colts Neck, Keith and Paul Caneiro were inseparable brothers building a wildly successful business together. But over the years, Paul changed and tensions mounted, setting the stage for one devastating night. ------------------- Father Wants Us Dead — called one of the best true crime podcasts of all time (Entertainment Weekly) — is back with a new season about family murders and the secrets behind them. Season 2, ‘Uncle Paul,’ investigates the slayings of the Caneiro family: Keith Caneiro, his wife Jennifer, and their kids, Jesse and Sophia. What first appeared to be a tragic mansion fire in affluent horse country turned into one of New Jersey's most shocking murder investigations. We’ll take you inside a world of brotherly love, betrayal, money and murder as we try to answer the question at the heart of this case: Why?
Content warning: Father Wants Us Dead: Uncle Paul deals with violence. Listener discretion is advised.
You can visit FatherWantsUsDead.com for photos, surveillance and body cam videos and other extras. You can email any questions and comments to [email protected].
Father Wants Us Dead is a production of NJ.com and The Star-Ledger.
The podcast is reported, written, produced and hosted by Rebecca Everett, an investigative crime reporter and podcaster. Our executive producers are Christopher Kelly, Jessica Beym, Jeff Roberts, and Jess Mazzola.
The podcast is recorded and mixed by Alex Graves at Sound on Sound Studios in Montclair, New Jersey. James Shapiro is our associate audio engineer. Music by Jacob Stone. Sound effects by Triple Scoop Music.
Special thanks to all the sources who agreed to speak with us.
Investigative reporting and projects like these require a lot of resources. If you want to support this kind of journalism, please consider subscribing to NJ.com. But you can also help us by following the show on the platforms below and leave us a review:
Please check out our other true crime podcast series:
Someone’s Hunting Us, about a little known serial killer and the girls and women who took him down: www.someoneshuntingus.com
In the Shadow of Princeton, about the cold case murder of the Princeton grande dame, Cissy Stuart: www.theprincetonmurder.com
This podcast contains descriptions of violence to children.
Listener discretion is advised.
Previously on Father Wants Us Dead Season 2, Uncle Paul.
It was almost like everything stopped once they saw us holding
her by the front door.
That was when everything changed.
Why is he walking into his garage at 1.30 in the morning
and shutting down his camera system?
We did everything together
and it wasn't really like an extended family, it was one big family.
On a gorgeous spring day,
I met my co-worker Kevin Shea in Colts Neck.
The corner, just after St. Mary's Church here,
is Springsteen's estate, Bruce Springsteen.
He owns this massive chunk of land,
starting right behind the church there.
I thought it would be more secluded.
I guess you can't see his house from here.
I hadn't been to Colts Neck before the Canero murders.
Members of Bon Jovi, John Stewart, Queen Latifah once lived here.
It's an hour from Manhattan, but a world away.
We saw apple orchards and horse farms,
Trump's golf course, and just absolutely palatial
estates.
There's like, the houses have, I mean, it's beyond having a nice pool.
They have tennis courts.
And for the nouveau riche, the appeal is obvious.
How better to solidify your place among
the elite than buying a home that looks
like the Rockefellers
or some other robber barons built it generations ago?
This was the community Keith and Jennifer Canero were buying into
when they purchased their 10-acre property
on Willowbrook Road. They'd arrived.
Turn right onto Willowbrook Road.
Then your destination will be on the right.
I've been to this spot several times over the years.
But I always just stayed on the side of the road and looked in.
But Kevin goaded me up the driveway that day.
That's all there is now. A driveway.
Surrounded by the overgrown fruit trees Keith planted.
They really took down everything. The foundation and everything.
Today, there's no sign of the footprint,
or the pool where Sophia could catch a ride
on Uncle Paul's shoulders.
Even as an empty lot, it sold for $1.3 million earlier this year.
It really doesn't look that big, man, in here.
I mean, a lot of it's probably overgrown.
It looks so big in the pictures.
Kevin and I knew the images of the house so well.
Keith had taken out a nearly $2 million mortgage to build it.
Faux stucco walls, a curved roof, and windows everywhere.
It feels like the home of a guy who came of age in brash Staten Island.
A home that's meant to be noticed, but also says,
I don't fit in with your country estates.
And yeah, what are you going to do about it?
But now, nothing's left. No one is left.
I'm Rebecca Everett, from NJ.com and the Star Ledger.
And this is Season 2 of Father Wants Us Dead, Uncle Paul.
In this episode, we're going all the way back.
The Canero brothers were always so close.
Their ambitions and triumphs were always intertwined.
But by the end, it all came apart.
The businesses, the relationship, all of it.
Like Cain and Abel,
Paul Canero decided the only solution was to kill his brother,
and then annihilate his family.
But the seeds of this destruction
were actually planted decades earlier.
when they were just two streetwise kids from the outer boroughs,
two young hustlers determined to
make their mark. You're about to meet the guy with all the answers
because he worked for the Caneros
from the beginning.
Now this is a quadruple murder case and he is afraid of having his
identity out publicly so we'll call him Larry
and alter his voice a little bit.
This is a story of luck and ambition and brilliance, Larry says.
How these brothers from the rough streets of 1970s Brooklyn
slingshotted their way into the most exclusive offices on Wall Street.
They were really young go-getters, smart hustlers, street toughs.
You know, they were hustlers, there's no doubt about it.
They didn't take ---- from anybody.
Kind of cursed, too. Is that alright?
So Larry is going to be our colorful guide here.
The story starts in Brooklyn,
long before places like Bed-Stuy became Instagram cool.
The Canero family business, started by their Spanish grandfather,
was a factory making fire doors in a rough part of Carroll Gardens.
Home was a 24-story apartment building a few blocks from Coney Island.
But in 1983, the family moved up and out to Staten Island.
After people in Brooklyn, like, make it, when they made their dough.
They either move out to Long Island
or through Staten Island out to New Jersey.
Keith and Paul were 15 and 16 and already becoming first-gen tech bros.
Now, in the mid-80s, most people hadn't touched a computer,
but Paul and Keith were naturals.
As a teenager, Keith worked at a computer store in the shadow
of Staten Island's infamous Fresh Kills landfill.
But by the time he was 21, he'd started his own consulting company.
Apple computers were his thing.
Back then, they were called Macintosh, or Macs.
No one was doing Mac consulting.
Nobody was doing that.
We became the Mac consultants around New York.
They used to call us the Mac Mafia.
The Mac Mafia made their own rules, and just raked in cash.
I was picturing the Wolf of Wall Street.
The meteoric rise part, not the later drug-fueled insanity.
Actually, can we get that song they used in the movie?
Oh yeah, that's it.
So here we go, these young guys are sprinting all over Manhattan,
installing computers,
talking their way into the right offices,
and they could hardly keep up with demand.
We'd be running around the city all day long.
We all had beepers and they would say go over
to this building on Park Avenue, do this,
and then when you're done go down to 8th Avenue.
Meeting a big shot at Citibank was Keith's first big break
when he was still a teenager.
I can picture Keith, 5'7", with baby fat still in his cheeks,
with his feet up in some exec's office.
He was the Wall Street whisperer.
He'd listen to their needs and make a deal on the spot.
Because he was super smart, well-read, and super, super ambitious.
Soon, they were on the trading floors, installing computers
and hanging out as IT support for the swaggering young brokers.
Oh, and billing $250 an hour.
That's like what a top New York lawyer would have charged back then.
We had knowledge that they didn't have,
and they needed the payers for it.
So the money was just rolling in.
The way Larry tells it,
they were instrumental in bringing the computer of the future,
the Apple brand, into these industries.
Nothing could stop them.
And Keith's motto, through it all,
was borrowed from his idol, Apple founder Steve Jobs.
It's better to be a pirate than join the Navy.
So it's kind of like, we're going to do our own thing.
We're not going to follow norms.
But here's the thing.
Keith wasn't doing it alone.
He needed Paul and his technical expertise.
It was Keith's company.
He owned 90%, but Paul got the other 10% and a fat salary.
Keith actually initially called the company J. Martin,
a mashup of both their middle names.
You know, when Apple started, you had Steve Jobs,
who's the natural salesman, and Steve Wozniak, who's the technical guy.
And they both need each other.
Keith was pretty technical, and he could pick up stuff really fast.
But he needed Paul to kind of do the heavy lifting.
Keith was just CEO material.
He talked the talk, wore the expensive suits, and drove the right car.
Acura NSX, it's like a race car.
Paul was gifted, but Larry said that he
was sometimes scattered, disorganized,
calling you up at midnight to help him finish
a project at the last minute.
At work, he'd joke around, flirt with any girls working at Citibank
with their shoulder pads and pencil skirts.
He drove a yellow Honda Prelude and was much less put together,
and always toting around a shiny metal briefcase and another accessory.
He would always have a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke with him.
Always.
And he would just sit there, swig the thing.
Like a caffeine drip, I guess?
But you can see they had a certain dynamic.
And Larry said Keith didn't let anything slide.
Paul's the older brother, but always,
Keith could put him in his place in front of other people.
He would tell them, he'd say,
Paul, you fucked that up.
You know, you were supposed to do this.
You didn't call this person.
Now I got to deal with you.
Paul would just kind of like shrug it off a little bit.
He'd give it back a little because Paul was a tough guy.
Back then, he was probably, you know, 285 pounds.
He's a big guy.
His hands were like, he's the kind of guy
who would shake your hand and like almost break it.
Keith, four inches shorter,
is getting in his big brother's face in front of people.
But Larry said Keith was hard to please.
Working was his whole life.
They even had to force him to take a vacation,
just go relax on a beach somewhere.
He came home early, he couldn't take it.
Soon they gave their company a new name, Square One,
and moved their headquarters from a dingy office at their dad's factory
to what was basically Corporateville, New Jersey.
But Keith was still a Staten Island guy.
He bought his house there when he was just 21.
We had this beautiful blue leather couch, this Italian leather couch.
The sickest stereo systems you've ever seen.
He just, he was like a Brooklyn kid who came into some money.
He liked flashy.
Like having the company Christmas dinner at Sparks Steakhouse,
the famous spot where the head
of the Gambino crime family was gunned down in the 80s.
But so for someone like Keith, Sparks was like the ultimate.
This is where the mafia goes.
This is the best steakhouse in the city.
But as the 90s wore on, things got leaner at Square One.
There was more competition in the market,
and Larry didn't appreciate being told everyone
had to tighten their belts when Keith's dad,
who knew pretty much nothing about computers,
was on the payroll
and was earning enough to afford that new Corvette parked outside.
So he left.
After I left, I heard they did a bunch of different stuff
and kind of went in different
different directions and, you know, kept the business going.
Larry wasn't surprised.
These guys were hustlers, so they pivoted,
found clients in the non-profit world,
and took on specialty projects,
like creating Ellis Island's Interactive Ancestry Search System,
a profile in the Asbury Park Press
said they were pulling in as much as $4 or $5 million a year.
But one thing did puzzle Larry.
He couldn't entirely understand how these two guys,
whose shouting matches in the office were operatic in their intensity,
Didn't just go their separate ways, but they were family.
And families, and family businesses, can be very complicated.
And by 2000, that family was growing.
Keith married a girl
who grew up around the corner on Staten Island, Jennifer Caritas.
If you want a sign that they were meant to be,
they literally had the same birthday, five years apart.
And now, Keith was no longer the high-strung businessman
who couldn't take a break.
He was working from home, settling down,
taking long trips to Greece, enjoying life and friends,
and of course, being a dad to his two kids,
whose smiles looked so much like his.
He was always chasing success, but the goalposts had shifted.
Now it was about giving his kids a bright future.
He never suspected his own brother, his best man,
his kid's uncle, would be the one to burn
it all to the ground. But one man always had
an inkling something could go very wrong. Wolfing
down a slice of pizza on his lunch break in 2018,
Larry clicked on a shocking headline
about a tech CEO killed by his brother.
You almost knew that this could happen eventually.
You almost could see it coming.
But then when you hear the rest of the story,
you're like, what the actual F?
Why would you do that to those little kids?
Paul Canero hit the gas and pulled out into the intersection.
There was shattering glass, crushing metal, and then silence.
In that moment, Paul Canero's life changed forever.
The fall of 2012, in his brand new Ford Explorer,
broadsided just a few blocks
from the office they'd moved to on the Jersey Shore.
In the hospital, the news was bad.
It was his neck, back, and hip.
He needed surgery.
And so began the next chapter of Paul Canero's life.
The broad-shouldered, nearly six-foot-tall,
230-pound man was now diminished.
Here's Paul's neighbor, Jonathan Harrington,
who we heard from in the last episode.
He had been so severely injured. He walked with a cane.
His disability would be permanent.
When his daughter Katie graduated from Towson University
in 2014, the family posed for a photo with her in black robes.
The camera captured Paul attempting to hide
his brown cane behind his back for the photo.
In other shots, he leans on it heavily.
Still a big man, but looking far older than his 47 years.
And even after the cane was gone, Paul still limped.
I've seen this myself in the courtroom.
Sometimes it's a heavy limp, other times it's more subtle.
He later told a friend the medication he took gave him migraines.
Family and friends said it wasn't unusual for him
to shut himself in the bedroom to sleep for hours.
He always said, you know,
he was in a lot of discomfort taking the pain medication,
and he was doing marijuana cookies.
His personality soured during this time.
That's what Jennifer's sister Bonnie said in court filings.
Her family wondered if an addiction to pain meds was to blame.
Is this when everything unraveled for Paul Canero?
Did the chronic pain change him?
Did medication affect his ability to be a good dad or business partner?
Or maybe he was already headed for destruction,
even violence, driven by a feeling that he deserved more.
And there was another change right around the time of the crash.
His brother Keith went back to school, to Columbia,
to finally get that bachelor's degree and later an MBA.
That meant Keith had less time to be involved
in the running of their two businesses.
Yes, two. By then,
Keith and Paul had taken over a friend's pest control company, EcoStar.
Pest control is quite the departure, but hey, it's business.
This time, they owned it 50-50.
But the tech company, Square One, was more profitable.
It was Keith's company. He ran
it and owned 90%. But Paul had always handled more
of the daily nuts and bolts work.
Like back in the 90s, Paul had been the one flying to Chicago
or wherever else to set up new networks.
And I think that in his mind, despite the fact that he only owned 10%,
he wasn't really getting his due.
That's Chris Decker, the assistant prosecutor.
Paul, probably not completely justifiable,
felt like he did a bulk of the work of the business.
But Keith was dialed in. I mean, Keith, he still maintained control.
The brothers needed each other,
and their lives became even more intertwined after Paul's accident.
Keith still needed Paul to work,
but now Paul could collect disability payments from the state,
plus from two private disability insurance policies.
Eventually, he was collecting more than $230,000
a year just in disability.
But of course, disability is for people who can't work.
Paul did keep working.
They just paid his six-figure salary to his wife, Susan.
He even got a raise.
Yep, this is insurance fraud.
Maybe that surprises you.
But it seems like Keith
and Paul were cool operating a little in the gray areas.
Like they and their families had company
credit cards for use on anything.
Money was flowing around a lot.
They'd borrow from the company if they needed a loan,
but they'd also put their own money in if
there were cash flow problems.
There's this accepted idea so many people had of Keith and Paul.
Wildly successful businessmen, best friends,
standing together no matter what. But when you
dig a little deeper, that image falls apart.
I mean, having to float the company to make
payroll is not a good sign.
Keith talked about them losing clients after Paul's accident.
Eventually, square one was down to just one big contract.
But Paul wasn't cutting back his spending.
Jonathan, across the street, had noticed.
They did all this extravagant work on the house.
You know, everybody likes to have a nice house, but he went overboard.
Paul seemed obsessed with building
this luxury life for himself and his family.
A custom-built Anthony and Sylvan pool,
a gorgeous back deck for entertaining, shiny
new Porsches for his daughters.
Kevin and I were standing in Jonathan's driveway,
looking at what used to be Paul's
home.
A nice colonial, but it's no mansion in Colts Neck.
Ocean Township is upscale, but his street has plenty of ranches.
Kevin wondered aloud,
was Paul throwing around all this money simply out of envy for his
more successful brother in Colts Neck?
He lived here and poured money into,
instead of building a giant, beautiful house,
he bought like a, kind of a good suburban house
and just kind of decked it out.
Any nice touch, he had to have it.
Recessed lighting, heated floors, custom built-ins, even soundproofing.
New kitchen. He built himself a man cave in the basement.
Did he show it to you at some?
I've seen it, yes. We'd be talking and he'd say,
oh, you want to see what I did?
He also showed Jonathan a few antique pieces from his gun collection.
Actually, I don't know if the word collection does it justice.
Carefully arranged in Paul's basement were nine handguns,
15 rifles, including an Uzi
and another with a bayonet, a shotgun,
and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
He also had a bulletproof vest, a silencer,
a laser target shooting system,
and a night vision attachment to detect body heat.
But the cost of all of this was adding up.
By the mid-2010s, he was in trouble.
Bill after bill that Paul didn't have the cash to pay.
Yet he couldn't seem to stop himself.
Paul was paying for his daughters
to go to the colleges of their choice.
He'd taken out a line of credit on top of his mortgage.
He paid $50,000 a year for the family's three Porsches and a Jeep.
He had $200,000 in credit card debt.
He owed roughly $80,000 to the IRS.
And he owed thousands more
to a jewelry company you might have heard of, Tiffany.
Oh yeah, and there was one more big expense.
The other woman in his life.
His mistress, Giselle Restrepo.
Here's me talking with Kevin about it.
And then, like, years after the murders,
it came out in court that Paul had an affair.
And, like, we didn't know anything about this woman.
That was a little bit of a, you know, mini bombshell.
Oh, my gosh, she's going to testify.
I think we always imagine the other woman
is the 20-something yoga instructor or secretary, like in the movies.
But reality is more mundane.
Giselle is 52 now.
When she walked into court,
I saw a Colombian woman with long, dark hair,
a downturned mouth, and an unreadable expression.
She spoke through an interpreter, and her voice faltered at moments.
Here's her answer about where she first met Paul Canero,
when she was in her early 40s.
At a restaurant in Ashbury Park.
She had acknowledged already that they were dating,
but in court she referred to Paul as a best friend.
Paul's own attorney, Monica Mastalone,
said in court that the relationship wasn't a secret.
The fact that Mr. Canero has a paramour has nothing to do with whether
or not he loves his wife and his children who are living in that home.
He was sleeping in a separate bedroom. They were separated at the time.
And it's clear that Susan, the wife, knew what was happening.
His daughter Katie testified it wasn't
the first time her parents had issues.
Two times before, he'd gotten his own apartment,
but he always came home after a few months.
But at some point, Giselle told police he wanted
to get an apartment with her, but she wasn't ready
for that. And of course, we know he couldn't afford it.
The prosecutors said he was already
paying rent for her, though she denies that.
And here's Kevin listing the other gifts he gave her.
Yeah, so Paul leased an Audi Q5 for her, cost him about $10,000 a year.
He paid for her daughter to apply to college, and he took her on trips.
They went to Colombia twice, they went to North Carolina, Las Vegas.
Here she is in court, listing each trip in Spanish.
Fuimos a Colombia, Carolina del Norte, Las Vegas, Boston.
It's baffling, him paying for that kind of travel.
Maybe he was just in denial about his financial problems,
sleeping in exile in the spare bedroom night after night.
Hiding from the truth.
He had major problems.
His marriage was a wreck.
He was in pain, struggling with medications and side effects.
And now he was getting cancellation notices and overdrawing accounts.
Maybe he thought Keith would bail him out from the company accounts.
Maybe he thought that's what he deserved after all
his years working for Keith's company.
Either way, Paul Canero was not a man who liked to feel slighted.
Here's his old colleague Larry remembering some
of the strangest days in the office,
and how Paul would make odd comments
that in the moment felt like jokes,
and so often seemed to find a way to talk about
that expansive collection of guns.
He would say stuff like, oh, you know,
I've got a few methods that I could use that I
know all about that would make sure that no one would ever find you.
And yeah, not those exact words,
but he would say stuff like that as a goofy way to just
kind of like mess with you, where you're like,
I actually believe that this guy could do
this kind of stuff.
On a May day in 2014, Keith Canero strode across
a stage at Columbia University, wearing
baby blue robes, a mortarboard, and a toothy smile.
He collected his diploma. It was a milestone.
He'd started his Mac Mafia with no degree,
and built a career. Jennifer watched proudly from the crowd.
As the ceremony went long,
she headed to a nearby Starbucks to grab a coffee.
But when she swiped her credit card, it didn't work.
She handed the barista another card,
then another. None of them worked.
She walked out of the cafe empty-handed and humiliated.
Unable to buy a cup of coffee on the day
her husband received an Ivy League degree.
We don't know what the problem was exactly,
but Keith figured it out like he always did.
Still, it bothered him for years, and he felt like Paul was to blame.
Keith is just trying to chart a path to calmer waters,
to a happy and productive life with
his family, but his entanglement with his brother is holding him back.
Complicating everything.
Here's Chris Decker.
Keith had some frustration with his brother,
and it revolved around just kind of being sick
of being in business with his brother,
and just kind of, I think in his mind,
carrying the family to a certain extent.
When they'd started Square One,
it felt like the Canaro brothers against the world.
But that was over.
Keith couldn't rely on Paul anymore.
He'd repeatedly request a one-sheet about some financial issue,
and Paul would never do it.
The office staff messed something up,
and Paul hadn't caught the mistake before it cost Keith thousands.
But of course, when a cancellation notice came,
Paul would want the company to pay it.
Like it was his due.
That last year of his life, Keith turned 50.
He was looking for a new challenge after getting his MBA from Columbia.
And he was really focused on his family.
Chris said he was thinking about the future,
saving and preparing for his kids to go to college.
And because of all this, he was thinking about a big change.
A career change.
Just getting a job in tech,
maybe a chief technical officer gig somewhere,
to free himself from the soul-sucking partnership with Paul,
so they could go back to being just brothers.
You know, he wanted to just go work for someone like
I know my paycheck's going to clear every day,
and it may not be the size of what they're making,
but I don't have to pay family members and other people.
I just want my check to clear.
And that year, both their companies were suddenly at a crossroads.
The computer company had only one major client, the Doris Duke Trust,
which paid them $1.4 million a year, but the contract was expiring.
Keith, the master dealmaker, was trying to get them to re-up.
Still, Chris wondered if it would have
been kind of a relief if it fell through.
Because it would have meant the end of Square One.
The thing that had yoked these brothers together for so long.
There was a chance they were going to lose Duke as a client.
And I think Keith was realistic about that.
And that's why he was looking for jobs.
And like a gift from the universe,
they got an offer to buy their pest control business.
Terminex was looking for smaller companies like theirs to buy up,
but when Paul saw that offer, $850,000,
he did not have the same reaction as Keith.
In their text conversations back and forth about this,
you can see Paul resist.
Here are two actors reading some of those texts, starting with Keith.
Make the deal.
No, we can wait a quarter and see how much more we can get.
I'm not interested in waiting. Let's walk on this.
Take the money, pay down your situation,
and get back to normal baseline.
I don't understand. Paul's resistance probably
seemed like he's just worried he'll never get another job
because he's on disability
and can't legally work. But actually, it was much more than that.
Paul had been stealing,
not just skimming from the companies for years.
He had taken thousands from his brother.
Here's the other assistant prosecutor, Nicole Wallace.
He was just living way beyond his means, way beyond his means.
And he was supplementing his income
by taking money from the trust fund.
The trust fund.
Keith had set it up even before his kids were born.
It held a $3 million life insurance policy.
So Jen, Jesse, and Sophia would
be taken care of in the event of a tragedy.
And of course, who would Keith trust to be the trustee?
Paul.
It was Paul's job to pay the insurance premiums,
from an account funded automatically from Keith's paycheck.
But Keith had no idea that starting in 2017,
Paul had stopped paying the premiums.
He was funneling the money to pay his own bills.
Then in early April of 2018, eight months before the murders,
Keith got a letter in the mail from that life insurance company.
Here's his insurance broker, Ron Artigas, describing it in court.
Keith had contacted me. He had a statement.
He was trying to figure out why there was a loan against his policy.
The policy was now worth $25,000 less than before.
The amount Paul had taken instead of making the payments.
So I said, perhaps there was a problem with the premium payments
and they took a loan out of the policy.
Keith flipped out.
He was furious at Paul.
Pretty soon, Ron found himself on an email thread with Keith,
Paul, and their accountant.
Paul was offering an explanation about where the money had gone.
Here's an actor reading excerpts.
I figured out why there are payments missing.
I selected the wrong payee from my list.
He said that for months, he'd accidentally been sending
the funds to one of his kids' student loans.
Now, I don't know if Keith really believed this.
He'd already been talking
with his estate attorney about removing Paul from the trust.
Here's another email from Paul.
I didn't sleep most of the night trying to sort this out.
I know you were stressed, and I'm sorry.
I'm stressed out more than I've ever been.
I understand your decision, and I'm not upset.
I know I failed you on this, and I'm sorry and embarrassed about this.
I've had my head up my ass, and now things are clear.
Paul paid the money back, but things just kept getting worse.
Paul was resisting selling the pest control company,
risking the whole deal.
Here's a text Keith sent to a friend that summer about his brother.
I would rather take the cash now than deal with him going forward.
He's a bit ******* nuts.
And as Keith was working to get another million dollar contract
with Square One's only big client,
Paul was not responding to questions, not getting things done.
As he grew more desperate, Keith visited a friend who worked at Amazon
and applied for a bunch of jobs with the company.
He even applied for a job in Abu Dhabi.
And in September, Keith finally really lost his temper at his brother.
Paul, again, had asked to put $5,000
in car insurance on the company card.
But he was also actively dodging giving Keith a straight answer
about staffing for that big client, Doris Duke.
Here are Keith's texts to Paul.
What the **** are you doing?
This is total bullshit.
You have time to email me when you need money for your insurance,
but you don't have time to follow up with me?
I'm ******* dealing with an issue that affects our only large client.
Don't put your insurance on my ******* card.
When Paul tried to make
a distinction between Keith's money and the company's,
his brother became enraged.
I am the company.
After all Keith had done for Paul,
all the times he had bailed out
the company after someone else's mistake.
When I was at graduation in 2014, you know what I remember?
My wife not being able to buy a ******* coffee at Starbucks.
I have my credit destroyed, tax liens debt,
and not even the ability to get a coffee.
He fired off text after text and told Paul,
You can kiss your salary goodbye.
Paul, we are done.
I'm not paying you moving forward.
You have to find a way on your own.
I said okay.
I didn't complain and I'm not starting now.
I'm putting away money for retirement.
I don't have insurance policies to pay me if I don't work.
You have that.
Figure out a way.
I'm sorry you had an accident
and I supported you, but I can't do it anymore.
We have to move forward.
I get it.
Paul is trying to de-escalate things.
But behind those calming words, he must have been frantic,
knowing he was going to be left broke and alone.
Plus, he needed to prevent anyone realizing how much he'd stolen.
Here's Chris Decker, again, in court.
He doesn't want Keith digging, okay?
He doesn't want him digging because when Keith digs,
bad things happen for Bolsonaro.
Time was running out.
It was about greed and desperation.
His whole world was about to come crashing down.
It was time for Uncle Paul to do something drastic.
That's next time on Uncle Paul.
Paul, just give me the login so I can see where the money went.
The chaos and confusion of having been awoken from sleep,
and the shock and terror of having their home invaded,
and in the dark, the defendant hunting them down.
He went from a gun to a knife because maybe the gun jammed.
Maybe he was trying to reload, drop some bullets here and there.
Father Wants Us Dead is a production of NJ.com.
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This series is reported and written by me, Rebecca Everett,
with additional reporting by Kevin Shea.
Our executive producers are Chris Kelly,
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The podcast is recorded and mixed by Alex Graves
at Sound on Sound Studios in Montclair, New Jersey.
James Shapiro is our associate audio engineer.
Music is by Jacob Stone,
with the exception of that song from The Wolf of Wall Street.
The song Meth Lab Zozo Sticker is performed by Seven Horse
and written by Joey Calio and Phil Leavitt.
Mastered by Seven Horse Music Limited,
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Published by Third Side Music, Inc. on behalf of Candy Seat Songs,
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Used with permission.
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Our voice actors in this episode are Bart Flynn
and Matthew P. Lindquist.
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