I am being followed. There are threats on my life. I know we're in danger. I know we are. It's a riveting mystery that started in a place of glamour.

It became a destination for the Rat Pack, for Frank Sinatra, and ended in a case of murder, the wealthy heir to this legendary hotel dad.

He was my father. He is the only father.

Now, police said she was next, someone in the shadows gunning for her. My suspicions are growing and growing by the minute. Who was behind all this? Plenty of suspects and plenty of motives. Anger, jealousy, greed. Someone had 10 million reasons to kill. We look back and say, oh, my God, I couldn't believe what I saw. A final terrifying twist. I see my mother with a crowbar. Will you see it coming tonight?

Family affair. Here's Dennis Murphy. If ever there was a little girl lost, it was Mayor Bond. From when I was little, I was always in the way she survived a mother daughter relationship, quite unlike any you've ever heard. My mother is like try to hug a cactus. You will eventually get hurt.

And if the intersection of blood and money intrigues you, pull up a chair and stay away because there's plenty of book just ahead in this story. It's really an amazing, unusual, frightening story. What ended so badly in a darkened hotel room with the curtains drawn has its beginnings real in the warm sands of South Florida, not the south beach of today, with its hot bodies and pulsating dance clubs.

That's all a marketing reinvention of a much older Miami Beach. No, we need to go back 50 years or more and Kattis with tailfins, we're pulling into the newest glitziest hotel on the East Coast, the fountain blue Miami should be a great city.

A hotel wheeler dealer named Ben Novac built it and they came.

Stephen Gaines wrote about the era in his book Fool's Paradise Out of Bounds, and it became a destination for the Rat Pack for Frank Sinatra. The major stars were appearing at the Fountain Blue and lots of movies were shot there as well.

Novak was the king, and he needed a queen to preside over his aquacultured palace. He found one and a former Coca-Cola model named Berniece. With her beauty and effortless charm, Burnie's turned out to be the perfect hostess to greet the celebrities, gangsters and just plain guests who made the fountain blue the scene of its day. King Ben and Queen Berniece lived over the store in a penthouse suite.

And then along came their young prince, Ben Novack, Jr..

He was a spoiled kid. He was a brat. Ben Junior, don't call him Benji, would be trotted out to shake hands with the likes of JFK. Then it was back up the hotel elevator to Hong.

Birthday cakes came from room service and the kids who came to the birthday party were complete strangers to him, just kids who were passing through the hotel.

The friendless, lonely boy disliked by his father's help, lost himself in the fantasy world of Batman. The superhero became an obsession. Even as an adult, Ben Junior was still amassing a floor-to-ceiling collection of Batman memorabilia. He even bought a Batmobile from the old TV show.

But there was no holding off the real world and chain just as the Rat Pack faded away. So too did the fountain blue. By the late 70s, Miami Beach was regarded as a still place for old people. Ben Novak Senior lost the hotel to bankruptcy and died not long afterwards.

The son, Ben Jr., all grown up, now stayed in the hospitality business and made his mark.

He created a company run out of his home here that organized conventions at big hotels. Like his father, he was a hard nosed businessman and in time he was grossing fifty million dollars a year. And like his father, he needed someone like his mother to mix and mingle with the clients. He found that woman and a recent immigrant from Ecuador. Her name was Narcy, and she had a little girl called Mae.

Why do you think they became a couple and not just passing in the night? My mother is a lot of fun.

You know, she definitely partied when Ben Junior met Narcy, she was partying for tips as a stripper in a sleazy Miami club supporting herself and her little girl. She did very well with it.

I guess she did very well. My mother is a survivor.

She adjusts to pretty much anything nasty, left behind her stripper pole to marry Ben Novac Jr.. But the little girl felt like so much excess baggage in her mother's new relationship, she was dispatched to boarding school at the age of eight. Did you feel you'd been shipped off?

Kind of. You had a tough childhood. The best thing is that it's over.

Ben Junior and her mother lived in a two million dollar Fort Lauderdale estate with a boat out back. His elderly mother, Bernice, lived not far away. But May the stepdaughter was never going to be a rich man's trust fund kid. She grew up tough and hard, estranged from her mother, paying her own way with bartending and waitressing jobs. She had two children, young and sweated the bills. It was the grandchildren that ultimately thought some of the ice between mother and daughter.

She may have been a horrible mother, but she was the best grandmother. She did everything with them.

And Ben Jr. warmed to May, the one time lonely prince belatedly seemed to recognize a kindred spirit in lonely, neglected May.

He saw me as his daughter and I did see him as my father, and he had no children of his own.

Ben, after his own stunted childhood, finally found in his grandchildren some kids who wanted to play with all his Batman stuff.

He did a lot of the grandfather things with them. A lot of I think why we saw so much of each other was because of those two boys.

When she was in her late 20s, Ben Junior asked me to become part of his very successful convention organizing business. She would work alongside her mother and his mother, Bernice. It had taken 20 years, but they were finally becoming a family, you know, and I actually became older and got into the business.

He was always there, guided me and showed me how to do things.

Then sentence. In the spring of 2009, Berniece, in her late eighties, had apparently slipped and taken a nasty fall. Getting out of her car. She struggled to the house and died. May thought the time had come for years, Ben had been asking her to consider becoming his legally adopted daughter. She thought it would be the perfect Father's Day gift for him.

I started thinking, OK, Bernie, I just passed. And it would be something nice for him, you know, to be like, OK, you do have a daughter, you know, because I do feel like I am his daughter to this day. So it never got legally changed. All the paperwork is still on his desk.

It never got attended to because of the brutal event three months after Bernice's passing. Ben, Narcy and May, we're putting on another of their big conventions at a hotel in New York's suburban Westchester County just after 730 Sunday morning, July 12th, 2009, the last day of the convention, hotel security got the urgent call. Something very bad had happened in one of the suites.

A 58 year old man had been found bound and bludgeoned to death in the bedroom. Ben Novac Jr., the one time Prince of the Fountain Blue had been murdered.

Coming up, who might want Ben Novak dead? The search begins and it wasn't going to be easy. We decided we were going to download the logs of the entire hotel, the comings and goings of every room, every guest.

One hundred fifty rooms when family affair continues.

The sprawling Hilton Hotel in Rye Brook, New York, was host to 2000 and we conventioneers that summer weekend in 2009, one of the suites had become a homicide scene.

Sergeant Terry Wilson from the local police would lead the investigation.

I couldn't believe what I saw when I went in the room and there was the victim hogtied on the floor and it was a bloody mess. What does that tell you? This was a targeted individual. And is it true that his eyes were also gouged out? Yes. Yes.

Sergeant Wilson learned that the victim was Ben Novac Jr., a name that meant nothing to him. The murdered man's wife and stepdaughter had been escorted to a nearby hotel room so investigators could take their statements. The wife of 20 years, Narsi, told Sergeant Wilson that her husband had been up all night working on convention details and didn't go to bed. She thought till about six thirty in the morning.

She said she'd been going downstairs around seven to oversee getting breakfast organized for the convention guests.

Could you verify, for instance, that the wife was indeed at the breakfast by a security camera? We did have our own video confirmed what she was saying.

The stepdaughter may aboard who managed the company money on these road trips, confirmed her mother's story of coming down to pitchin with breakfast.

I was thinking, you know, there is a lot of people there's 2000 people down here.

I'll take any help I could get after the breakfast rush. Narcy says she called her husband up in the room. No answer.

And then she comes back up on about seven, 30 or so and finds him. Yeah, she told the detectives she tripped over the body, then bolted from the room, shrieking for help. Security arrived, as did hotel manager Jeremy Morse.

Our security guard was holding Narcy at the end of Mr. Novavax feet, and Narsi was continuing to lunge towards the body like howling and screaming at the top of her lungs.

When Narcy later told police about the timeline of the morning, the computerized room key card confirmed her recollection.

Our card was used to get into the room. It's about 40, but from just after midnight. Oh, there's been no activity up to that point opening to go into the doors.

That right away tells you that. Well, then the door opened from the inside.

If Narcy had been downstairs helping with breakfast and no key other than the wife said opened the door since midnight, who then had admitted the killer or killers?

And early on, mystery men, meanwhile, had been summoned by the hotel manager to her stepfather suite.

So I asked McQueen what happened. And they're just like he's gone, you know? And I'm like, What do you mean he's gone? I'm like, just try to go do something.

The hotel guards wouldn't let her in the room. One security officer was talking to another one.

He said it's a bloodbath in there, a bloodbath that sent her mother into hysterics. She's emotional.

She's wailing tears. She's like throwing herself on the floor. Last time she goes, I think they're after all the convention money, she's like, it had to been a robbery. They know we carry a lot of money. Somebody must have been watching us.

Unusually, Ben Novavax convention business ran on cash bags of it. The exhibitors would turn over their dollars to the stepdaughter, Mae and her assistants on site this weekend. They'd taken in more than a hundred thousand dollars. Now, that money wasn't being kept in a hotel safe behind the front desk. Rather, it was stashed in closets under the beds of the staff members. Question had an insider who knew how they'd gone about their business, decided to rip off the company by torturing Ben to cough up the cash.

They had around one hundred and ten thousand in cash. So you're in motivation country right now, right? And we're trying to figure out what's going on.

They didn't get anything from Pam, so of course I'm scared, you know, not just for myself, for the staff.

And if someone had been roaming the hotel hallways with money and murder on their mind, there were 2000 potential suspects, a detective's nightmare.

We decided we were going to download the logs of the entire hotel.

You're kidding. The comings and goings of every room, every guest.

One hundred fifty rooms. It took him two weeks to do it.

The hotel was bristling with security cameras, but unfortunately for the investigators, none in the hallway outside the murder room. One of the first things the cops did was round up all that cash and get it stored in the hotel safe till the banks opened in the morning. Then Sergeant Wilson posted a guard at the hotel room being shared by the mother and daughter. Before that Sunday night was over, the two women would have another round of questioning with the detectives and they totally grilled me and you get mad.

So, of course, I was fighting back. They're asking you the question, did you do this correct? You know, and then one of the cops even told me, we have to ask these questions. Oh, my God, you have to get like right here and asking the questions.

A veteran Westchester County detective named Allison Carpentier had joined the investigation and led some of the questioning. May the daughter, what do you make of her, pretty much I got the feeling that she was being honest with me, but you never know. I mean, people are deceptive.

The cops went through Narcy story once again, hoping for some overlooked detail or investigative nugget.

And she is the grieving.

She's all of a sudden widow. Widow. Exactly. We need that information. She's the last person that saw Mr. Novak.

Narcy told detectives there was something of value missing a gold bracelet that spelled out Ben's name in diamonds.

An expensive Rolex watch was still on the bed, lying in a pool of blood, as well as an unexplained broken stem from a cheap pair of sunglasses. And then there was the matter of her husband's huge Batman collection and a rare Akama valued at 43000 dollars he was planning on selling that weekend.

Batman might have been a motivation for murder, his passion in life. He had a valuable comic and somebody else wanted it. Carl wanted the value of it correct.

Sundy was over. On Monday, the cops would hear about the Novavax, tie me up sex games on Monday when mother and daughter started to go for one another's throats.

Coming up, they should have been united in grief. Instead, there would be a feud sparked by a single troubling moment. As I'm sitting there, my suspicions are growing and growing by the minute when Dateline continues.

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So. Who had bound, gagged and bludgeoned to death, Ben Novak Jr., the scene. It was overwhelming. I mean, to see it and just thinking, oh, my God, in this case, the detectives art of victimology would play a big role in finding out who the murdered person was, as well as the people in a circle of friends and families, his enemies. So this is the address here. Detective Allison Carpentier, along with Detective Terry Wilson, would eventually piece together an unflattering family portrait.

In the beginning, we didn't know if an affair. Was this a domestic? Was this just a random act?

They cobbled together the story of Ben Jr., the wealthy son of a famous Miami Beach man with his eccentric Batman collection, The Wife From Modest Beginnings, the stepdaughter welcome late to the Family Circle.

We were still learning the dynamics of the family. How much was a stepchild? It took a long time for us to learn more about the family.

The Novavax came off like candidates, maybe for the cast of a bad reality show. But good old fashioned robbery still look like motive. No one in the homicide. Ben Novak Junior was a hard charging businessman. A lot of guys didn't like his style. That's correct. He could have cultivated enemies along the line. There were a lot of people that didn't like him.

On the Monday after the Sunday morning murder, police took Narcy and her daughter to the morgue to identify Ben Jerry's body. Was that when they started to get the creeps about what had happened watching her stone faced mother watch? I'm throwing up in a garbage can.

You know, detectives are like right there and everything else. And we all turn around and she is just staring at them. There was no emotion at all from her.

So that Monday, late into the night, Narcy and her daughter were interrogated by the detectives. I should have been there.

I wish I had told Detective Carpentier broach the sensitive subject of the couple's sex life.

I know this is hard. You want to speak to me alone? You wanted to leave with a male detective out of the room. Detective Carpentier managed to win Narcis Trust.

Narcy confided that Ben was into bondage and when he eventually came up, if he like his hands behind his back from behind his the and now here he'd been tied up in the homicide.

Did you think, well, is this a sex game gone wrong?

We had put it up to her and I did. Confronted with that during the interview, Dennistoun in a way that he enjoyed sex. Oh, no, no. When I found out who I am, I just found it odd that the way he finds pleasurable, he's killed in the same way because she was the spouse.

The questions for Narcy got sharper as the night wore on. Was she in on the murder?

I mean, is the island and I know I don't listen to all the while. May had been outside eavesdropping on her mother's interrogation, getting chills. They said to me that somebody told her it was a blood bath. I don't think my mind is just listening to her talk to detectives, nothing was making sense.

When she heard her mother describe tripping over the body and reaching down to touch Ben, alarms went off. She'd seen her mother shortly after that.

I'm looking at her and there is no blood on her in a scene that was described to you as a black as a blood bath.

Correct. And I'm looking at her from head to toe there. But you don't see any of it? I don't see any evidence on her. What do you think and what's going on? Suspicions are growing and growing by the minute. And then I'm thinking that I am this horrible human being for even thinking that my mother could do something like this.

For 14 relentless hours, homicide detectives tried to pin back nasty Novavax ears, grilling her as though she'd masterminded her husband's murder.

Did you have anything to do with that? No, she never ate anything. She never drank anything. And she never went to the bathroom. The detectives would come in, questioned her. She would just just keep flowing. Nothing faced.

The question had been hired, a kinky escort girl to tie them up. Nurses scoffed at the idea and told the detectives to tone it down.

How long do they have compassion? Please have mercy. If he is an electrical charge in how many they give it to me right now for me out of my misery, I want to die.

Shortly after nine p.m., Detective Carpentier brought up the idea of a lie detector test.

I set out to recite the facts as I do whatever you want me to do.

So at this point, I'm like hoping that I am completely wrong. If she takes this polygraph test and she passes, then I'm just going crazy in my own head, there's no way she did this.

May also agreed that night to be polygraphed, but then Narcy got cold feet about taking hers.

And the daughter is saying to her mother, what is wrong with you? Why don't you just take the lie detector test?

What's the problem? The mother finally agreed to the polygraph. May would pass her test.

But how did the lie detector test go for Narcy? It didn't go well. She flunked it all the way through. Yes.

When the cops were finally done with the two of them for the night, they confronted her mother. I asked her to her face, what did you have something to do with us? I did. I got in her face and they had pictures of, like the crime scene and stuff, and I smacked them in our face.

You think your mother is killed, Ben Jr.?

I think she definitely had something to do with it. You know, I didn't think she did it herself personally.

The cops, it only started to peel back the many layers of the Novak family story. There was still so much about these people. They didn't know what was coming up.

There were a few things May herself didn't know. I see my mother coming at me with a crowbar. When family affair continues. The cops were spooling through hours of hotel security cam footage looking for what they weren't exactly sure the footwork, tedium of a homicide investigation was underway or leaving the doors open as far as we're concerned.

Everything's on the table until the investigation either stalls or, you know, someone's arrested.

The body of Ben Novac, Jr. was with the medical examiner.

Mother and daughter attatched, now by blood, only returned to Florida separately. Many had her own agenda, telling the cops she'd help them any way she could. She was collecting her things from her parents house when she stopped in the guest cottage where Ben had his home office. She was snooping through his files for the detectives when she turned to see her mother upon her like a fury. I see my mother coming at me with a crowbar and I very quickly she swung it and I poked my arm up and she got this Hoenn on me with the crowbar.

It was literally the final blow for me. She was calling me a traitor. She knew that you were giving evidence against her. Could you have backed off at that point? Could you have been a good little daughter and fallen in line? No, it's not in me. I knew what she had done was wrong. Even though she was my mother, I knew she was wrong.

The battleground between mother and daughter then moved from the Novak house to the courthouse. A take no prisoners fight over the will. May was giving the cops her theory. Her mother had murdered her stepfather for the inheritance nasty as the beneficiary stood to get an estate estimated at ten million dollars lock stock and Batmobile.

At this point, my mother was to get everything and I was actually going to get away with this may file a civil lawsuit against her mother, arguing the probate court shouldn't award Narcy Ben's money because she'd had him killed. The judge ended up freezing Ben's assets while the court looked into the daughter's allegation. So the big money was on ice. But May said her mother had already by then illicitly cleaned out the safe deposit boxes kept by Ben and his mother.

Was she on the list of people that had the key to get out?

She was not. No, she was not. She told him a story. She did. My husband's out in the car waiting. Mm hmm. And he'd been dead for a week at that point.

Yeah.

Narcy was seen leaving the bank with a duffel bag with police scrutinizing her every move and May hounding her. Narcy hired New York attorney Howard Tanner. He says Narcy did have authority to go into those safe deposit boxes. He also disputed Meiwes contention that Narsi was involved in her husband's death.

She had absolutely nothing to do with it. And she when she discovers Ben Novak, she acted consistently with how anyone else would act in that situation.

And the defense attorney urged anyone looking at this case to follow the money in Ben's murder down there in the fine print of the will.

It shows that may the daughter may have had her own reasons for wanting Ben dead. And her mother accused May Abott and her children were the next in line. If somehow Narcy was removed from the line of inheritance, the daughter Mahabad would get ten million dollars from her children. That's correct.

With Narcy out of the picture, May would get a flat one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and her two boys, the rest of the ten million dollar estate Narcy began offering her own theory of the crime.

May did it when she realized, you know, the finger was pointed, been pointed out her, you know, and she accused me of arranging to kill that correct. For the money. The mother and daughter finger pointing accusations continued without cease fire, even as the intern men in his family mausoleum, Narcy hidden beneath sunglasses and a scarf and had ignored her daughter. The mother was flanked by armed bodyguards. The daughter brought her sons. One of my mother's bodyguards flashed his guns at my kids.

I'm packing in case there's any doubt one of those kinds of gestures. Yeah, I saw the extent of everything when she threatened her own grandkids, and I always said she'd never do anything to her grandkids. She loves these kids.

There was mother daughter war, bad blood for sure. But the detectives were about to learn that was another close relative of interest in this toxic family portrait and more crimes to investigate, perhaps even another murder coming up from out of the blue, a twist, a clue that could turn the case upside down.

This is shocking and it could be a big break. And then revisiting those hotel security videos, the site that she told investigators when Dateline continues. Hey, everyone, it's Chris Hayes. You know, these days, I find it helpful to just take a step back from the day to day onslaught of news and take a broader look at the issues I haven't had time to cover on my TV show, all in everything from the legacy of racism in America to how community and creativity can flourish amidst a pandemic.

I do it each week on my podcast. Why is this happening? And I'm joined by uniquely qualified guests like Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Nicole Hannah Jones.

Progress does not mean justice or equality or that we are right. After 400 years of black people being in this country, the time for marking incremental progress and patting ourselves on the back for that has been long over. Author Rebecca Solnit.

How do we take care of each other in the context of not being able to physically be with each other in ordinary ways and many others who help me make sense of what's happening in our society and our world?

I really enjoy your conversations. I hope you will too. So join me for new episodes every Tuesday. Just search for why is this happening wherever you're listening right now and subscribe. Mother and daughter each had a ten million dollar motive for murder as the detective saw it. But Sergeant Terry Wilson was focusing on Narcy. He knew he didn't have enough to charge her with her husband's death, at least not yet. She had an alibi for the assumed time of the murder.

The case against her was circumstantial.

So someone else must have gotten into the room and killed her husband. But who then, seemingly out of nowhere, an anonymous letter fluttered under the desk of a detective a thousand miles away from the crime scene. Miami Springs, Florida investigator Gary Fetters personally knew nothing of the Ben Novak case, and his department wasn't involved.

There's people, obviously, that heard the name and knew about him, the fountain, blue and all. I wasn't one of them. I didn't know anything about it until I talked to Detective Wilson in New York.

The letter written in Spanish was nothing less than a blueprint to the murder, naming names, citing motivations.

This is shocking and it could be a big break.

Sergeant Wilson up in Westchester couldn't wait to see it.

Whoever wrote this letter obviously had information inside, information looking back that that letter had the whole story, the greed, the inheritance, the obstacles in the way of the inheritance. The facts of that letter were on the money.

Here's the gist of the letter. It claimed Nazis' brother, a man named Crystal Ball Vellis, had hired some thugs to kill Ben Novak Jr.

Sergeant Wilson and his team paid an unannounced visit to the brother at his place in Philadelphia.

We apparently had caught him off guard and he bought a sentence to sit down and he'd be more than happy to answer any questions we had. And as we sit down, we said at this kitchen table and the kitchen table is littered with papers, Wilson and another detective spied something atop the heap.

There's Western Union receipts and this is all right out in the open. This is too good to be true. Like pinch me. And we're holding the conversation with him, trying to not focus on the table because we want to draw attention to it.

When Nurses' brother briefly left the room, Sergeant Wilson's partner furiously copied down names, dates and receipt numbers.

Why would nurses brother, a bus driver just scraping by, be wiring loads of money to one particular person in Miami?

One of the names in the receipts as Garcia is all right. One hundred Garcia. But the surname Garcia in Miami is like being a Murphy in Boston. Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

They began running it all down and security cameras picked up nazis' brother wiring the money from Philly. But at the receiving end in Miami, the cameras were on the fritz. No luck in getting pictures of this Garcia guy picking up the money. So they moved on to the brother's cell phone records and found frequent calls to a woman in Miami.

Turns out the phone belonged to Garcia's ex-girlfriend and he'd been using her.

They talked to her with a big break, came with she said that he had a defective by a Garcia with a bad eye.

The database search was narrowed.

And now we have some sort of physical description to see if this individual was arrested. And lo and behold, he was so Garcia with a he comes out of the database, pops up, and that's how we get a up.

Now, the detectives were on a roll with Alejandro Garcia's mug shot before them. They reracked those hotel security tapes from the day of the murder.

This is the main entrance. Here they come. Bingo.

There was Garcia in the dark shirt with somebody else. His ex-girlfriend said he always wore sunglasses to protect his bad eye, but he wasn't wearing them on that day.

And you see the two of them walking very fast out. Alejandro is the bag. Alejandro doesn't have his glasses on anymore with the broken frames, which are now well, apparently, as the victim reacts to the assault, he hits Alejandro in the face, breaking the glasses. The glasses fall onto the bed.

They rewound the tapes even further back to the first day of the convention. And there they were again, Garcia in sunglasses and a yellow shirt and the other guy casing the hotel. In one chilling scene, they check out their future victim, Ben Novac Jr. in the lobby. And in less than 48 hours are going to murder this guy and this 48 hours to get rid of this guy.

The second man is IDed as Joel Gonzalez of Miami. Wilson and his team had two targets and started with the apparent leader, Garcia, who started to hunt him down.

The Miami hunt didn't take long. Garcia was picked up on an outstanding warrant. The New York cops braced him.

Garcia denied ever being in New York.

He's on video in a hotel. I saw detectives had some surprises to smoke out there. One, I suspect they showed him stills from the security cam footage, Garcia and his sister. Affected accomplice in the hotel, the capper was a tape recording of a phone call between a detective and nurse's brother, Cristobal in the call, Nazis' brother sounding all cooperative, says he wants to help the cops and gives them the name Alejandro Garcia as a person. Good for the murder.

Garcia listened silently as the brother threw him under the bus.

Cristobal, who the murder Cristabel, told me you Putin says having baby.

But he denied being the hitman in that interrogation. But the message was clear. Get on board now. Confess or take the fall.

He's going to be booked on charges of murder.

Meanwhile, the evidence against Nurses' brother was piling up. Cell phone tower records showing him near the hotel on the morning of the murder evidence. He'd provided a getaway car and driver who was in charge of this gang.

The conspirators, the street boss that was handling everything that was going on was Cristobal Police and who was the boss of bosses with a ten million dollar motive.

There was only one answer for the cops. Narcy Novak had ordered the hit on her husband.

Obviously, he reported to NASA. I worked in that direction.

What started as a small suburban village investigation was now a multi-state conspiracy case. The decision was made to let federal prosecutors take the complex conspiracy to trial the suspected hitmen. Garcia and Gonzales were offered a deal, testify against nursing and her brother, or go away to prison for what would likely be life sentences. The two confessed to being the hitman and a murder for hire scheme. Then Garcia shot the prosecutors. There was something else, a second murder they didn't know about.

And if they didn't act fast, he said, a third was on the way. Coming up, just who was in the crosshairs? There was a hit out on me, this detective's personal quest to save this daughter in danger when family affair continues. This is the brother of the two hitmen had confessed, admitting to killing Ben Novak Jr., They claimed Ben's wife nursing and her brother paid them to do it. But still no charges have been filed as police continue to investigate.

And then the hitman, Alejandro Garcia, dropped a bombshell.

He claimed he also killed someone else on orders from Narcy and her brother almost a year earlier and he'd gotten away with it. The murder for hire, none other than Ben Novavax, 87 year old mother Bernice, the one time queen of the fountain blue died three months before Ben.

And what Florida cops and the medical examiner ruled was an accidental death, a slip and fall, getting out of her car as he killer had a monkey wrench and he took what appeared to be a baseball swing several times that Garcia said he got paid 600 dollars for the job.

But why kill Benn's 87 year old mother?

Because in Benzoyl will in place at the time, if he died first, his mother, not his wife, Narcy, would be the primary beneficiary, but with Burnie's dead. There was nothing standing in nurse's way.

Had they not tried to kill Ben and succeeded in killing Ben, they would have probably never been caught.

And there was more. When detectives arrested Garcia, they learned that still a third murder might be in the works someone else provided for in the will Narcis daughter May. She was in serious peril and I always believed that she was.

I just couldn't prove it to anybody. But when we sat down with Alejandro Garcia and learned that there was a hit out on me that became concerning, a battered photo of me was found in Garcia, the confessed hit man's wallet.

He was told she'd be the next job. Well, Maiffret, she needed to move apartments ASAP and told federal prosecutors she didn't have the money. The feds told her they'd get her the money, but the paperwork would take time. Detective Alison Carpentier didn't think there was time.

And here came a moment of big moral dilemma, ethical dilemma for you as a person and an officer. Yes, it was hard. What did you decide to do? I decided to give you the money and to remove your money from your bank account. Yes.

The Westchester detective loaned me 5000 dollars of her own money. They promised to pay her back. When prosecutors learned of it, they removed Detective Carpentier from the case. The defense, they admonished, would call it buying witness testimony.

And I said, I can't sleep at night knowing that if I wake up tomorrow morning, something happens to me and her children. And I did nothing.

I am very grateful to her because if I didn't move when I did, I wouldn't be here today.

Almost a year after Ben's murder, Narsi was indicted and walked before the cameras of America's Most Wanted. She and her brother Crystal Ball were charged with racketeering and conspiracy for two murders, witness tampering and a host of other charges. The plot that led to the death of Ben Novack was a family affair when the trial got underway in federal court, Garcia, the hitman, testified an ice cold detail how he killed Ben Novak. June.

So how did they get into the room? Narsi opened the door and let them in.

Prosecutors argued that morning there was a small window of opportunity for Narcy to let the hitmen in and direct the assault on her sleeping husband. The victim is in bed.

They get right in position. They signal one to three and then boom, then the assault starts and they're banging him in the hotel. They hit him all over the head. They hit him in the ribs brutally. The two hit men use small hand weights to pummel Ben Narcy looked on. Then there is a point in time where I guess he's he's making sounds, moans, and she tosses a pillow in to keep him quiet.

And they say that Narcy tells them to cut out his eyes. She did at mid trial. The case against Marcy's brother was solid. A long trail of wire transfers, credit card receipts and cell phone records connected him to the hitman. But for Narcy, it was primarily the hit man's word against hers. Until the jury heard about Narcy secret cell phone on the morning of the murder, Garcia testified that Narcy called her brother while they waited at a gas station near the hotel.

Narcy makes a call from their phone at six thirty nine in the morning. The saying, come on in. You know the coast is clear, the coast is clear. That becomes huge because it's her calling Cristobal to say bring the killers in, puts her right at the top of the plot. The conspiracy. Yes.

And there's yet another twist. Would you be surprised to learn that there was another woman in this story, a person named Rebecca BLIS? You're looking mighty sexy today. Well, thank you. BLIS, a South Florida tattoo artist and sometime porn actress, was having an affair with Ben Junior. He put her up. The nice waterfront apartment and told Bliss he was going to leave his wife for her Narcy, the story goes learned of the affair and called Bliss, saying, if I can't have him, no one will.

Six months later, he was dead and without eyes to ever look at another woman. This case was about money and it was about Narcy not want to be replaced.

When defense attorney Howard Tanner put on his case, he zeroed in on the hit men's credibility and their motivation in testifying. He also attacked their allegation that Morsi was in the room during the murder.

They themselves stated that they would do anything to help themselves. In my book, they would have been willing to lie. Is Narcy in the room? Absolutely not. And how about the disturbing direction she allegedly gives them gouges is that it just didn't happen.

The defense also suggested that nurse's daughter may could have somehow been involved in the murder so she and her sons could inherit Bend's estate, may abide had Narcy Novak in her way.

If Narcy Novak disappears, she takes and her children take under the will. Those are facts.

So that's the defense. Jurors consider who's going to get this money here. And it's not just Narcy Novak. It's the daughter here. May, there was an incomplete investigation done in this case. I'm not claiming that that anyone else committed this murder. The defense here is that Narcy Novak did not commit this murder.

Detectives concluded that they knew nothing about Benzoyl till well after the murder.

I didn't even know that my name or the boys names were in this. Well, after a nine week trial, Narcy and her brother were found guilty of racketeering and conspiracy in the death of Ben Novac Jr. and his mother, Berniece.

They were acquitted of only one charge involving the theft of Benn's diamond bracelet for the crime. The conspirators almost got away with the murder of Burness Novak. The conviction carried a mandatory life sentence for both.

The best part of it was that Burnie's could finally rest in peace.

After the verdict, Narcy spoke by telephone with Dateline from prison. She says she would never have done anything to harm her husband, Ben, and was innocent of all the charges. Sergeant Terry Wilson and his team of detectives, the prosecutors won their case with some big assist from May Abullah. Now her mother is gone and will spend the rest of her life in prison.

She didn't see what she had in front of her. She had her daughter. She had two grandkids that totally loved her. And now she has nothing and greed and some amount of jealousy presumably is driving this. Absolutely. No matter what, I loved my mother. She was my mother. She had grandkids that adored her, that would have done anything for her. And they did. And she just threw it all the way through, all the way for money, if you go to Miami Beach, the fountain blue is still there, all spruced up with a new lease on life.

And May has a fresh new outlook on the rest of her life to everybody, a new little guy in her life, a she named him back after the lost prince, the namesake he never got to meet. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thank you for joining us.