Cut, Color, Kill | 2. The Stranger at the Wake

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In a ballroom in Las Vegas, the stage is lit with purple neon lights. There's a glittering

backdrop and a long catwalk that extends out into the audience. Thousands of spectators fill row on row of seats, all dressed to the nines. It's clearly a high-end runway crowd. This is the grand final of the North American Wella Trend Vision Awards. It's like this superbowl of hairdressing. The best dialess from across North America come to compete for gold. A line of models struck down the catwalk. This is high fashion. Their hair is teased, tossled and sculpted into wild

shapes. One model looks like a dragon. Another, like some kind of glamorous alien embrace from another galaxy. Then, center stage, a spotlight. A big bear of a man with a well-trimmed beard and an enormous smile burst onto the stage. The crowd erupts as he whips them into a frenzy. Fabio Cementilie, the big daddy of hairdressing. The superstar hair stylist from Canada turned executive at one of the largest hair corporations in the world. He's living up to his name.

And the crowd loves him. Watching him, it's clear he's approachable, warm, charismatic. The kind of person, where you'd see their glow up and say, "It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy."

So, yeah. What a buoyant person. Always smiling seems very warm to the people around him.

Yeah, that was just like, that was Fabio. Melanie Garabay and I watched this video together. I catch glimpses of her as it plays. Her eyes well-up, but she's also smiling. We're watching a major milestone for her. Melanie put on this event back when she was the national show director for Wella. Back when Fabio was still alive. My job at the time was producing, you know, big huge hair fashion shows, if you will. These are a million dollar presentations for, you know, 4,000

“people, 5,000 people. Melanie's life is very different now. She runs a wine business and see”

me valley about an hour and a half north of LA depending on the traffic. Melanie's a small business owner, but she stays cool with magenta streaks in her hair. We're sitting in her tasting room. And I'm here to talk with her, that her boss, Fabio. Do you remember the last time she saw him? Was one of those small moments, you know, the kind you were playing in your mind later? A snapshot that doesn't tell the whole story of a person, but takes on new meaning after everything that happened. It was

January of 2017. She arrived at work, parked her car, she was walking in when she ran into Fabio. I had gotten a new car, got my new corvettes, and Fabio had, you know, just gotten his portion. A shiny black portion, 9/11 convertible, a dream car. He got the good parking space like

“right at the front. And I remember the last thing he said to me in the parking lot. Wow, you know,”

nice car. And he's like, don't think you're going to get away without letting me have a ride in there and that's like, yeah, you know, like, you're not going to fit in your fog, but just, um, but yeah, that was the last time and the last thing that I remember Fabio said. Six days later, Fabio was dead.

that you're like, I still was like in denial, I was in disbelief. In disbelief, because this was

her friend. Still, the people at work don't always know what's actually happening in our lives.

What darkness could have crept in unannounced. Melanie couldn't imagine who could have had it out for Fabio. But it turns out his killer had a very particular reason for wanting him out of the picture. And the clue that would send cops in the right direction would have something to do with Fabio's beloved Porsche. From Sony music entertainment and novel, this is Cut Colour Kill. I'm Jonathan Hirsch. Episode two, The Stranger At The Wake.

Fabio is dead. The leadership at Wella calls an emergency meeting. Carol Proton is there. Her jet-black hair is styled in a spiky pixie cut. She's the senior

director of education at Wella and Fabio Cementilly's right-hand woman.

The night before she got a call from Sal, their CEO, telling her that Fabio had been murdered. I just, I have no words. I could not believe it. What, what are you talking about? It was just

“like someone had just punched me. Like that must be a mistake. He's going to be okay. You know?”

Carol hung up the phone. She went into the living room and turned on the TV. CBS LA had the story. Tonight is police search for his killer. Celebrity friends are fondly remembering icon, Fabio Cementilly. The media is all over the story, repeating every gruesome detail. A murder in LA is not unusual, but this one is. Fabio's glamorous lifestyle and sleepy suburban setting and woodland hills have an allure that news editors could not resist.

He was found dead on the back porch of his woodland hills estate Monday evening. Sure enough, her ears had not deceived her. It was true. Horrible and unimaginable. But true. There was, you know, helicopter over his house and then showing and talk about this celebrity

“hairdresser who had been murdered on his patio. I'm going like, wait, what?”

Alicia Truzdale is Fabio's executive assistant. I had just spoken to him that Monday.

She got the call from sound last night too. He told her to assemble the team first thing.

We all meet in Fabio's conference room when the head of HR and South come in and talk to us. There's tears crying. People are dumbfounded. Can't even put it together or what's going on. Just numb and shock crying like this isn't happening, but it is happening. Melanie was there too. We were grieving. We were trying to process. We were trying. There was just so much, like, so much. I took my immediate team in my office.

Fabio was a fan of Ticula. So we opened the bottle of Ticula and we all had a shot for Fabio.

“That's how we kind of somehow made it, you know, through the day.”

No work is getting done today. Just quiet conversations punctuated by long stretches of grief. And it didn't take long for colleagues to wonder who had taken his life. Like stabbing is just so personal and so brutal. And, you know, you're thinking like, how can this even be happening? Someone's heard that the police are looking into the knock knock burglary crews operating in LA.

When we're thinking of that Fabio had been sitting out of this pool taking calls, smoking a cigar, we're thinking he probably didn't hear if somebody knocked at the door. They came in. Right from the beginning, the people who knew and loved Fabio have questions, rumors and speculation began to swirl. We kind of all started to think, "This is just not right. Who did Fabio piss off?"

Fabio didn't just light up the stage. He lit up the office too. He made work terrible. There is a fun for his colleagues. When he came in the morning, you knew he was there. That passion, that love of the art of what you're doing and the showmanship of it. He just brought all of himself when he came.

Carolyn Fabio were kindred spirits. They worked together on mentoring a new generation of

They even had nicknames for each other. I called him Papa Bear, a lot of people

“called him Papa Bear, but he also had a nickname in the industry that was big daddy.”

I never really liked big daddy. I thought he was a little uh, I prefer the Papa Bear.

And then I was mama bear. It was big man and big hearts, big voice, big laugh. And of course, a big success story, too. Fabio would frequently host parties at his home in Whitman Hills and invite his coworkers to come over. That was this caterer that he loved this man as she did tacos like nobody's business. And she'd set up around the pool and he'd have a fire pit going and blankets all over for the

girls to stay warm and music playing and everything. And we just would have a really good time having dinner. That's the way the cementilies were. It was welcoming like God.

Like the perfect family. Carol got to know Monica pretty well bonded very quickly.

Hang out a lot with college other on a regular basis. So yeah, we became friends. Monica felt really lonely moving to LA because, you know, obviously Fabio was working a lot. The girls were in school. She missed home a lot. She talked about missing home a lot and eventually

“moving back to Canada. So that's why I think she really appreciated when there were people around”

coming to the house because it gave her, obviously, you know, the sense of family that she was missing from moving away from Toronto where the rest of her family was. In the days after Fabio's death, some of his coworkers quickly turned their attention to supporting his family, his wife Monica and his daughters. They were, as expected, in impossible, emotional pain and turmoil. I'm immediately on the phone. I'm getting lists

from Monica who should come and I'm making arrangements for his family, his immediate family to come in and some close friends. In a few days, friends and family will arrive in LA or nearly there's a kind of expectation of finality about these events. The chance to say goodbye, pay a respects. But there is nothing was all about this case. Everyone is searching for answers. And aside from the knock-knock theory, there's very little to hold onto.

At the offices of the Valley Bureau Homicide Department, Detective Ryan Werner is making calls sifting through different theories about what had happened to Fabio. Since the news about the murder when public, he's been inundated with tips. Like, oh, it was guy named blue something new from South Central that, you know, claimed responsibility for this and, you know, I just all sorts of stuff. None of it was panning out. It was all leading the dead ends.

But there's one thing to take this out on their side. It was very, very evident there was going to be a lot of video based on the neighborhood. It's an amazing array of cameras. I mean,

I personally never seen a homeowner's association with cameras that are this good.

An officer was trolling through the footage from the day of the murder and they found something. Two, what we believe in men, dressed in oversized clothing, kind of pants, sweats, with sweatshirts that were over their head. The codies were cinched tight, so they were looking through a tiny hole. And they had the sleeves of their hoodies pulled down over their hands. You could tell in the video that they were running with a purpose.

The hooded men run up to the cemetery house at 4 a.m., then at 4.53, Fabio's Black Porsche appears, going in the opposite direction. Through the window of the car, there's a glimpse of a green hoodie. In that time, just over a half hour, Fabio was stabbed. We knew right away those were guys. [ Music ]

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for details. It's two days on from the murder when Fabio's colleagues Melanie and Carol arrive on the doorstep of the Seventy Lee House in Woodland Hills. They're here with a couple of other work friends to drop off some groceries for Monica. We brought white wine for Monica. She liked that Pino Grigio at the time cigarettes. She was smoking like a chimney at the time of his visa. We made sure that you didn't have to go anywhere. We took care of them. The best we could.

Monica invites them into the house to take a seat on the back patio. He had his favorite chair

in the patio where he would always sit. Everybody knew that was his chair in the patio outside.

A chair that now was empty, except for some carefully chosen items placed in the seat by Monica. There was a little shrine for Fabio. There was his hat that said Big Daddy on it. There was a cigar a bottle of tequila, a glass and then Monica was wearing. He had like one favorite kind of off-white

“sweater. I remember always when he was wearing it. He felt great in it. She was wearing his sweater.”

She was wearing his watch and she just kept rocking in the chair in denial of what had happened. She didn't quite know what to say. It was a little chilly that night. Someone offered to light the fire pit. She kept saying, "No, no, Fabio is going to be here soon. He always starts it when he gets home from work. Just Fabio is going to do it. Fabio is going to do it. He was like, "Hot broken."

You know? Like, yeah. That would always stain my mind.

Carolyn Melanie tried to comfort Monica. It was a surreal moment. All gathered there together, just feet from the spot where Fabio had been brutally murdered. Try to be as normal as you can, but at the same time there was obviously, you know, drama unfolding and knowing that he had been murdered where we were sitting was another thing that was extremely uncomfortable. My thought was like, "Why are you in this house?" Because if my husband was brutally murdered,

I wouldn't feel safe. I kept asking, "Why are you staying here? Just go away,

where this happened." But she kept saying, "No, that was his dreamhouse. He would want us to stay.

“This is what he would want." Carolyn Melanie leave the house and woodland hills. They both said”

they felt uneasy, worried for Monica and her girls. Were they safe there? At the cementilly house, the DVR system, which had been taken offline during the murder, is still out of action, and the murderers, still on the loose. That same day, Detective Ryan Werner gets a call. A homeowner had noticed that a black Porsche had been parked in his neighborhood for several nights. Fabio's prized Porsche 911, the car that was a symbol of his success. It had been abandoned

about 10 minutes away from the cemetery house. The windows left rolled down.

As it was being appounded, we were able to open the doors up, gloves on, of course. And, you know, kind of, use our flashlight to look around inside the car. We could see that there was what appeared to the blood stains inside the vehicle. I believe it was on the driver's side, door panel near the seat. We knew that that was going to be the ultimate importance. The detective sent the blood swaps to the DNA lab. They already had suspected of one of the attackers.

Might have been injured at the scene of the crime. If this blood belongs to one of them and not Fabio,

“it could be the key to cracking this case.”

The Black Dahlia murder of 1947 is arguably California's most notorious unsolved case. It's only rival might be the zodiac murders a generation later. Now, an amateur sleuth is attracting attention with the claim that the same killer is responsible for both cases. I'm Christopher Gofford, host of Crimes of the Times. Check out our new season on YouTube and listen to it on Apple Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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The viewing is about to begin. You know how in movies cops always go to these memorials to see who

shows up to try to get a read on the room and which people choose to attend. Cops didn't come that day. But the people who loved Fabio noticed something that just didn't fit. At a more cherary in the valley, Luigi Cementilly is sitting in the waiting room. Music is playing faintly in the background. Luigi's waiting to see his father's body.

“Walking into that viewing room, I remember my knees buckling and my dad's best friend”

having to kind of help me back up. And I had been to many funerals before and didn't expect it to hit me as hard as it did. But I remember it did hit me really hard seeing him in the casket. The viewing room is simple and modern. There are rows of wooden pews and around stained glass window. Fabio is lying in a casket at one end. Smartly dressed mourners, all in black, file into the room. Countless names and faces coming up to me shaking my hand, giving me their

condolences. Luigi True's Dale has organized everything according to the family's wishes. There is going to be a separate funeral in Canada a few days later. But for everyone who knew Fabio and California, this is their chance to say goodbye. Everyone, it's just such an Alexa zombies almost. People brought their husbands and wives and things, you know, because they

Monica is sitting in the front with the two girls and Fabio's Canadian families there too.

And she has a thing over her like a blanket or something like that. And crying, but the sobbing was so loud. When Carol approaches, Monica tries to usher her towards the body. I couldn't go to the casket. I cannot do that. And she kept saying, go say goodbye,

“go say goodbye. I can't. I just can't. That's not how I want to remember. Sorry.”

Because Melanie looks at Fabio lying there, the enormity of what has happened, dawns on her. It's that life was gone. And it was not only like his physical being, but just that ray that huge light that he just shined on everyone that he interacted with, there's just gone. And it was really sad.

After the viewing at the mortuary, everybody heads to the wake over at the cementilly house

in Woodland Hills. Alicia has made all the arrangements and brought in Fabio's favorite carers from the Taco Place he loved. People are coming up, people are kind of eating, people are mingling around. I'm done this whole week of bringing food up to the family, arranging shuttles for them to go places and that type of thing, arranging things for them. Just taking care of them. Alicia has set the Canadian relatives up in a hotel.

Luigi didn't want to stay at the house in Woodland Hills. Being here for the wake was bad enough. I didn't want to be there. And just very weird, especially being out in the backyard,

precisely where he was killed. Because that was where he spent most of his time when he was at home.

His absence was very loud, too. That he was the only one who wasn't there and the whole family was there, but not him. Normally a party in the backyard would be full of music and laughter. Fabio might burst into songs spontaneously or take Monica by the hand and whirler around. Tonight, the atmosphere is muted. People talking to each other in little groups and

“exchanging memories that they've had personal need with Fabio and getting together. I think it's”

felt good to be together in a moment like that to not feel like you're alone in that grief. Some of Fabio's relatives are sitting here on the sofa. Monica's there, too. She was in a separate chair or something on the side and there was a man there. One of Fabio's work friends points the guy out to Alicia. His short brown hair. He looks in shape and he's wearing a leather jacket. She said something to me about

who is this guy and it kind of went over my head like I'm going like a friend, a neighbor, I don't know. They're the only ones who notice him. He catches Carol's eye, too. He kind of stuck out, you know, nobody knew who he was and then a lot of people that were there they were people from Wala, right? So everybody had a certain look. When you're part of the industry you have a certain look to you. You know the way you dressed. I all put together, you know,

fashion forward and you just didn't fit. And we were very protective of Monica. When I close this guy, who does he want from her? You know? And someone said that's her coach from the Rocket Bull Club. He's a friend from the gym. And I was like, okay, well, you know, Monica had some life outside of here, too, but just just he stood out like two sort of thumb. The air is thick with questions that night. There were definitely

“hushed conversations, you know, who could do this and, you know, why is she still in his house?”

And you're trying to just wrap your head around the brutality of this and the whole doc, doc burglar thing made no sense to anybody. All these burglars, like they don't, they don't kill. You know, you say get surprised. They beat you up and they run away. It felt very personal the way he was stabbed. Melanie finds herself wondering how well she really knew Fabio's life. Wow, did Fabio,

somebody, you know, really, somebody really must hate him or something or like, did he cross a, and, you know, Fabio's Italian, I'm not throwing anything out there, but it's like, you know, this was like a mafia hit. I mean, you know, you just don't want to think it, but it's just like, that is somebody who is pissed off. Of course, there was rampant speculation about everything.

Are you like the more sensible? Let's not rush to judgment,

person, or are you usually the one who would be like, you know, the first one to weigh in? No,

the last to weigh in, if I weigh in at all. When I studied philosophy in school and my area of confidence was skepticism, I was just doing my best not to jump to conclusions, to listen to what the detectives and other people were telling us about what had happened. But the whispers from the wake travel quickly, that night, detective Ryan Werner's phone hangs, Deborah O'Bod, a family friend, has sent Werner a photo.

Basically what it shows is Monica and this male, he was there, he was kind of weird and taking up a lot of her time, and we noticed that on in one of the pictures that appeared that there was,

“you know, maybe a bandage on one of his fingers. It's not interesting, okay?”

You kind of put in your back pocket, there's not a ton there, it's interesting. The officers take it on board, but they're inundated with speculative leads that go nowhere. Detective Werner has his mind on the Porsche and the blood found at the scene in Fabio's car. Investigators have to remain objective, clear-headed, but understandably, Fabio's friends and family are emotional. They want answers and fast.

Nobody knew what was going on and we were all getting a little frustrated, like why is it taking so long, you know, and you know, friend is gone. Get your act together, you know what I mean? Did you start to get frustrated at all with black of answers?

“I wouldn't say I was frustrated, but I was definitely feeling hopeless.”

Feeling hopeless that this was just another name was faceless criminal, among the horde of criminals in the world. And the not knowing not being able to wrap your mind around this crazy event was really adding to the pain, adding to the suffering, adding to the grieving. We get our DNA hit back on the 14th of Fabioari. Detective Ryan Werner has been waiting for the blood samples to come back for three weeks.

Finally, something concrete. We are told that Rob Baker matches the DNA profile of the blood

that's been recovered. Robert Baker, he's 54 years old, short-brown hair and athletic build, which makes sense because he's a coach at a rack-a-ball club, the rack-a-ball club, where the seven tillies go. A man they've taken lessons from. And now his DNA could place him at the scene of the crime.

“I believe not only from the house, but also the Porsche, and we've met him before.”

The blood staining Fabio's stolen Porsche belongs to the strange guy in the leather jacket at the week. So that's our guy, Rob Baker. But why would a rack-a-ball coach want to kill Fabio? Next time, on cut, color, kill, the cops find out. We need to get surveillance up on this guy. We need to find out who he is, where he is, what he's doing, what he drives, everything.

Don't want to wait for that next episode. You don't have to. On lock all episodes of Cut, color, kill, add free right now by subscribing to the binge podcast channel. Search for the binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Not on Apple, head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen.

As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to new stories on the first of every month.

Check out the binge channel page on Apple Podcasts or getthebinge.com to learn more. This is Cut, color, kill, an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and novel, hosted by me, Jonathan Hirsch. Caroline Thornham is our senior producer, Katherine Doddfree is our editor, Muhammad Ahmed is our assistant producer,

For novel, our executive producer is Max O'Brien.

“For Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producers are Katherine St. Louis and me, Jonathan Hirsch.”

Production management from Shari Houston, Joe Savage and Charlotte Wolf.

Fact checking by Fendell Fulton, research by Miron Kaplan. Story development by Nell Gray Andrews.

“novel's director of development is Selena Meadow.”

Special thanks to Caroline Churlevin at Miller Corsnick Brainman.

And a big thanks to the whole Sony Music Entertainment team. [Music]