Worst Roommate Ever – S02E02 – Housemate from Hell | Transcript

Worst Roommate Ever
Season 2 – Episode 2
Episode title: Housemate from Hell
Original release date: June 26, 2024

Plot: After some troublesome tenants, Anita Cowen seems to have landed on her feet when she takes in Scott Pettigrew, a charming and funny lawyer, but trouble instantly starts brewing.

* * *

[unsettling music playing]

[computer keys clacking]

[Sgt. Heather Olsen] “Female executive has an executive home, exquisitely furnished to share, three bedrooms, two baths, lush backyard, and French door private entrance overlooking the pool.”

[unsettling music continues]

[Anita Cowen on recording]

[Sgt. Olsen] I’ve never worked a roommate case myself where it ended so tragically.

[Anita on recording]

[Sgt. Olsen] The thing that sticks out the most to me in this investigation is that she recorded her murder.

[Anita moaning on recording]

[Anita yelling]

[unsettling music rising]

[Sgt. Olsen] Cathedral City is one of the smaller cities located just east of Palm Springs in the Coachella Valley.

It has one of the lower crime rates in the Coachella Valley as it pertains to homicides.

We can see anywhere between one to five.

It really just depends on the year.

It’s a very safe place to live.

[Det. Albert Holloway] It’s a desert city. This is a working-class city.

But there is a sect of retirees that do live in Cathedral City.

For the most part, it’s fairly quiet, so what makes the Anita Cowen case memorable is the brutality of how the events unfolded.

[dark music playing]

[Sgt. Olsen] In June of 2016, we received a “check the welfare” call a little after 11:00 p.m.

[line ringing]

[operator on phone] 911, what’s your emergency?

The call for service came from Anita Cowen’s daughter-in-law to have the police department go and check on her because they hadn’t been able to get a hold of Anita Cowen.

[siren wailing]

[indistinct radio chatter]

[Sgt. Olsen] The officer arrived to the residence.

He went to the front of the house.

[knocking on door]

[Sgt. Olsen] He began knocking on the front door. There was no answer.

[officer] 5-0-2, can you start me another unit up here also?

[Sgt. Olsen] A second backup officer arrived.

[suspenseful music playing]

[dog barks]

[knocking on door]

[officer 1] Wanna go check the back real quick?

[dog barking]

[officer 2] It’s padlocked. We’re gonna have to jump the wall.

[scraping noises]

[Sgt. Olsen] It was very dark. There was no lighting.

Walking down the side yard, leaves crunching.

He would later describe to me

that he had a horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Once they rounded the corner,

they located Anita in the pool.

[eerie music playing]

[water gurgling]

[Sgt. Olsen] She was severely beaten.

She had visible injuries on the left side of her head and face.

There was broken glass, um, broken picture frames.

And blood drag marks in the concrete

just outside of the door leading to the backyard.

It’s gut-wrenching.

How did this happen?

Who’s involved?

And what kind of a person would hurt an elderly woman?

[music fades out]

[intriguing music playing]

[Steven Stirt] My mom got divorced pretty young.

And she had to get a job, so it made her more independent.

So she was always, um…

We were always renting,

and, um, she always wanted to have a house.

It was her dream.

[intriguing music continues]

[Cindy Stirt] Buying a home was what she wanted.

So her girlfriend Patty

brought her to Palm Springs, said,

“You’re gonna love Palm Springs.”

“Palm trees, blue skies.”

And she fell in love with it.

[Steven] So when she found the house in Cathedral City, she wanted it.

[Cindy] When she bought that house, it was everything for her. She loved it.

It was a three-bedroom, two-bath.

It had a pool, had a Jacuzzi.

A beautiful backyard.

[Steven] She loved the house. It was her independence.

It was “she’s arrived” kind of thing.

[Cindy] Anita and Steve talked every day.

They were extremely close.

So I think it was really hard for Steve because she was so far away.

Steve and I live in San Diego,

and it’s about three hours from Cathedral City.

Anita had her own business.

She recruited travel nurses, trying to recruit them to hospitals.

And she really was good at what she did.

But when Anita was in her sixties, she had to close the business.

When she lost her job,

she needed to do something to make money.

[Sgt. Olsen] She actually got a job at Walgreens Pharmacy working part-time,

but she was having a difficult time paying her bills.

So she took out a loan for the equity of her car just to make…

To pay her bills.

What a lot of people don’t understand is, living in the desert,

the cost of utilities is very high

because of the heat that we have.

A lot of retirees don’t have that regular income coming in,

so they go looking for tenants to rent out guest bedrooms.

[birds chirping]

[wind chime tinkling]

[Steven] She’d put an ad on Craigslist.

You know, room for rent, nice house, come as you go, separate entrance.

Then she would say, “Here’s the rent, here’s the deposit.”

And people would show up with just that rent and just that deposit,

and she would take the money and give them a key.

I mean, nothing like, “Where do you work? Where are you from?”

[Cindy] We asked her to screen them before she had them come live with her,

and she didn’t do that

because it costs money to do background checks.

Anita lived with roommates out of necessity

and also, I believe, maybe being lonely and not having someone there with her.

[Steven] Having the roommate sort of worked for a while.

Darrell was one of her first roommates.

I think Darrell was the longest roommate she ever had.

[somber music playing]

[Darrell] I was going through a divorce,

and I was living in a shack out in the middle of nowhere

with no heater, and burning wood on a stove to keep warm.

And my car was falling apart because it was a long drive to go to work,

so I really needed to move somewhere closer to work.

I was pretty desperate.

I had bad credit because my divorce was going on,

and I was having a hard time finding an apartment.

So that’s how I ended up going on Craigslist

to find a homeowner who was desperate as I was to get a tenant,

and found Anita’s ad for a room for rent.

So the house was pretty immaculate, kind of like it is now,

except it was just cluttered with all these fancy little things

that she got from all over the world.

The room was nice,

and it seemed like a perfect little fit for me and my cats to move in with her.

And that was that.

She didn’t do any kind of background check, or…

or anything like that.

She very quickly took my money and gave me the key.

When I first moved in, me and Anita got along pretty good.

She seemed like a nice woman,

and I have respect for people who are a little older

and was gonna do everything I could to be the best tenant that I could.

[Cindy] Anita said that Darrell was a little different

than what she was used to seeing,

but he always paid the rent, and she was okay with him living there.

I’ve only met Darrell a few times.

I’ve found some of the things he did to be a little peculiar.

[knife clanking]

[Darrell] Most of the time I’m just hanging out in my room

and hanging out with my cats and just, you know,

we’d just see each other in passing.

We didn’t bother each other. Everything was fine.

Anita’s house was a three-bedroom, two-bath house,

and she was renting out both rooms in that house as much as she could.

There were several people that lived in the room across the hall from me.

There was a time

when she was having trouble with one of the tenants,

and a friend of mine and myself had to intervene.

We had to tell them to cool it off and cool it down

’cause they were getting a little heated, being disrespectful to an elderly woman

in her own home.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Steven] She had all different kinds of issues.

She’s had times when people would come in and they wanted to squat in the house,

and they wouldn’t pay rent, they’d keep eating her food…

Anita had difficulties with different tenants,

so she would call the police essentially to assist her

with removing these tenants.

So, on multiple occasions, officers had to explain to her

that there’s a legal process

on how to evict these tenants from her home.

[foreboding music playing]

[Darrell] About two years after I moved in with Anita,

she introduced me to a friend of hers, and his name was Scott Pettigrew.

[Cindy] Anita met Scott through work.

They instantly had a connection.

[Darrell] My first impression of Scott when I met him

was that he’s an educated, clean-cut gay man,

typical of Palm Springs area.

So when she came up to me and told me that Scott was gonna be moving in,

I was kind of happy for Anita to have a new tenant that she knew,

someone that she trusted.

So, yeah, I gave Scott a big hug and was very happy to see him

’cause things were gonna be easier around the house for all of us.

[Cindy] Anita liked Scott.

She liked the company, and they socialized.

She never socialized with… with Darrell,

but with Scott, she did.

[Darrell] From the time Scott moved in with his two dogs,

he started being strange and odd.

[eerie music playing]

[door squeaking]

Sometimes he would just open my door and shut it real quick while I was asleep.

[door slams shut]

Then I would come very angrily out of my room and say,

“What are you doing? Next time, knock.”

And he would say, “I just want to know if you’re home or not.”

He would come in and, like, knock something off of a dresser,

and then run out the door before I had a chance

to really fully wake up and realize what happened.

Just odd things that would drive you nuts.

Terrorizing my cats.

[door squeaks, slams shut]

[Darrell] Every time Scott would come in, he’d slam the door.

They would freak out and go hide.

I had complained to Anita on numerous occasions,

but she declined to do anything.

She said, “Not my problem. That’s between you and Scott.”

[Cindy] Anita, I don’t know if she didn’t care

the two didn’t get along.

Scott just could talk a good talk.

He just was a charmer, and she trusted him.

[Darrell] Scott had Anita convinced that I was doing

all kinds of weird things around the house that I wasn’t doing.

[eerie music continues]

[Darrell] I had a flashlight in the medicine cabinet

that I keep just in case the lights go out.

And he had her convinced that two little holes on this flashlight

were a camera and a microphone

filming him naked while he’s in the bathroom.

I said to her, “It’s not a camera,” and she didn’t believe me.

I’ve known Anita for many years. She’s a very strong woman.

And I was a little surprised that she would even believe that.

But she did.

[Steven] I didn’t like him very much,

and I don’t know why she was so interested in Scott, to this day.

But whatever he said, she wanted to go along with.

[Cindy] He was trouble.

He was very pushy.

He would try to get his own way,

and he definitely did not want Darrell in that house.

At one point, Scott was stealing things and blaming it on me.

[tense music playing]

[showerhead squeaking]

[Darrell] Scott took the showerhead away,

and he convinced Anita that I had stolen the showerhead.

He was stealing the light bulbs out of the porch light and blaming it on me as well.

And then he started stealing the cleansing tablets out of the toilet in our bathroom.

Anita came to my door asking me why I was stealing the little blue cleansing tablets out of the toilet.

And I said, “I’m not stealing those tablets.”

“I have no use for those. Why would I take them?”

But Anita was constantly believing him.

The whole time Scott’s over her shoulder snickering and laughing, and I just remember thinking, “This is crazy.”

[Cindy] Anita was freaked out because there was just weird things happening.

Like, things were being stolen. Things were disappearing.

She goes, “I don’t understand why Darrell’s doing that to me.”

“What’s the purpose? Why is he being like that?”

[Darrell] So the worst thing that Scott did,

he had thrown up and defecated in the bathtub.

And it was disgusting.

I went to take a shower, and the bathtub was full of just filth.

The next three mornings it was like that, and Anita came knocking on my door

and asked me why I kept doing that.

And I told her, “That’s not me. That’s him.”

[inaudible]

[Darrell] She was just believing anything and everything he told her.

[Steven] So at that point, my mother started getting nervous.

She was just not trusting of Darrell very much.

[Darrell] Scott was manipulating her, and it was working.

And I started looking for a new place to stay.

[suspenseful music playing]

[doorknob jiggling]

[Darrell] Anita and Scott were locking me out of the house

by chaining the door shut.

I actually had to call the police probably five times in two weeks

to have them come let me in the house

because you can’t just lock the door on someone and say,

“You don’t live here anymore.”

[ominous music playing]

[Darrell] They were threatening to call the police on me

and lie to the police,

and I decided I needed to pull my phone out and record this.

This was important. I don’t want the police to be lied to.

So I pulled out my phone and pressed record and kept it down low.

[Scott, on recording] Do you really think that you’re going to have more credibility

than the two of us?

Seriously?

Do you know how many attorneys I know in the Coachella Valley

that I went to law school with?

I’m not playing here.

I’ll show you my degree, and you can look me up on the Internet.

[Darrell] So… Okay. So you’re…

[Scott] Not playing. You need to listen!

And that’s when I raised the phone up to show him

that I’m filming this, and he immediately changes the subject.

[on recording] Film me all like, like you filmed me naked in the bathroom.

[Darrell] What? [laughs]

[Scott] You did. I got the equipment…

And then he tries to convince Anita

that I’ve… that I’ve got some sort of extensive criminal record

that’s visible on the Internet.

And that was all just right there in that little video.

There’s a lot in that video.

[Scott, on recording] Your fingerprints on the other device.

[Darrell] The phone?

[Scott] Yes.

[Darrell] Police need a federal warrant, and there’s not anything on there.

[Scott] You have a criminal record.

[Darrell] I do?

[Scott] You have a probation officer.

[Darrell] Never met a probation officer.

[Scott] Darrell, you have a criminal record.

[Darrell] Okay.

The next day, I told her that, you know, things didn’t have to be this way.

You know, if you could just stop Scott from harassing me,

and stop harassing me yourself, and we can work this out.

You know, I told her, “If you want me to move out,

you’re gonna have to give me time, and I’m gonna want my deposit back.”

She didn’t disagree, but she didn’t agree.

She just kind of listened to me and was like, “Okay.”

[foreboding music playing]

[Darrell] I went out of town with my friends for a couple days.

Came home Sunday night really late,

and the door was chained again.

So I called the police, and I said to the police,

“Yeah, it’s me again. My door is chained again.”

The police officer on the end of the other line said to me,

“You wait right there, and we’ll be down there to get you.”

And I remember thinking, “Get me? That’s odd.”

But when the police arrived…

[handcuffs clicking]

…they handcuffed me and threw me in the back of a car.

I had no idea what I was being arrested for.

I asked him, “What am I under arrest for?” He said, “You know what you did.”

From the time Scott moved in to the time I got arrested and sent to jail,

I want to say it was three weeks to a month.

When I got to jail, I had no idea what I was being charged with.

I was very angry because I had called the police for help,

and they had arrested me.

My public defender was the first person to tell me what I was being charged with.

They were all felonies. Felony counts.

Senior abuse. Damage of property, I believe.

Scott and Anita said to the police that I had been acting crazy,

and had been threatening them, and had chased them into a room.

And supposedly, I pushed Anita down on the lawn.

I was flabbergasted. I was completely astonished.

Not only was I being accused of a crime I didn’t do,

but it was a particularly heinous crime.

So I had to spend time housed alongside all kinds of really bad people.

Child molesters, rapists, and all kinds of heinous murderers.

And I could not afford bail.

My bail was set at $150,000.

I was facing two-and-a-half years in prison.

I was really angry with Scott and Anita,

and was having all kinds of thoughts of revenge.

How am I gonna get back at them when I get out?

I never, ever thought that I would ever have lived with somebody

capable of doing these things.

[Julie] My name is Julie Russell,

and Scott Pettigrew was my roommate in 2012.

[somber music playing]

[Julie] I found Scott through Craigslist.

He had responded to the ad that I had put up.

Said… [reading email]

He was super charming, super funny.

He had two small dogs as well.

I trust a dog person over a non-dog person any day.

Scott moved in, and it was fun.

You know, we laughed. We had a good time.

Things seem to be going really well.

I did notice that his dogs were having a lot of accidents in the house.

I’ve had pets my entire life. I understand things happen.

Um, but it was excessive.

I had a concern that it would upset our other roommate,

who hadn’t moved in with a pet.

I started to really worry when our other roommate

was leaving the back door unlocked.

And since we were on the ground-floor apartment

that led out into the garden and then a very busy street,

I started to get irate emails from him

about his safety was in jeopardy and the safety of his dogs

because the door kept getting left unlocked.

The tone showed me a complete other side to his personality.

When he stopped paying rent

and stopped paying his portion of the bills in the apartment,

things started to turn bad.

[tense music playing]

[Julie] We had maybe only been living together for about a month

at this point.

He started eating our food, eating my roommate’s birthday cake,

threatening legal action against me

for having three roommates in a two-bedroom apartment.

I think that was probably one of the biggest shocks,

when I went to open my liquor cabinet, it was empty.

He’d emptied everything in it.

There were several times that I went to my boss in tears and said,

“I have to leave right now. I’m going home.”

“I think my dog is in danger.”

“Don’t know what I’m gonna find when I get there.”

I just feared that he was going to try to hurt her in some capacity to get at me.

He went through a period

of sending horrible voice messages and text messages to us

to complete silence.

We couldn’t get in touch with him for anything.

I couldn’t afford to cover another person’s rent and bills.

So it was time to start bringing the landlord into the equation,

and ask if we could get a new lock put on the door.

It took a couple of weeks before we got that approval.

But when we finally got the locks changed,

I felt like that was the point that I could actually breathe again.

I was able to get into the bedroom at that point.

I wasn’t prepared for the mess that I saw when I got in there.

His bedroom was just filthy. Stuff everywhere.

Dog food everywhere.

Used condoms.

It was just disgusting.

[unsettling music playing]

[Julie] I did not realize he had been removing his belongings

when we weren’t there.

He was leaving his bedroom window unlocked

so that he could get in and out without us knowing.

There were many moments when he lived with us

that I felt that he was capable of snapping,

and I’m just glad that that didn’t happen when we lived together.

[unsettling music continues]

[Steven] At some point after Darrell was arrested,

Scott and my mom, their relationship started to have some problems going on.

The friction started with Scott.

He lost his job at Walgreens.

He didn’t have any income, no money, and he stopped paying rent.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Steven] They were fighting because Scott would eat her food.

She would call me and say, “He’s a pig, he’s sloppy, and doesn’t pay any rent.”

Scott was stealing her stuff.

He would steal Anita’s vanilla extract because it has some alcohol base to it,

and he was drinking that.

[Steven] I think that he now had nobody to…

“Nobody watching me,” in a sense, because he became more aggressive to her.

His dogs went all over the place.

He took more of her stuff, just kept locking it up

without any kind of respect for her.

His room was totally gross, trashed up.

I mean, I’m like, “What the hell?”

You know, she just… It was ridiculous to me.

[Cindy] Steve was getting uncomfortable,

and we were trying to get Anita to come live with us,

but she would not leave her house.

She loved that house. She worked very hard for her house.

She wasn’t about to let Scott take that from her.

[Steven] This was our worst nightmare,

not knowing what’s really happening while she’s sleeping.

Usually if something goes bad, you’ve done something in the past bad.

So what did he do in his past life?

[somber music playing]

[Rob Salcedo] I believe that things are not just black and white.

There’s always more to a story than just him being a monster.

My name is Rob Salcedo,

and I was Scott’s partner for about 12 years.

When I met him, I really did, uh, fall in love with him very quickly.

He was very funny.

He was very loyal and protective.

I felt safe.

Part of the attraction was that we kind of both

came from not having such an easy life.

Not too long after we met,

Scott told me that his father had abused him.

His mom was so abusive that she would get him pets,

and then she would take them to the pet shelter

and have them euthanized,

and would tell him that she never wanted him.

Things like that.

We both came from not the most ideal situation growing up,

and we both wanted to study and become somebody.

I was going to get my degree, and he was gonna get his degree,

and he was gonna go to law school.

“White picket fence” sort of thing.

When he came back from law school, he was a totally different person.

Um, he came back emaciated, like, very ill.

I started finding, like, vodka bottles, like, hidden in the closet,

and he was taking all these prescription pills.

I paid for Scott’s bar exam at least two times,

and he told me he took the bar exam,

but I never saw evidence that he actually took the bar exam.

When he drank, he would either completely pass out

or he would get, you know, violent.

At one point, he drank a whole bottle of tequila,

and he got a kitchen knife and was chasing me around the house.

I ran down the street.

It was trash day, so I was throwing trash cans,

trying to knock them down, but he was jumping over them

like they were hurdles.

I hate to think if I didn’t outrun him, what would have happened.

Scott and I broke up in 2002.

I just didn’t see a future.

But we were always, you know, in contact, and I would help him whenever I could.

When Scott first met Anita, they were friends.

And then, you know, the relationship just started to deteriorate.

One time, I was on the phone with him

when he alleged that she had opened the back gate

and let the dogs out,

and he was on the phone with me yelling down the street like,

“You let the dogs out. I’ll kill you.”

[ominous music playing]

[Steven] My mom didn’t know what to do with him anymore.

So I think that’s probably… I think she felt stuck.

[Cindy] Scott would go out drinking, and he’d come back,

and he’d be violent.

He was even getting meaner and meaner, and drinking more.

He was yelling at her, and it got really bad.

So Anita started putting all her stuff in her bedroom,

and she put a dead bolt on her door.

She hoarded everything in her room.

Things from the kitchen, silverware, all that,

so he didn’t have access to any of it.

She couldn’t even lock him out because he took out all the dead bolts

of the back French doors.

Scott was the one blaming Darrell for all the stuff that was missing…

but there’s no way Darrell could have done any of that stuff

because Darrell was in jail.

So Anita realized quickly that… that she made a mistake.

[tense music playing]

[Cindy] Anita told Steve that, “Scott and I put Darrell in… in jail.”

Scott had this scheme that if we both say he pushed you and I’d be your witness,

then they would just arrest him.

That would lock him up.

And then he’d be kicked out.

They called the cops and said he did this, and it was a freaking lie.

It was ridiculous to me.

She was just flat-out in the wrong for what she did to him and, you know,

caused him to lose his job, his income, lose his place where he was living…

Steven and I told her if she does not go to court

and tell the courts that she perjured herself,

then we’re not gonna talk to her again.

[Sgt. Olsen] Anita ended up talking to the district attorney and said,

“Actually, this didn’t occur. I lied.”

[Cindy] I believe that Anita did feel bad.

If Anita didn’t feel bad, she wouldn’t have gone back to the courts

and tell them she perjured herself.

[Sgt. Olsen] After she told the district attorney’s office

that she falsified this police report,

Darrell was released.

[ethereal music playing]

[Darrell] You take all kinds of freedom for granted.

But when you do a hundred days in jail, you really appreciate your freedoms.

And being free, being out, was amazing.

My first night out, I took a long, long walk.

My feet hurt the next day. It was wonderful.

I went over to the house with a policeman

to retrieve some of my clothes and some toiletries,

and Scott and Anita were home.

[uneasy music playing]

[Darrell] I noticed that Scott and Anita were not happy with each other.

Anita actually came over to me in the garage

and was helping me look for some of my things,

shoulder to shoulder,

and I felt that she was really sorry for what she had done.

Scott told me that Anita had my cats euthanized.

[melancholy music playing]

[Darrell] My cats were my everything to me at that time of my life.

I was going through a divorce.

I didn’t have any children with my ex-wife, but we had the cats.

And they were like the only thing I had left.

[Cindy] Well, Anita wouldn’t do that because Anita was an animal lover.

She had two dogs of her own, and she’s had cats,

so she wouldn’t have done that.

I believe that Scott did kill his cats.

He was that mean.

[Darrell] When I was done getting my belongings out of the garage,

the police officer who was there accompanying me

congratulated me on keeping my calm and not freaking out, not blowing up.

He advised me not to come back to the house ever, for any reason,

without a police escort.

And I said to him, “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

“I ain’t coming back here without you guys for sure.”

[door slams]

[uneasy music playing]

[Sgt. Olsen] After Darrell was released,

Anita went back to court and she filed the paperwork

for a restraining order and a kick-out order of Scott.

[ominous music playing]

[Cindy] She did write a letter to the judge

about things that were missing and disappearing,

and that Scott was letting the dogs urinate,

and pooping all over the house.

And he was violent.

She said he was yelling and screaming and throwing stuff around.

[Sgt. Olsen] She had to have been really scared.

She knew that this was her only way to get him out of the home.

A judge granted the order

that Scott’s dogs were to be removed from the residence.

He also ordered Scott to stay five yards away from Anita at all times.

Why a judge would order dogs to be removed from the residence,

but not the person that was threatening you?

I’d never heard of something so ridiculous in all of my career.

How can you be in a certain distance of someone in your house?

I mean, it’s not that big of a house. Like 1,400 square feet.

But the judge said that he had not been violent with her, so he let Scott stay.

[Steven] I don’t think she knew what to do next.

So I was trying to help her out.

Would he do something… do something that will get him evicted?

So I told her to get a tape recorder to document if he’s yelling at you

or threatening anything, or breaking anything either.

Whatever you can do that’d show the court

that how your living conditions are changing to get him thrown out.

[unsettling music playing]

Anita knew that Scott was gonna be served with the order that day.

So she was working,

and she planned to stay away from the home and not return

for as long as she possibly could because she knew when she returned home,

he was going to be extremely upset with her,

and she was afraid to come home.

[foreboding music playing]

When she came home, she called me.

And she said, “I can’t get in.”

He put a lock on the garage door and padlocked the side doors.

[lock clicks]

I said, “You need to call the police.”

[siren wailing]

One of our officers responded to her home just after 6:00 p.m. to assist her.

Once he got inside the garage,

he realized that the garage door motor had been disconnected.

So he reconnected the plug for the garage door motor,

and was able to open the garage door for her.

She asked the officer to go inside and talk to Scott Pettigrew.

She essentially wanted the officer to scold him for doing this to her.

And he explained to her that this was a civil issue,

that no crime had occurred.

And he left.

[tense music playing]

Anita called me, and I asked her what was happening.

And then she kinda told me that when she was gone at work,

the sheriffs came and served him papers.

So when she came home, he’s yelling and screaming and throwing stuff around.

[glass shatters]

[tense music continues]

[Cindy] She said he lost it.

He also put superglue on her bedroom door

so she couldn’t get in her bedroom to hide.

Steve had just gotten off of work.

He called me, and I said, “I think there’s trouble.”

“We’ve got to get out to your mom’s house.”

So he goes, “Okay, let me call her right now.”

[phone ringing faintly]

[Steven] So I said, “We’ll go out there, and we’ll get you a hotel room.”

“We’ll try to work on some way to get him out.”

“Pay him off, whatever it takes.”

We thought she was fine.

I hear the glass breaking and him yelling in the background.

[faint shouting]

[Steven] So when I was talking to her, I told her to take the tape recorder out,

turned it on, and she goes, “Okay. I’ll call 911.”

And then, all of a sudden, the phone goes dead.

[disconnect signal heard on phone]

[Cindy] We called and called and called, and we got in our car and drove out there.

That drive was probably the longest drive that I’ve ever done.

[Steven] We called the police several times to do a welfare check on her

because she never answered the phone again.

[Sgt. Olsen] It was just a little after midnight, so I’m sound asleep,

and I received the call.

I was told that an elderly female was murdered and thrown in her pool.

[ominous music playing]

The two officers in the backyard had pulled Anita out of the pool,

and then the officers go inside to do a safety sweep.

[officer, on recording] Come to the rear. I need your help clearing the house.

And to find out if there’s potentially someone else

that’s injured within the home.

[officer, on recording] We’ll go through and clear. A guy in the back bedroom.

And he’s a renter here.

Okay, so we’re gonna go through and clear this.

They quickly do their safety sweep throughout the home.

They end up right at Scott’s door, which is closed.

They call out to Scott,

open his door,

and they see him laying naked on his bed.

[officer, on recording] Cathedral City Police Department! Let me see your hands!

Get your hands up! Both hands up! Stand up and come over here.

Keep coming.

Come over here. Okay, turn around, turn around.

Put your hands behind your back.

[Sgt. Olsen] They basically call him out into the hallway.

[officer, on recording] Come over here.

What’s your name?

Scott.

[officer] Scott what? Oh, careful. There’s broken glass.

Give me some light. Some light.

[Scott] Scott Pettigrew.

[officer] Okay. Sit down here, Scott. Sit down right there.

There you go. Here, Scott. Cover yourself up.

Sarge, he’s detained.

[police sirens blaring]

I was called by a patrol sergeant

who informed me of a homicide,

and that I needed to assist Detective Heather Olsen,

who was already on scene.

Upon entering the house,

I saw police officers standing with Scott Pettigrew

in the living room area.

I noticed he had raised red scratches on his back

that were going from the top of his back running down,

but he started to make statements about asking where Anita Cowen was.

Scott made a reference to another person named Darrell Hatfield.

I asked, “Who’s Darrell?”

Scott stated to me, “Darrell’s our other roommate.”

“Darrell said he was gonna kill us. I’m afraid of Darrell.”

“I feel like he did something to Anita.”

And it’s not that I believed him or I didn’t believe him.

It’s part of the puzzle we’re trying to solve.

And the only way to solve that is by finding Darrell

and finding out what his role in this homicide investigation was.

[intriguing music playing]

[Cindy] Steven and I pulled up in our car,

and the whole cul-de-sac was full of police officers.

And an officer came up to us and asked us if we need any help.

And Steven said, “Well, my mother lives in this house.”

[Steven] And that’s when they tell us that my mother’s dead. Yeah.

[breathing shakily]

[somber music playing]

[Steven] I just didn’t see it coming.

It makes me sort of feel like, in a sense, that I failed.

[breathes deeply]

[cries softly]

[voice breaking] Probably one of the worst days of my life.

[dark music playing]

[Darrell] I got released from jail on Saturday,

and it was the following Tuesday night that Anita was murdered.

When I found out what happened to her,

I was just flabbergasted and stunned and shocked,

and I kind of lost my mind.

And it just clicked.

I thought to myself, “Oh my gosh. I have to be a suspect myself.”

Instantly, I realized that I needed to turn myself in for questioning.

[Det. Holloway] One of our patrol officers called me and said,

“I have Darrell Hatfield.”

And I met him at the Cathedral City Police Department.

Darrell said Scott was the reason that he was arrested and had to move out.

So Darrell, he didn’t have a place to go.

And not only that, he was in jail for something he didn’t do.

And so, uh, that would make me pretty mad.

I was scared that they might have thought that I was involved or guilty in some way.

But the night of Anita’s murder,

I was not feeling good.

And I ended up in the hospital.

So when I went to speak to the police, I found a receipt from the hospital.

And this receipt was for my belongings.

It was for my shoes and my bag and my coat.

And I handed that to the police, and they said, “This is very good.”

[Det. Holloway] We were able to confirm that he had been in the hospital at the time the murder occurred.

So there was no way that he could be at the home or even be implicated in this homicide as a potential suspect.

And now all of our, um, focus is now on Scott Pettigrew as the primary suspect in the homicide.

[Sgt. Olsen] When I had walked through the crime scene initially,

I had immediately noticed in the bottom of the pool there were multiple packages of chicken wings thrown into the pool.

And there was actually a whole chicken.

It was really odd.

When I had looked at the items that were strewn about in the kitchen,

I was immediately drawn to the pepper grinder.

The pepper grinder matched the circle of bruises that were on Anita’s back.

There was a breakfast nook and a kitchen table

on the other side of the kitchen.

So I had pulled back the open French door.

And as I looked behind the French door,

I saw a digital recorder.

And I actually picked up the recorder

and saw the digital file was recorded on the night of the murder

because it was date-and time-stamped.

[unclear dialog heard on recording]

[Anita, on recording] I don’t think that.

Oh, maybe it’s good. Okay.

Stay away from me.

Stay the fuck away from me.

[Scott] Cunt.

[Anita] You bastard!

You bastard. You bastard.

Now you’re gonna start beating up an old lady, huh?

[Scott] You’re an old cunt, aren’t ya?

Cunt.

[Anita yelling] Get out of here!

Get out of here! Get off me!

When I hear that recording, it… it makes me sick to my stomach.

Like, it just sends chills down my spine.

After I listened to the digital recording, I knew I had my suspect.

So I went back to the station to interview Scott.

My focus was honing him in on events that occurred that day.

And when we got closer to the time of when the physical altercation occurred between the two of them, he asked for his attorney.

At that point, I knew my questioning was done.

So I gathered my things on the desk, and I said,

“Oh, that’s a shame, because she… she recorded this murder.”

[intense music playing]

And as I’m walking out the door, he says, “What? Wait a minute.”

And he wanted to talk to me. “What was on that recording?”

And I explained to him, “Listen, you asked for your attorney.”

“I can’t speak to you.”

And he kept asking me, “What’s on that recording?”

“What did she record?”

So I re-Mirandized him, and then we started again.

And we got about ten minutes into trying to get him to tell me what happened, and he asked for his attorney again.

I explained, “Listen, we’re… we’re done.”

“There will be no further interviews or questioning.”

And it was at that point that he asked for the death penalty.

Innocent people don’t ask for the death penalty.

[Det. Holloway] I believe the motive behind the homicide was the eviction of the dogs.

It is really what provoked that extreme emotional response with Scott Pettigrew that led him down a path of where he attacked and he beat Anita Cowen.

[plaintive music playing]

[Darrell] You know, I never thought that I would be sharing a house with a murderer or a murder victim.

It’s surreal.

I was pretty angry with her, and still am, for what happened and what she did to me.

But Anita did not deserve what happened to her.

[Cindy] Anita, she opened her heart to people that she trusted, and I think when you trust in the wrong people, you never know what’s gonna happen.

But it’s, um, it’s just really sad.

[Steven, emotionally] I think she tried. [breathing shakily]

I mean, my mom has her shortcomings, but I don’t think anybody deserves that.

[Sgt. Olsen] I think the most important takeaway with this investigation is how people can be very dangerous.

And that’s why people need to do background checks.

That’s why people need to know who they’re going to invite into their home.

You know, you’re most vulnerable in your own home.

[intriguing music playing]