Roberta Samard

A grandfather killed in his house in Oregon.

“The victim was on the back porch, but I have been told”

that a woman and possibly shot her husband. The evidence appears to point to a tragic accident. There's really no sign of any struggle. A lot of mistakes happen in the dark. You can stub your tail or end up accidentally killing your husband.

[music playing] But when details fail to add up, detectives begin to suspect a cold-blooded murder. And the bottom of a laundry camper was a foreclosure notice.

She had built house of cards on lies and deception.

And information from beyond the grave reveals the killer's deceit. Well, looking through this office, we come across this notebook. The last thing he writes is, maybe I'll be on my own.

“The little lies turned into big lies, turned into, how do I get out of this?”

[music playing] Millersburg, Oregon is a town of about 3,000 people, halfway between Portland and Eugene. It's a small city in London County that really doesn't have much crime, much burglary, much theft, hardly any major crime.

In the early morning hours of November 16, 2015,

this normally quiet community awakens to the sound of sirens, as local sheriffs respond to a frantic 9-1-1 call. [music playing] So, you've been shot? Yeah, man, can you take a deep breath and tell me what happened?

[laughter]

“Yes, let's go, Dad. We'll see what's in this little city here.”

Okay, we're going to get help sent out way, okay? Stay on the line with me. Deputies quickly arrive at the home of Ken and Roberta Samard, a couple in their late 50s and early 60s. When police arrive on the scene, it's still dark outside, you know, it's early morning hours. They encountered Roberta, she was in the house,

still on the phone with 911. They brought her out to the front porch. They start talking to Roberta. She seems a little out of it. She is telling them, "I did it. I shot my husband." But she had planned to die by suicide.

Her husband, he was going to leave her work and had at some point come back in, and interrupted Roberta's plan to take her life. She happened to accidentally shoot him. Roberta is taken into custody and held in the back of their patrol car while detectives arrive on scene.

I got paged out that a shooting that had occurred in Miller's Bird, which was only five to seven minutes away from my house. As you walk in the front door, there's a glass door that leads out onto a wood porch. The victim, Ken Somart, was on the back porch. It was pretty easy to tell, he was deceased.

The gun was inside the threshold near that door. It was a pretty unique gun, like a snub nose, 38 stainless steel, but it had pink grips on it. From the looks of it, probably a few males gun. I was told that it was a woman had possibly shot her husband,

but he wasn't supposed to be there. I thought maybe this guy left her work, came back and she thought it was a birdler, accidentally shot it. I have to look for a reason as to why this tragic event happened. It is an accident, we're going to have to figure out why it happened.

We need to obtain some more flavors from more in depth of what happened that morning. Ken Somart was born in Albany, Oregon, on January 25th, 1958.

Ken was a very hard worker. He always had a job. He grew up farming.

“When he was probably a 16, he worked in the fields during the Combining Windrowing and Plowing.”

He graduated in '76, and he joined the Navy. He married his girlfriend, Bikki, and he was in a Navy for four years, and was stationed various places. He had a pretty funny dry sense of humor. His personality was one of, I would say, good character. He really cared about people.

Ken was a very kind person. He went out of his way to help anybody. He left to learn new skills and just being there for his family and really helping us family. When Ken returned home from deployment, he found work as an engineer.

“But the time away had caused him and his wife to drift apart.”

When he came home, the marriage didn't last very long. So they were divorced and soon after that he met Cindy. My dad met my mom through my uncle and his girlfriend. I have two brothers. Brad is the oldest. I'm the middle child, and Matthew is the youngest. Dad took us camping all the time when we were kids.

And we'd go gold panning, or go hiking, or we'd go fishing, or hunting, or whatever.

Just always kind of had a good time.

Unfortunately, his second marriage only lasted a few years longer than his first.

“My mom and dad were divorced when I was around two.”

My mom and dad both have really different personalities and wanted different things in life. And it just, they kind of grew apart. Starting over for the second time, Ken was now in his early 30s. He took a job at a paper mill in Miller'sburg, Oregon, and put his engineering skills to use as a member of the Oregon National Guard.

We were in the maintenance section. He was a mechanic. So as I, we became fast friends. We're traveling to wherever, you know, the vehicles are that we're working on. Ken spent the following years focused on his work and his children. Then, in 1996, 38-year-old Ken met the woman who would become his third wife, 43-year-old, Roberta Bogart. Roberta was at the mill. She was a secretary there. They went out on some dates,

and, like, say, no, they were, they were together. She was previously married, and they had two boys. They grew up around here, then they moved to Alaska. We were living with my mom and we were in school, so it was just weekends that we would be with him. I was about 14 when Roberta and my dad started dating.

She was nice, she was friendly, she always had a smile on her face,

seemed to make my dad happy. Before we knew it, they flew to Las Vegas, and got married. Well, you have Roberta as your wife to share your life with her, to speak to truth to her in love, to honor and tenderly care for her. Yes, I will. Five years later, the couple bought their dream home in Millersburg.

There's a five-bedroom house with the huge barn with the property out of town. He really enjoyed that piece of land that he had. He would spoil her, Ken went and bought her a new car, because he was making a good money. They always seemed happy and go lucky. 13 years into their marriage. The couple's good fortune ended when the paper mill closed down,

and they both lost their jobs. But Ken was nothing if not resourceful. He starts a company, he becomes a roofer, then he falls on hard times again,

Despite that, Ken is a fighter. He says, "I'm going to go back to school, I'm going to

“learn a new trade," and so he begins studying to become an HVAC engineer.”

And so again, he picks himself up, and he's studying to better his life. Ken seemed very excited about HVAC school and getting out there to help people and just making up difference in someone's life. At this point in Ken's life, his adult children, his three adult children, are growing their out of the house. He's a grandfather. He's overcome some hard times,

but he's with Roberta. They're living in their dream home that they had purchased, and he's got a new career. Things are looking up for him.

“Ken's recovery is brought to an abrupt halt after another accident has resulted in his death.”

Roberta's in the back of the patrol car, the deputy's unseen and already went into the house, secured it. Ken, he appeared dressed for work. I mean, he had a jacket on, his lunchbox, a mug, his keys were back there on the back, back porch as well. There's really no sign of any struggle. There's no broken class. There are no pieces of furniture tipped over. The scene appears to match what Roberta told officers,

but they won't know for sure until they conduct a thorough investigation. He did the preliminary exam in the body, and right in the crew of the neck, we found a gunshot wound. We're trying to determine there's this gunshot wound match what Roberta's telling us. The next step, there's going to be a detective assigned to work on an application for a search warrant. So while we're waiting for that, we'll go back to our

sheriff's office and sat in an interview room, the interview room Roberta. If not under arrest or anything, we're just trying to get kind of the facts, and it's sometimes the seizure to bring it down here in an interview. Can you tell me what happened? They've been really sad, depressed. They're going to take away our house when it's soon, they just couldn't face it anymore and it couldn't face all that.

The reality is that financial stress can be massive, it can be overwhelming for a married couple.

So people do make drastic decisions. She said she was going to shoot herself and Ken showed up. It accidentally went off. He got shot, but in processing all sorts of possibilities, a lot of mistakes happen in the dark. You can stub your tail over, end up accidentally killing your husband.

“So that's what we're looking for. Now, is that what evidence can we find to support Roberta's”

statement? Or are we going to find stuff that can flicks with that? Coming up, Roberta reenacts the fatal shooting. She says she's bringing the gun up the killer herself. It accidentally goes off, and it's Ken. But was it really an accident? I wanted to believe her, want to believe her so bad. Roberta Samarth has just confessed to accidentally killing her 57-year-old husband Ken in a

botched suicide attempt. Lin County detectives press her for more details. Roberta tells us when Ken left for work, she retrieves his fire from the bedroom. I was chasing her in my house and

didn't just do it instantly when I thought I had the chance because I could always think of

with my kids. And did you think Ken didn't already love? So if you don't want to have the door, you have the house usually doesn't come back. She tells detectives that for some reason he came back in to the house and caught her in that very moment.

what? And he has this weird look on his face. And I said, I love you. And then the next thing I made will get rid of all. She said when she's bringing the gun up the killer herself, it accidentally goes off, and it's Ken. What would be my response if I saw my spouse doing something like that? You know, I'd probably reach out and try to grab the gun. Well, if there's a struggle, she pulls away, he pulls a close,

she loses her balance. Now the gun's up, now it accidentally goes off.

“He's alive. I think he was going to take you would take it away from ease. He's probably going”

in, so he'll be inside. And so I, I mean, dancing, I don't know what happened. You're thinking, man, this lady just was in a mental health crisis now. She's just suffered this tragic loss. It's her husband. So yeah, not being able to remember minor details wasn't unusual. Roberta's memory might be hazy, but she's clear about one thing. Roberta maintains, I shot him, but this was not supposed to happen. This was an accident. I love

my husband. We have a lot of these cases where some of you will kill their spouse and then kill themselves.

I gave her five enough to help me cut it. Never, I'm not this woman. Never. Never think about her again. Never. Never.

Rather than taking Roberta's word at face value, detectives talk to the Samarids loved ones to gain insight into their marriage. Can, and Roberta, they live alone, they don't have any remains.

“Your interview in the family to see, oh, is it possible Ken's abusive? Is Roberta controlling?”

Nobody really says that. They describe Ken and Roberta as kind of the perfect couple. Ken and Roberta did seem very happy when they worked together. They'd be joking and enjoying

each other's company. In all the time that I knew him and new Roberta, he never said a bad word

about her. He really cared about her. Ken's family was unaware of any financial troubles at home. My uncle read in the newspaper that my dad's house was up for foreclosure. So he called my dad and said, you know, hey, Ken, what's going on with the house? You know, do you need some help? And my dad said, no, no, Roberta's got it all under control. She said it

“was a mix-up and they changed mortgage companies or something and she sent the check to place A and”

it should have went to place B, but it's all covered. It's all good to go. Loved ones also say their surprise to learn Roberta had been struggling with her mental health.

She was always smiling. She was, you know, always positive. Always up and going.

I never knew her to be suicidal or to be depressed. Despite receiving positive impressions from family and friends, the timing of Roberta's attempted suicide and Ken's sudden return doesn't feel quite right. It seems a little unlikely that at that very moment Ken might have walked in right as she planned to shoot herself, but it's not completely out of the realm of possibility.

There were a lot of questions asked where she said, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. And we're imagining stuff on just limited information. If we put that with the actual physical actions, we can put it in perspective. To verify Roberta's version of events, detectives offer an unorthodox solution. You have two people, one person's dead, one story. At this point, she either

didn't remember or she didn't grab the gun.

Detectives prepare to return to the scene to allow Roberta to reenact the mornings events.

“One of the things that helps us understand the chain of events that occur is a reenactment.”

So once Ken's body was gone, we proposed that Roberta to do the reenactment back at the house. She agreed. So we drove her back and the house was still being processed for for evidence and we did a video recording reenactment. My partner played the role of Ken. So let's go, let's go ahead and shut the door. And he's standing out there like about like that.

Because he must have been like right there and when I opened up the door, I'm standing like this

and he took a step back. I dropped it.

“So we got the devil here, right? Who would like a former devil in front of him?”

Yeah. So he had the finger down and he's right there, let's go open the door. He's going to take a step back and open the door, right? So when she opens the door, it's definitely a shame that we'll talk about.

It gave us kind of a perspective of how close they were to each other,

which you know, probably two feet apart at most. Some close enough to where, yeah, Ken kind of reached out and grabbed it. Roberta's reenactment suggests the barrel of the gun was about 18 inches from Ken when it was fired. The story Roberta's telling detectives makes sense when you look at the trajectory of the bullet.

The way it entered through Ken's neck, he's almost a foot taller than her. And so she says the gun went off as I'm bringing it up to my head. That lines up. How she portrayed it, it was possible. I wanted the believer on the believer so bad. But one of the things that stuck out in my mind was, here we are, standing at the glass door, looking out on a patio where just hours earlier her husband died.

There was no emotion, no tears, nothing. After Roberta's confusing reenactment, investigators acquire a search warrant for the samard home. They need to search every inch of this house to figure out what happened here. There has to be more information. So they begin searching the house. We're looking for any type of evidence to see they're going to prove or disprove Roberta's story.

There was a clean house. This is a well-kept, older person's home, just looked organized. In the course of their search, detectives find something out of place. And the bottom of a laundry hamper was a foreclosure notice relating to the cell of Kinder Roberta's home for non-payment on the mortgage. It was rather weird where we found it because I know I don't, and I'm sure a lot of people don't

“file important paperwork in the bottom of a laundry hamper.”

In an otherwise tidy home, it looks to investigators as though Roberta could have been trying to hide the paperwork from her husband. Roberta's signature was the only signature on those foreclosure documents. Ken's signature was not on them. In Ken's office, they find something equally intriguing. They find a notebook that Ken had filled out was a really self-reflective type of notebook.

It gives you a peek behind the curtain of their marriage between him and Roberta.

It's really the only thing we have that gave us his thoughts and his feelings.

“As I'm reading Ken's notes, I'm thinking, "You poor bastard."”

Just hours after the shooting, investigators are conducting a thorough examination of the Samard home. Having just found a foreclosure document revealing the Samard's dire financial situation, another piece of evidence emerges in Ken's office. When we were looking, you know, we go room by room and as we're looking through this office, we come across this notebook.

It was found in with his homework for the HVAC classes. Seems like he would just been free writing, you know, to get his emotions out. In his notebook, Ken complains about the frequent conflicts in his marriage. It had some notes in there about Roberta being controlling up money.

He might always have to ask permission for money or permission to spend money.

In another themselves, they weren't really anything, but it started to provide an insight into maybe this marriage or the things that Roberta had told us. Maybe the relationship wasn't all a peaches and cream. It spills it out pretty clearly that Ken does not have an accounting of where his money is going or their money is going.

That does mention that she's allowed to spend money, but when he spends the money, it causes an argument. You really get this idea that he's helpless and that Roberta is the one who holds all the power in their marriage. Toward the end of the notebook, Ken even writes about leaving Roberta. The last thing he writes is, maybe I'll be on my own.

I think he was just probably about ready to sever that relationship. To investigators, the notebook puts Ken's shooting in a new perspective.

“It's really the only thing we have that gave us Ken's thoughts and his feelings.”

So that's the closest we could get to how he was feeling or what his perspective, the relationship was.

I never ever expected that there was any problem in their marriage or that my dad had ever even

had those thoughts from the outside looking in. We thought Dad was happy he was living his life, he was, you know, having fun doing what he wanted to do, and that wasn't the case. Knowing that house was in foreclosure, detectives dig into where the money was going. Roberta liked having the fancy things and basically being viewed in a certain light. She liked to spoil her friends, like she liked to buy them, um, like extravagant gifts.

I just can't imagine if you don't have the money to pay for your house. Well, how you would be buying extravagant gifts from your friends.

“I really think give this impression that you're well-off and living this fabulous life.”

What they learned from this notebook is really important because detectives are looking at this wondering, could this be a motive as to why she shot him? The notebook combined with the foreclosure paperwork start to paint a clear picture. Whether Kim gave Roberta the impression that he was on the verge of leaving, probably in her mind, she knew that once he found out about the house,

he was going to be done. Investigators review Roberta's 911 call for further proof. Roberta, I'm sorry. I need you to take a few breaths and try and calm down. Can you check and tell me if you okay? Can you tell me where he was shot?

You don't want to go see if he's okay?

“There's a lot of things during this investigation that just didn't make sense.”

She can't tell the dispatcher where she shot him. She doesn't want to check on him. She, during the interview, she acts like she's crying, but there's no tears. You put everything together and there's this just a whole facade of a web of lies. After a swift investigation, detectives sit back down with Roberta Samard, just 12 hours after Ken's death. We hadn't had a chance to get the autopsy done yet through an operating on information that we had,

came back to the sheriff's office and had some follow-up questions. Here's kind of a wrap. It is, you know, obviously something bad happened to the death of this chaos. And looking at your story and everything you've told us, it rises to the level of a manslaughter. So you will be arrested today.

“Well, I think you probably had that thought in your mind at some point.”

I think Roberta was in disbelief that she was actually getting arrested. In her mind, she thought she was going to be able to just walk out the front door of free woman.

As Roberta spends her first night in jail, local TV picks up the story.

And investigators receive a call from a local real estate investor that helps put the pieces together. I was a house footer, so I flipped homes, bottom at four closure auctions. And then as watching that, a lot of my clock news, and then I was totally shocked. My mind is like, "Oh my gosh, that's my house." The next morning I called the Sheriff's Office, basically like, "Hey, I own the house now.

Do you need to talk to me?"

“The learned Roberta had worked with the new owner to stay in the house for a few more weeks,”

which that time came in win, so she got another extension.

You know, we're surmising that can never had an idea.

The fact that the house was sold from under Ken's feet further immense detective suspicions. The last fight had spoken with the husband. I never seen him, never spoke with him, only dealt with Roberta. And, you know, in my conversations with her, she's like, "Oh, I handle the finances. I just don't want to upset my husband, rather not a victor." So, give her an extra week or so, and then next thing I know that night before,

we're supposed to get possession of the property, and our mugshot came across the train. I was so shocked, you know, she was just like a little older lady, she was looked harmless. Brian's statement appears to confirm Ken didn't know he lost his dream home. The day Ken died, was the day that they were supposed to be packed up and moved out of that house. There were no moving boxes. If I lost my house, and I had to be out that day,

and my house was impacted, I probably wouldn't be going to work. I'd probably be packing. A month before all of this happened, my dad had started buying materials, and they were still sitting out back to build on to the porch. So, why would it be doing upgrades to a house that

is going up before closure? My dad absolutely loved that house. He would have never lost that house,

especially not for the minimal amount of money that was still owed on it. It seems Roberta had spent months hiding the truth from Ken, but time had finally run out, and detective suspect she acted out of desperation. When you look at everything as a whole, and you see, the walls were closing in around her. I mean, they were losing their house that day.

But all of that could also lend itself to Roberta's story of that she was extremely depressed and had nowhere to turn, and she was going to take her life. And so, what detectives

On November 17, the day after Ken's shooting, the medical examiner performs an autopsy.

Investigators hope it will provide the proof they're looking for. The biggest finding in the autopsy was, was the wound Ken suffered was the close contact wound, which tells us that Mosul's going to be right up there, close in center, there's going to be charting, sitting around the wound, and probably not going to happen from, you know, 18 or so inches away as she's as she described it.

“Roberta had told police she couldn't remember if Ken had tried to grab the gun to stop her”

from shooting that firearm. And what the autopsy revealed is there was no gunshot residue on Ken's hands

indicating that in all likelihood he did not try to grab the gun from her or interfere. The evidence suggests her arm was outreached and she pulled that trigger intentionally to kill Ken some more. The autopsy blows his case open. We sent the firearm to New Oregon State Police. We wanted to know what the what the trigger pull on that firearm was because if it's one of those triggers that you barely touch it and it goes off,

it's creating to Roberta's story. In this case, it was a pretty hard trigger pull. I had interviewed some people that had taken her to the firing range, and she had struggled shoot the gun. She had to squeeze that trigger pretty tight for it to go off, which tells them you did this on purpose. This was intentional. Following Ken's autopsy, the charges against Roberta are increased from first degree manslaughter

to murder. The trial set for April 6, 2017, Louis County Courthouse, here in Albany. The outcome of Roberta Samar's murder trial hinges on the interpretation of the medical examiner's findings. The prosecution's trying to prove it was a close contact with him. The defense

“is trying to prove it wasn't. The trial was long, hard. Images I will never forget.”

But my dad's always been big on justice, like you can't be a criminal in this world and not

expect to pay the consequence for it. After eight days of arguments, the cases handed over to the jury, they take five hours to deliberate. The jury comes back and sides with the prosecution determining that Roberta is guilty of murdering her husband Ken. Roberta is ultimately sentenced to 25 years in prison. I think 25 years is kind of a petty sentence. However, going in at 63, the odds are against her. I honestly don't think that you'll make it out of there.

That being said, harsh as that may sound, I'm okay with that. Despite her conviction, Roberta continues to insist she's innocent and many questions still remain. In this investigation, the hardest thing for people to get their minds around is the whole circumstances why Roberta resorted to killing Ken. What was the point of that? I still think it was going to be a murder suicide. She was going to kill him and then herself. Maybe it was. She wanted to say

if Ken from embarrassment of losing his house, but she'd check it out. I don't think at all that she

“was going to commit suicide. She's not that kind of person. I think that she just planned it wrong.”

She had built a house of cards on lies and deception and the pressure caused her this now. I think it all could have been avoided if she would have been honest with Ken. I bet you

I'm still very much so angry with her and doing everyone to see her face, really.

“Roberta choosing to kill Ken didn't solve anything. It didn't solve any of her problems.”

She destroyed her own life. She took away a man who meant a lot to a lot of people.

Ken was someone I looked up to. He always listened. He could tell him anything.

“So I tried to be there for my child and my family and the way that he was for me.”

I just wish he was still here and could play with his grandkids and watch him grow up.

I want people to know that my dad was a good guy. There was no physical, mental, emotional abuse.

“There was none of that going on. He loved her. He took care of her. I feel like she owes us”

a reason why. We want the truth. Will we ever get that? Probably not.