0:02 [SPEAKER_01]: Longly fine country covers the western edge of Louisiana, up along the Texas line, in the first week of April, it is as pretty as any place in the south. 0:12 [SPEAKER_01]: The white stays late in turns gold in the pine tops. 0:15 [SPEAKER_01]: The Worcestaria hangs purple in the fence lines. 0:18 [SPEAKER_01]: And, off towards the gulf, the evening thunderhead stand up whiteish church quotes. 0:23 [SPEAKER_01]: The ditch is singing with frogs. 0:25 [SPEAKER_01]: The winner, the seat of Beauregard Parrish, is a sawmill town. 0:30 [SPEAKER_01]: The sawmill's mostly finished with long ago. 0:33 [SPEAKER_01]: Roughly one in five of its people live below the poverty line, close to double the national raid. 0:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Louisiana itself hosts the worst poverty numbers in the country year after year. 0:45 [SPEAKER_01]: The ground under the town has its own inheritance. 0:48 [SPEAKER_01]: This corner of the state was no man's land once. 0:52 [SPEAKER_01]: The neutral strip, an ungoverned seam between two empires. 0:57 [SPEAKER_01]: It was left for years to people who were into the war with distance, the sawmill boom that built the winner also staged the grab-out gunfight of 1912, a labor war that put four men in the ground, a few miles from town, and in the modern numbers. 1:13 [SPEAKER_01]: Louisiana has led the nation in murder for more than three decades straight. 1:17 [SPEAKER_01]: Inside those numbers runs a quieter count, listener. 1:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Most murdered women in America die at the hands of the men they know. 1:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Inside their own homes, the most dangerous stretch of a failing relationship is at the end of it. 1:32 [SPEAKER_01]: The season when a man understands he is losing her. 1:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Louisiana stands near the top of the states, where women are killed by men. 1:40 [SPEAKER_01]: The advice the culture gives such women runs towards long. 1:44 [SPEAKER_01]: Just leave. 1:45 [SPEAKER_01]: There's another side of that advice. 1:47 [SPEAKER_01]: In the spring of 2022, that side lived in a house on North Ritz Drive. 2:04 [UNKNOWN]: Thank you. 2:41 [UNKNOWN]: You 2:45 [SPEAKER_01]: Ashley Fish was 28 years old and de-ritter was her ground, a town built along southern lines, where churches outnumber the red lights. 2:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody's mother knows everybody's business, and Friday night belongs to the high school. 2:59 [SPEAKER_01]: She was raised in all of it. 3:01 [SPEAKER_01]: She married Josh Fish in 2012, still a teenager. 3:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Over the following decade, the two of them built a life that fills a minivan. 3:09 [SPEAKER_01]: Four daughters came, one after another, a house of girls. 3:14 [SPEAKER_01]: The family moved to West Texas when Josh took a job there. 3:18 [SPEAKER_01]: One of those relocations, oil and industry imposed on golf-coast families. 3:23 [SPEAKER_01]: For a while, the marriage traveled with them. 3:25 [SPEAKER_01]: She was a young mother of four, and a flat new country far from the pines. 3:30 [SPEAKER_01]: In January of 2021, Josh Fish learned his wife had met a man through an online application. 3:37 [SPEAKER_01]: The marriage tried to survive in. 3:39 [SPEAKER_01]: There was marriage counseling, and there was effort, and a couple of months later, there was an end, actually moved back to deriter with the girls. 3:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Back to the long-leaf country, were spring arrives in March, and the yards filled with resilience, back to the town she knew. 3:55 [SPEAKER_01]: She filed for separation on the road to divorce. 3:58 [SPEAKER_01]: Joss security transferred a Beaumont, Texas, and now we're going to have down the road, 4:05 [SPEAKER_01]: The two of them did a thing that broken couples are always urged to do, and rarely manage. 4:11 [SPEAKER_01]: They co-parented, and they were good at it. 4:14 [SPEAKER_01]: The girls went between them. 4:16 [SPEAKER_01]: The workings of a divided family. 4:18 [SPEAKER_01]: The calls and the schedules and the hand-offs. 4:21 [SPEAKER_01]: They all ran without violence, without drama. 4:24 [SPEAKER_01]: The divorce paperwork carried a condition that matters to everything that follows. 4:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Under the custody arrangement, Ashley was not permitted to have an overnight guest. 4:34 [SPEAKER_01]: It is a standard of calls and a thousand family core files meant to study the ground under the children while the adults rebuild. 4:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Break it. 4:42 [SPEAKER_01]: and a parent can be fined, break it badly enough, and time with the children can be taken away. 4:48 [SPEAKER_01]: There was also the gun. 4:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Years earlier, in 2016, back when the marriage was whole, Ashley and Josh had bought a pistol together, a Smith and Wes in semi-automatic, in the south, a nightstand pistol can be furniture, back gun lived in her drawer, in her bedroom, for six years, just another fixture of her life. 5:09 [SPEAKER_01]: The man from the online dating website was named Tyler and Neil Dirtchowski, and he had come a long way to be in her life. 5:16 [SPEAKER_01]: He was from Oregon, he'd been adopted at about four by Zigbin and Theresa Dirtchowski, along with his twin brother and twin half brothers, four boys from the same biological mother. 5:28 [SPEAKER_01]: His parents described him in the fondest terms. 5:31 [SPEAKER_01]: He told on himself when he got in trouble. 5:33 [SPEAKER_01]: He turned his grades around in high school, and went in a ward for it. 5:37 [SPEAKER_01]: His mother called him funny, articulate, kind and gentle. 5:41 [SPEAKER_01]: A son who carried spiders outside, rather than killing them. 5:45 [SPEAKER_01]: He went to college and dropped out in a second year to join the Navy. 5:49 [SPEAKER_01]: We picked up medical training. 5:51 [SPEAKER_01]: The Navy endured Chelsea parted ways after about 10 months, honorably discharged. 5:56 [SPEAKER_01]: He worked afterward as an emergency room technician. 5:59 [SPEAKER_01]: He married in 2016. 6:01 [SPEAKER_01]: The marriage came apart in 2021, and significant part because of a woman in Louisiana. 6:07 [SPEAKER_01]: He had met through an app, and that August, he was divorced. 6:11 [SPEAKER_01]: By then, he had already followed the new relationships south. 6:15 [SPEAKER_01]: In 2021, he moved from Oregon to Derriter to live with Ashley into the house with the four girls. 6:21 [SPEAKER_01]: He landed in the deep south. 6:23 [SPEAKER_01]: He was six feet two and two hundred and thirty pounds, Ashley stood five three and weighed 130. 6:30 [SPEAKER_01]: He would be in her life for two years. 6:32 [SPEAKER_01]: The relationship curdled the second year. 6:35 [SPEAKER_01]: They fought in the fighting god wars. 6:37 [SPEAKER_01]: By the spring of 2022, Dirtowski was talking about going home, home, and that meant the x, y, if you've left for Ashley. 6:47 [SPEAKER_01]: He 6:47 [SPEAKER_01]: He meant to try again with her. 6:49 [SPEAKER_01]: He packed the truck and left his sitting in the drive. 6:51 [SPEAKER_01]: That pack truck was meant as a promise. 6:54 [SPEAKER_01]: It says that leaving had already been decided that the goodbyes are done or nearly done. 6:59 [SPEAKER_01]: That all that remains is a key in the ignition in a road north. 7:03 [SPEAKER_01]: It had been promising for days. 7:05 [SPEAKER_01]: And the woman in the house wanted that promise cap. 7:08 [SPEAKER_01]: He was also every nighty state, a violation of her custody paperwork. 7:14 [SPEAKER_01]: And he knew it. 7:15 [SPEAKER_01]: She knew it. 7:16 [SPEAKER_01]: The thing Tyler Durrachowski reached for when the relationship failed was her children. 7:21 [SPEAKER_01]: He said it often. 7:22 [SPEAKER_01]: In the days before April 7, he would call Josh Fish and tell him the truth that he had been staying overnight to Ashley's house all along. 7:31 [SPEAKER_01]: In his own words later to police, he was going to mess her life up. 7:35 [SPEAKER_01]: The one thing Ashley Fish had rebuilt her whole world around was the one thing he knew how to reach. 7:41 [SPEAKER_01]: According to him, she reacted to the first threat two days earlier by taking the pistol from her nightstand, waving it, racking the slide, and telling him that was not going to happen. 7:52 [SPEAKER_01]: No one else saw it. 7:54 [SPEAKER_01]: April 7th was a Thursday, and by late afternoon the heat was leaning in. 7:59 [SPEAKER_01]: The mocking birds running through their stolen songs, the shadows stretching out across the yards. 8:08 [SPEAKER_01]: Ashley texted Josh at the same moment and asked him not to answer Josh wanting no part of it texted her back that he was not trying to get into her drama. 8:17 [SPEAKER_01]: She replied, he won't leave. 8:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Josh let the cargo to voicemail into her trail skiing left the message she had been promising threat executed. 8:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Whatever damage the truth could do to her custody arrangement was in motion, there was nothing left for him to extort with, and he still did not get in that truck. 8:35 [SPEAKER_01]: At 550 actually sent Joshua's text, she would have the girls call him soon, she wrote, she was trying to cook dinner, he should call when he was ready, and then a final line, patient and wary and contain, she was still working on the situation here, her situation, 8:52 [SPEAKER_01]: Only one witness to what happened next is alive, and his version collapsed under the physical evidence. 8:58 [SPEAKER_01]: Sometime around six in the evening, the argument moved from the bedroom into the master bedroom. 9:04 [SPEAKER_01]: The pistol from the nightstand was out, and in that small-tailed room, with four children elsewhere in the house, Ashley Fish was shot in the head behind the right ear. 9:14 [SPEAKER_01]: At contact range, the muzzle pressed against her skin. 9:18 [SPEAKER_01]: She went down onto her left side on the bathroom floor and did not get up. 9:23 [SPEAKER_01]: In her right hand, her dominant hand. 9:25 [SPEAKER_01]: She was gripping her cell phone, Dirtyowski did not call for an ambulance. 9:30 [SPEAKER_01]: The Navy had trained him in medicine, and an emergency room had employed him in and he rendered no aid. 9:36 [SPEAKER_01]: What he did instead was procedural. 9:39 [SPEAKER_01]: He unloaded the pistol, racking out the rounds, and set the gun at its magazine. 9:44 [SPEAKER_01]: on the bathroom vanity, he closed and locked the door with Ashley behind it. 9:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Then he walked out through the house where her daughters were. 9:52 [SPEAKER_01]: Gone to the pack truck and drove, a neighbors camera recorded the truck leaving at 618 in the wall in the amber white of Louisiana April, with daylight still in the sky. 10:04 [SPEAKER_01]: He did not drive door again. 10:05 [SPEAKER_01]: He drove to the parking lot of a 10:12 [SPEAKER_01]: He told her he was sorry for everything that had been a fight in an accident. 10:16 [SPEAKER_01]: He would later repeat that to detectives. 10:18 [SPEAKER_01]: He tried his father next and got no answer. 10:21 [SPEAKER_01]: Then he called the director police. 10:23 [SPEAKER_01]: The dispatcher, Officer Gladys Santiago, walked a jury through the column two years later. 10:28 [SPEAKER_07]: Hi, I, uh, I need to turn myself into the police. 10:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Okay. 10:32 [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how to do this. 10:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Are you wanted to see if an act of war? 10:35 [SPEAKER_07]: No, I just committed a crime. 10:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, what crime could you commit? 10:39 [SPEAKER_07]: I shot somebody. 10:39 [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, where are you located? 10:41 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm at Bert's outlet in Derritter. 10:44 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm in the parking lot, and I just am going away here to get picked up. 10:49 [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, who did you shoot? 10:51 [SPEAKER_07]: a woman. 10:52 [SPEAKER_00]: OK, what is her name? 10:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Ashley Fish. 10:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Corporal Josh Sandford was dispatched to Northridge Drive. 10:58 [SPEAKER_01]: The person who opened the door to him was Ashley's oldest daughter. 11:02 [SPEAKER_01]: She was nine years old. 11:04 [SPEAKER_08]: You all right, babe? 11:06 [SPEAKER_08]: You all right, you all right, you all right. 11:09 [SPEAKER_08]: OK, can you sit right here for me? 11:10 [SPEAKER_08]: Yes. 11:11 [SPEAKER_08]: Is anybody in there? 11:11 [SPEAKER_08]: No. 11:12 [SPEAKER_02]: My sisters are in the library. 11:16 [SPEAKER_08]: Yes. 11:16 [SPEAKER_08]: OK. 11:19 [SPEAKER_02]: She's in there. 11:23 [SPEAKER_08]: Hey y'all come in here. 11:24 [SPEAKER_08]: Come in. 11:24 [SPEAKER_08]: Come in. 11:26 [SPEAKER_08]: Come here. 11:26 [SPEAKER_08]: Say it here. 11:28 [SPEAKER_01]: The corporal went through the master bedroom. 11:30 [SPEAKER_01]: Has to gun holster on the bed. 11:32 [SPEAKER_01]: And into the bathroom. 11:33 [SPEAKER_01]: He got the four girls to a neighbor's house before he went back inside. 11:37 [SPEAKER_01]: Too far for city. 11:46 [SPEAKER_08]: Come help me come help me come help me. 11:50 [SPEAKER_08]: Do you know these children? 11:52 [SPEAKER_02]: Yes. 11:53 [SPEAKER_08]: Do you know any of us? 11:54 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay. 11:55 [SPEAKER_02]: Yes. 11:56 [SPEAKER_02]: Nice and Matthew. 11:58 [SPEAKER_08]: Do you got parents here? 11:59 [SPEAKER_08]: Yes. 11:59 [SPEAKER_08]: What's going on? 12:01 [SPEAKER_08]: Did you take them to a secure place for me? 12:04 [SPEAKER_08]: Was there anybody else here by? 12:05 [SPEAKER_08]: I don't think so. 12:06 [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know. 12:09 [SPEAKER_08]: Is there one victim or two? 12:11 [SPEAKER_08]: I am at the wrong man or three. 12:13 [SPEAKER_08]: Say you do, I have only victim or six. 12:16 [SPEAKER_08]: So when you can clear the rest of the house, I'm under the impression that there was a mail here, but there's a lot of this stuff. 12:21 [SPEAKER_08]: There's a lot of this stuff. 12:23 [SPEAKER_08]: There's a lot of this stuff. 12:24 [SPEAKER_08]: There's a lot of stuff. 12:26 [UNKNOWN]: City Police! 12:28 [SPEAKER_08]: Police! 12:28 [SPEAKER_08]: Police! 12:29 [SPEAKER_08]: Police! 12:33 [SPEAKER_08]: see when they class was on the phone with a mouse, something in question there was a male subject I've got an abacky order What's that a male? 12:44 [SPEAKER_07]: Like a barn on the cuckoo, okay? 12:48 [SPEAKER_08]: Oh, here we go. 12:50 [SPEAKER_08]: Everything is clear. 12:51 [SPEAKER_08]: Everything else is clear. 12:53 [SPEAKER_08]: Let me hear. 12:54 [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, you were in terms of, yes. 12:57 [SPEAKER_08]: Actually fish. 13:01 [SPEAKER_08]: They're across the street. 13:03 [SPEAKER_08]: They actually fish. 13:05 [SPEAKER_08]: I'm home soon and young. 13:07 [SPEAKER_08]: They fell for what I'm saying here. 13:10 [SPEAKER_08]: All right. 13:11 [SPEAKER_08]: Did you? 13:12 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. 13:13 [SPEAKER_08]: So she's coming for her. 13:15 [SPEAKER_08]: Yeah. 13:16 [SPEAKER_08]: And those two legs. 13:18 [SPEAKER_08]: She became the Josh Fish. 13:20 [SPEAKER_08]: I don't know what I'm thinking about, she's your Azoor. 13:23 [SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, I'm proud of graduating together, so we're about to start learning to kind of solve some stuff, just a little bit. 13:29 [SPEAKER_08]: Not much, but she's seeing something happen next to her. 13:35 [SPEAKER_08]: Well, I was just not a lion, I saw her home. 13:39 [SPEAKER_08]: Like, the car of the, every leaf. 13:43 [SPEAKER_08]: What's that? 13:44 [SPEAKER_05]: The girls out of my house, he tells us to go out. 13:47 [SPEAKER_08]: It's not good. 13:48 [SPEAKER_08]: Is she alive? 13:50 [SPEAKER_08]: No, she's not. 13:51 [SPEAKER_08]: Um, she's not. 13:53 [SPEAKER_05]: Yes, she was. 13:55 [SPEAKER_05]: She was out. 13:55 [SPEAKER_05]: I don't hear earlier when about five o'clock or so. 13:58 [SPEAKER_05]: I saw her out here. 13:59 [SPEAKER_05]: Everything seemed fine. 14:00 [SPEAKER_05]: There was a truck. 14:01 [SPEAKER_05]: She had a significant other. 14:04 [SPEAKER_05]: She was going through a divorce. 14:05 [SPEAKER_05]: And they're legally separated. 14:08 [SPEAKER_05]: But he was here. 14:09 [SPEAKER_05]: The truck of a truck was here. 14:11 [SPEAKER_08]: Yes, ma'am. 14:11 [SPEAKER_05]: Do you think he shot? 14:13 [SPEAKER_08]: I can't tell you a whole lot, so as long as the children are safe with you for now, we'll take care of it. 14:20 [SPEAKER_05]: I don't know her, I'm just assuming that it was a tight, tight, tight person out. 14:25 [SPEAKER_05]: I don't know if that was just pretty much usually drives the back turn, and then her husband is in his jaw on this. 14:33 [SPEAKER_01]: A week later, on the 14th of April, her funeral filled Shady Grove Pentecostal Church on Highway 26, two reverends officiated in the visitation the evening before ran for hours. 14:46 [SPEAKER_08]: Oh, if you're still comfortable, go back to me. 14:48 [SPEAKER_08]: You come a little bit though. 14:49 [SPEAKER_07]: What happened? 14:49 [SPEAKER_07]: Women in my garden multiplication last night is things were kind of falling out between the two of us. 14:53 [SPEAKER_07]: Just relationally, and I was getting rid of them back to Oregon, so she pulled out. 14:57 [SPEAKER_07]: She had a gun in her drawer. 14:59 [SPEAKER_07]: She loaded it. 14:59 [SPEAKER_07]: And then was pointing it at me and started fighting. 15:03 [SPEAKER_07]: And went off. 15:05 [SPEAKER_07]: He gave herself a little bit of a feeling of problems. 15:07 [SPEAKER_07]: He told me all that he would do. 15:09 [SPEAKER_08]: Yeah. 15:11 [SPEAKER_08]: I see the hair in his face. 15:13 [SPEAKER_08]: I've called it in the serial number. 15:15 [SPEAKER_08]: Can be a smith in the west of the world. 15:17 [SPEAKER_08]: She's been here for a minute. 15:18 [SPEAKER_07]: But yes, I mean, she's still having some coming out of the way. 15:23 [SPEAKER_07]: She's just very warm and bad. 15:25 [SPEAKER_07]: But if it's going to be 50 minutes in an hour and 20 minutes. 15:29 [SPEAKER_08]: Oh, a little bit. 15:30 [SPEAKER_08]: That's it. 15:31 [SPEAKER_08]: Yes. 15:32 [SPEAKER_08]: So once they run the trip, we'll back out. 15:34 [SPEAKER_08]: We'll get a circle of five and five. 15:36 [SPEAKER_08]: Where are we going? 15:37 [SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, I know. 15:38 [SPEAKER_08]: We're going. 15:38 [SPEAKER_08]: I got it. 15:40 [SPEAKER_05]: Ready? 15:42 [SPEAKER_05]: Ooh. 15:43 [SPEAKER_05]: And strawberry. 15:48 [SPEAKER_07]: The one you want to talk to, she supposedly told my wife that she saw something, and she didn't want to talk about it. 15:57 [SPEAKER_04]: He's there and he comes down. 15:59 [SPEAKER_04]: I think you should run ahead and I'm like, and hey, brother, let's meet you. 16:04 [SPEAKER_04]: He's got straight in the door, and he's got Ashley's guitar. 16:08 [SPEAKER_04]: I got some boxes later. 16:09 [SPEAKER_04]: All the damn trampolines are floating at the moon and playing guitar and I'm like, Ashley, what does he do when? 16:15 [SPEAKER_04]: Can we just go inside? 16:16 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know where he has prepared to play here. 16:18 [SPEAKER_04]: So I'm gonna need to write something. 16:20 [SPEAKER_04]: And he come over there to pull us apart and I was worried about him pushing this out of his head and I had told her he needs to go, you know, you need to get the stomach get it done, get him on the road, you know, last summer when she told me she had my ears. 16:41 [SPEAKER_08]: So we got a man, and I told him, we're more afraid of this, but I don't understand why somebody that supposedly has got their living already said, you know, they didn't got one problem to start seeing somebody that has four kids, they have no kids, I said, the only thing I can think of is maybe the damage that sounds suspicious to me, you know? 17:01 [SPEAKER_06]: There's a record. 17:03 [SPEAKER_06]: Tell me, keep everything in track, so my biggest thing is, I want to know who you are, because that's very important. 17:11 [SPEAKER_06]: Um, when you know who actually is, that's very important. 17:14 [SPEAKER_06]: It's not just the, you know, so what happens tonight. 17:18 [SPEAKER_06]: It's the, it's the whole totality of the history with you guys. 17:21 [SPEAKER_06]: Um, because that's going to help besties flying everything that led up to where we're at. 17:26 [SPEAKER_06]: I'm going to, I'm going to tell you, you know what I'm saying? 17:31 [SPEAKER_06]: The truth will set you free in here. 17:34 [SPEAKER_06]: I said to you, I can't make you. 17:36 [SPEAKER_06]: I would love to know we would all love to know just for the sake of you. 17:41 [SPEAKER_06]: And for the sake actually, obviously. 17:43 [SPEAKER_07]: I feel like giving a statement just because I'm here. 17:46 [SPEAKER_07]: I don't know how long to wait for a lawyer to get here or whatever. 17:49 [SPEAKER_07]: But I just wanted to talk about what happens. 17:51 [SPEAKER_07]: You know tonight's, I don't know if that's, you know. 17:53 [SPEAKER_06]: I think it's important because right now we've got, obviously, in the hands. 17:57 [SPEAKER_07]: I think I need to tell what happens. 17:59 [SPEAKER_07]: 13. 18:00 [SPEAKER_07]: Hello. 18:00 [SPEAKER_07]: Hello. 18:01 [SPEAKER_07]: Hello. 18:01 [SPEAKER_07]: Hello. 18:02 [SPEAKER_07]: Hello. 18:02 [SPEAKER_07]: Hello. 18:12 [SPEAKER_07]: and a woman, the woman and I had an altercation with a woman weapon, and she had a bullet. 18:19 [SPEAKER_07]: And every niche she did, like violent contact on her, like that. 18:22 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm not the woman that full of guns, so I'm don't have to gun. 18:25 [SPEAKER_07]: I don't want to gun. 18:27 [SPEAKER_07]: I don't want to then just use the gun. 18:29 [SPEAKER_06]: No, I'll take turn to shoot after. 18:30 [SPEAKER_06]: No, I'll never have. 18:32 [SPEAKER_07]: I don't want to take on my way from a 4K, it's like that's not my thing. 18:36 [SPEAKER_01]: Nearly everything Tyler Derichowski did instead in the police custody that night was recorded. 18:42 [SPEAKER_01]: The body camera from the evening is out there, and so are two and a half hours of interview. 18:47 [SPEAKER_01]: The body camera begins in the Berks' outlet parking lot, where Officer Cameron Smith collected him. 18:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Smith read him as rights in the patrol car, enter a trousky, freshly told he could remain silent, talk the whole ride. 19:00 [SPEAKER_01]: He laid out both altercations the night before, in that evening, he explained the custody paperwork and that he had been staying overnight in violation of it, that he had threatened to tell Rex husband the truth. 19:11 [SPEAKER_01]: He said she had pulled her gun the night before, and again that evening, that they were in the bathroom, that they started fighting, and that he went off, 19:23 [SPEAKER_07]: I was a door. 19:24 [SPEAKER_07]: I blocked the bedroom door to the bedroom. 19:27 [SPEAKER_07]: The kids don't go in there. 19:29 [SPEAKER_07]: I had emptied out the gun. 19:30 [SPEAKER_07]: He was empty and I left it there and I went out. 19:33 [SPEAKER_07]: I didn't know what the fuck to do. 19:34 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm sorry. 19:35 [SPEAKER_07]: I wasn't perfect. 19:36 [SPEAKER_07]: The kids were there. 19:37 [SPEAKER_07]: There was a nine-year-old there that was most thoughtful. 19:40 [SPEAKER_07]: I was watching the kids. 19:41 [SPEAKER_07]: The neighbors were outside of the hospital. 19:43 [SPEAKER_07]: I had seen neighbors outside of the whole front of the hospital. 19:45 [SPEAKER_07]: I felt like... 19:46 [SPEAKER_07]: I just need to go and be like this, just, yeah, but I drove to parking a lot down the street and just called that one. 19:54 [SPEAKER_06]: And she's got how many kids were they all announced tonight? 19:57 [SPEAKER_06]: Yes, okay. 19:58 [SPEAKER_07]: I was wondering, here's a nice fellow like a man of honor, and I had a ring on it. 20:01 [SPEAKER_07]: I was proud of it. 20:02 [SPEAKER_07]: It was proud of you, Mary. 20:03 [SPEAKER_07]: It was proud of you. 20:03 [SPEAKER_07]: It was been nice, Ellen, to this weird relationship. 20:07 [SPEAKER_07]: I never wanted to be in. 20:09 [SPEAKER_07]: I never wanted to be a part of it. 20:10 [SPEAKER_07]: And I just put it down this road that I just kind of thought I could never escape from like drowning in it, you know? 20:17 [SPEAKER_07]: like I was able to divorce, you know, we're getting, you know, they went through and just like a couple months and it was finalized and I was done. 20:23 [SPEAKER_07]: Part of thing is done a year, right? 20:25 [SPEAKER_07]: It takes a year for them to like do the separation process and everything. 20:29 [SPEAKER_07]: So we've just been kind of in the whirlwind back and forth with everything stuff and I just thought about leaving multiple times. 20:36 [SPEAKER_07]: I've wanted to leave multiple times just because it's kind of too much to just cave me and like am I taking this one away from my taking this man away from four kids like his four kids. 20:46 [SPEAKER_07]: Well, there I just had fun a lot of stuff that I love. 20:48 [SPEAKER_07]: And my life in this relationship. 20:50 [SPEAKER_06]: I haven't become physical. 20:51 [SPEAKER_06]: She ever hit you, struck you, hit you, slapped you. 20:55 [SPEAKER_06]: Blast. 20:56 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm just on five of the things shoes or something like that. 20:59 [SPEAKER_07]: She's hitting those like shoes and stuff I hear frustration. 21:03 [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, he is your heart 21:10 [SPEAKER_07]: We'll tear like floaters and we're talking about it. 21:13 [SPEAKER_07]: It's kind of like the crossover when you might have something you have there. 21:15 [SPEAKER_06]: So, you know, for the way I picture it's like, if my wife agitated with me or agitated with me, she passed me with stuff. 21:22 [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. 21:23 [SPEAKER_06]: We sang something like that. 21:24 [SPEAKER_06]: Are we saying to you aggressively? 21:26 [SPEAKER_06]: No, like do you know? 21:27 [SPEAKER_07]: Pocked you with something. 21:29 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm saying that all ground. 21:31 [SPEAKER_07]: Oh, that just kind of like paste about something, but just that's how she's reacting to it. 21:36 [SPEAKER_07]: but she wasn't like it openly like I've never seen a little aggression to me. 21:40 [SPEAKER_07]: So, well, what the god, I don't know where there came from. 21:43 [SPEAKER_07]: I didn't know. 21:44 [SPEAKER_07]: I never seen her do anything. 21:45 [SPEAKER_07]: I didn't even know she cut it. 21:48 [SPEAKER_07]: So our relationship was really falling out here. 21:51 [SPEAKER_07]: And I threatened to tell him the truth when I was getting ready to leave. 21:56 [SPEAKER_07]: I was going to call her. 21:57 [SPEAKER_07]: I was going to be like five at the same time. 21:59 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm here. 21:59 [SPEAKER_07]: I don't know when we were on vacation. 22:01 [SPEAKER_07]: So now for you guys and your life and your... 22:04 [SPEAKER_07]: I've been in the position of the youth, this relationship has hurt me a lot of boys that have sacrificed all of the things. 22:10 [SPEAKER_07]: And for me to go and have a close right thing, to like I'm just gonna let John know the whole truth that he deserves and know that she was, I'm sorry, it's kind of ugly ending for both of us. 22:17 [SPEAKER_07]: This one of the night, she has a load of guns. 22:19 [SPEAKER_07]: Her share of the gun, he entered the garage for war next to the bed, and I was the individual talking with her, and she loaded her gun and cocked it back, and basically told me that she wasn't gonna let them 22:34 [SPEAKER_07]: And so this just went to like a thousand like zero to a thousand in like one blink of an eye She'll like again the better talking with her even in on the conversation She's a loading up done in front of my face and she has a pistol like literally Packing some stuff put us in stuff in the drawer. 22:48 [SPEAKER_07]: I wasn't doing shit I didn't hear her. 22:50 [SPEAKER_07]: I wasn't like fighting her anything. 22:52 [SPEAKER_07]: I was just talking She's like a motivator done and was pointing at me. 22:55 [SPEAKER_07]: I just know that like that's what I started from 22:57 [SPEAKER_07]: And I'm not saying that to like, dude, like, do some, dig myself in a great, like, oh, the past. 23:03 [SPEAKER_07]: He never saw how it happened, and now she did it. 23:04 [SPEAKER_07]: That's something like bullshit. 23:05 [SPEAKER_07]: No, she did it, though. 23:07 [SPEAKER_07]: Oh, man, I'm a lot stronger than her. 23:09 [SPEAKER_07]: It was aggressive, but it was like, she's not, she's not that good, I'm be fortunate with the fuck she's doing. 23:14 [SPEAKER_07]: I don't shoot guns. 23:15 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm like, very, like, shot a gun in my life. 23:17 [SPEAKER_07]: And so the whole way it happened. 23:19 [SPEAKER_07]: I feel like for me, I didn't mean to. 23:23 [SPEAKER_07]: To anything I didn't need for her to do anything it was like basically felt like it was like just fighting for my life And I feel like it was like This is how it ended The story he built was a fight for his life. 23:34 [SPEAKER_01]: He and Ashley had struggled over the gun He said moving it around to had each other and the fight went to the ground He described his position behind her attempting what he himself called a choke-one against this story stood a small-tiled room Detective Cooley walked that room 23:51 [SPEAKER_01]: On the vanity set of hair dryer, a hair brush in a toothbrush, undisturbed, towels hung from their rack, a jewelry stand hung on the wall, a shampoo caddy and laundry basket stood up right, in the toiletries sat where they had been set down. 24:06 [SPEAKER_01]: There was no broken glass, no damage to the walls, no blood anywhere, except beneath her head. 24:13 [SPEAKER_01]: and no mark of any kind on the body of the man who claimed a fight for survival and happened there. 24:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Nothing in the room hinted at a struggle. 24:21 [SPEAKER_06]: Okay, how long from the time she came to the bathroom to where escalators of the point she had shot? 24:28 [SPEAKER_06]: talking about seconds or minutes. 24:29 [SPEAKER_06]: Two minutes probably. 24:31 [SPEAKER_07]: Talking about seconds or minutes. 24:32 [SPEAKER_06]: There's two minutes. 24:33 [SPEAKER_06]: Okay. 24:33 [SPEAKER_07]: Fighting and trying it. 24:34 [SPEAKER_07]: It's a combination of talking, moving the gun around each other. 24:37 [SPEAKER_07]: It's like, Tom, trying to grab her. 24:38 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm trying to hold onto her. 24:39 [SPEAKER_07]: It's just like it was just felt like it was like a fight for survival. 24:43 [SPEAKER_07]: I don't know what's going on. 24:44 [SPEAKER_07]: Five shoes going to tell me. 24:45 [SPEAKER_06]: So at no point, you should be done from her. 24:49 [SPEAKER_06]: And have a gun in your hands. 24:50 [SPEAKER_06]: Totally. 24:51 [SPEAKER_07]: Not until it was over. 24:52 [SPEAKER_07]: Not until. 24:55 [SPEAKER_07]: She was on the ground. 24:56 [SPEAKER_08]: Were you on top or she on top behind? 24:59 [SPEAKER_07]: She, you were behind like kind of like just like kind of trying to do like a total shit thing or something. 25:05 [SPEAKER_07]: She was like trying to get it done to me. 25:06 [SPEAKER_07]: So which is the in our general facial areas? 25:08 [SPEAKER_07]: Okay. 25:10 [SPEAKER_07]: After the shot, what happens? 25:12 [SPEAKER_07]: I... 25:13 [SPEAKER_07]: I don't even, I don't know, I stood there and I couldn't believe what the fuck happened and the first thing I thought of was, is I have to call somebody I have to get someone here. 25:23 [SPEAKER_01]: I have to stand up for what I've done. 25:25 [SPEAKER_01]: The physical facts assembled the sequence. 25:28 [SPEAKER_01]: Ashley was right handed and her right hand was busy with her phone, so any gun she supposedly wielded would have been in her weaker left hand. 25:37 [SPEAKER_01]: The wound was on the right side of her head behind the ear. 25:40 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a contact wound. 25:42 [SPEAKER_01]: The muzzle had been pressed against her skin when it fired. 25:45 [SPEAKER_01]: The escaping gas tore the skin in the star pattern that pathologists know at a glance there was sight inside the wound. 25:52 [SPEAKER_01]: In the gun left the imprint of its own muzzle on her, the bullet traveled right to left and went into the four beneath where the left side of her head lay. 26:01 [SPEAKER_01]: which put her head down against the floor when the shot came. 26:04 [SPEAKER_01]: A long black hair consistent with hers was found trapped in the slide of the pistol caught by the mechanism as a cycle against her head. 26:14 [SPEAKER_07]: Well, do you feel like it probably just got that on hand? 26:16 [SPEAKER_07]: Yes, I think our whole relationship is on a kind of anything. 26:19 [SPEAKER_07]: But I've never had someone do that to. 26:23 [SPEAKER_07]: I've never had someone get that mad at me to be loaded weapon in their house. 26:26 [SPEAKER_07]: The kids were asleep at the two nights ago and she caught it back and she's standing to like, oh, cocky looking at me like she's going to like she knows what she's going to do with it. 26:34 [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, why not? 26:35 [SPEAKER_06]: If this lady's got to be on, why not just get to hell out of it? 26:39 [SPEAKER_07]: Because of those she had never done anything else before. 26:41 [SPEAKER_07]: I just, the other nine, two nights ago. 26:43 [SPEAKER_07]: I don't even know why I let that go. 26:46 [SPEAKER_07]: I should have left them. 26:48 [SPEAKER_07]: I guess it's a fairy-like sail that I strayed from my life, so. 26:51 [SPEAKER_07]: Yes. 26:52 [SPEAKER_07]: Like if that's fair to say that, I mean, if you like to do the cop out there of life, you're a big dude. 26:56 [SPEAKER_07]: And I feel it's not fair if it's like, you look like you could handle yourself. 26:59 [SPEAKER_07]: You could just like punch during the face or like cater or something or like, if you've liked it down something and I'm like, I don't know. 27:06 [SPEAKER_07]: no man and you won't pull it close off in your fucks yeah I just felt like it was like for me it's not about that that's what about us it was a fight for literally like she I don't know what the fuck she's gonna do she's right me the night so now I'm just like I don't even know it just feels like it was a accident I didn't try to murder any but I didn't try to kill anyone I don't know how I don't know what happened I don't know I worked in the middle of the film I know that it's not good I know that we're still missing some things that I feel 27:35 [SPEAKER_06]: that you're kind of rushing through. 27:37 [SPEAKER_07]: I think just crossing today, I just want to feel like I'm like someone's like kind of listening on my side. 27:46 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm on your side. 27:47 [SPEAKER_07]: Right, no, I'm not trying to... 27:48 [SPEAKER_07]: I can't say. 27:49 [SPEAKER_07]: I've seen this in the movies. 27:50 [SPEAKER_07]: I know what I'm trying to do. 27:51 [SPEAKER_07]: It's like the more I'm telling now, it's like the better it looks. 27:53 [SPEAKER_07]: Like the more I just tell now, it's like, but I'm getting to that place where we're like, we're at like the hard of everything that happened. 28:00 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm trying to be really careful with like, 28:03 [SPEAKER_07]: If I fuck up, or if I season me stupid, I don't know what, then more and talk, I feel like the more it's like going to look like, oh man, dude, I'm trying to explain the best they can't have what happened. 28:11 [SPEAKER_07]: Right now, the old world is, you know, what just happened is probably like, that guy's a piece of shit, so I'm like, feel really alone, where I look like I can't even, my family's up here, no one's here. 28:19 [SPEAKER_07]: I understand, I understand. 28:22 [SPEAKER_07]: The action's not here either, and I'm trying to process that shit right now. 28:26 [SPEAKER_01]: At trial, the prosecutor weighed down on the courtroom four in the position she was found in. 28:31 [SPEAKER_01]: Detective Coolie confirmed, quote by point, that the defendant's struggle could not produce that geometry for a story to be true. 28:40 [SPEAKER_01]: The gun in her left hand would have had to travel around her own face to press itself behind her right ear while her head lay on the ground, and a man twice her size rode 28:52 [SPEAKER_01]: This myth in Western carried roughly five separate safety features, and it would not fire if dropped from a roof or kicked across a room. 29:00 [SPEAKER_01]: To discharge it, the round had to be chambered by racking, and the trigger had to be depressed, correctly by a finger. 29:08 [SPEAKER_01]: Dr. Christopher Tafe, who performed the autopsy, called the death of homicide, and explained a contact wound like this one, he said, 29:18 [SPEAKER_01]: But the gun was not in her hand and not at her side, so it was a homicide by default. 29:24 [SPEAKER_01]: A second forensic pathologist, Dr. Terry Wilk, reviewed everything independently and landed in the same place. 29:31 [SPEAKER_01]: This was not an accident. 29:33 [SPEAKER_01]: It was not a suicide. 29:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Tyler Durrachowski was found guilty of second-degree murder. 29:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Under Louisiana Law, the sentence was mandatory, and the core imposed it. 29:44 [SPEAKER_01]: Life imprisonment at hard labor without benefit of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence. 29:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Ashley Fish spent her last hour on dinner, and on a call between her daughters and their father, keeping her house calm around a man, she could not move, 28, rebuilding from the second time, patient till the end. 30:07 [SPEAKER_01]: The man who killed her will die in Louisiana, and the stay he spent two years trying to escape a hard labor, in a sentence with no road out of it. 30:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Ashley said he wouldn't leave. 30:18 [SPEAKER_01]: She was right twice. 30:20 [SPEAKER_01]: On the 7th of April, 2022, the oldest inheritance this state has, came for a 28-year-old mother of four, whose only demand was a man's absence. 30:30 [SPEAKER_01]: The pine stood still in the heat while it happened. 30:33 [SPEAKER_01]: as they stood through the strip, as they stood through grab-out, Whittaker Cemetery keeps her in the soil of her town, rain comes up from the gulf most weeks of Louisiana spring, and it falls warm over the red clay earth, there is blood in the dirt. 31:33 [SPEAKER_03]: We've got stuck until it's ready
Show full transcript (484 segments)