CBS News Correspondent Natalie Morales and 48 Hours Producer Gayane Keshishyan Mendez cover the 2003 murder of Justine Vanderschoot. They discuss the isolated area where Justine’s body was found, how this case affected them as mothers, and why Justine’s family continues to fight to keep her convicted murderers in prison. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who are the key people discussing Justine Vanderschoot's case?
Welcome back to Postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green. And today we're going to be discussing the case of Justine Vandershoot, who in 2003 went missing from her parents' home in Auburn, California. Now, law enforcement quickly suspected Justine's boyfriend and his roommate. With me here to discuss this case is 48 Hours correspondent, Natalie Morales, and producer, Guyane Kachetian-Mendez.
Thank you so much for joining us again, ladies. Good to be with you, Anne-Marie. Thanks for having us. So listen, as usual, everyone, a reminder to you that if you haven't listened to this 48 hours episode, you can certainly find the full audio version just below this episode in your podcast feed.
Chapter 2: How was Justine Vanderschoot's body discovered?
So go take a listen or go watch it wherever you get your 48 hours and then come on back for this conversation. You start the hour with a conversation with Matt Scribner. He's the equestrian who had actually first spotted, first a freshly dug hole in the ground, and later he goes back and it looks a lot different. You're on horseback. And I think that's something that maybe...
might be missed, is that this is an area that's actually kind of hard to get to.
Yes, yeah, absolutely. And Matt Scribner, you know, he was key to the testimony in this case by giving investigators that timeline of when he saw this freshly dug hole and then saying, going back later and then seeing a mattress in debris covering that hole.
Now, what was really intriguing about this is that, you know, had he not been eight or 10 feet above ground on a horse, he probably might not have seen that. But I loved being able to do the interview on horseback because, you know, that's how he saw it. And it also provided for us a A little bit of a different element and a way into this investigation than we normally do.
Chapter 3: What challenges did investigators face with the crime scene?
A key element of the case is that this location was so hard to get to, at least the prosecution argued, and Brandon being able to lead detectives right to it without any hesitation in the dark. through sort of rugged terrain. Even the investigator, the original investigator on the case didn't know how to get there.
Matt was the only one who was able to lead us every single time because he just grew up on these trails. And so he knew it like the back of his hand. There's a couple of road signs, but once you're there to actually get to the spot where the burial site is, there is nothing marking it. It's just sort of feeling your way and knowing where to go. And he couldn't really give us verbal directions.
We had to have Matt as a guide every time, and he was just very generous in doing that.
And I learned something about you, Natalie. I did not know that you were an equestrian yourself. And the horses are pretty interesting as well.
Yes. Oh, my gosh. The horses are incredible creatures. They are... I think both of them were wild mustangs that had been, you know, tamed or broken. And the horse that Matt Scribner was riding, his name was Astro. And they were so... amazing to be on, but also so relaxed and chill, surprisingly, given that we had camera crews all around them.
And also we use drones and we were a little concerned using the drones because, I don't know if you know this, but when they round up wild Mustangs, they fly helicopters over them. And so there was some concern that That the drone and that sound that they make, you know, that buzzing noise might freak the horses out a little bit. Thankfully, you know, we kept the drones far away from them.
The horses seemed to be pretty fine with it. And so we got the footage that we needed and we were able to do the interview and it all came out great. Yeah.
When I saw kind of the image of the debris, I thought, is that a mattress? What is that? And then I thought, how do you even get stuff out there? You know, what was this place like back then?
From what we've been told and also from some of the evidence photos we've seen, you know, back in the early 2000s, and this crime happened in 2003, it was really a dumping ground, you know, where you would have maybe unhoused populations coming through. There was an abandoned trailer there. So just all kinds of debris. And so a mattress was really not out of place. Wow.
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Chapter 4: Who were the main suspects in Justine Vanderschoot's murder?
The sheriff's detectives tell us that they zeroed in on these guys early on. And one of the reasons being is that they did everything together, according to the people in the inner circle in the know who knew... Danny, Brandon, and Justine. And they found out that they were lying about their alibi that night. So that was sort of a big red flag right away that led them to look at these guys.
But as they looked at them, they discovered that they had this... fascination with violence, with murder. They talked about being able to kill people and get away with it. They looked into beating polygraphs. Brandon was said to have a website that sort of ranked levels of violence. And based on the witness accounts of what they had seen, it was pretty startling, disturbing stuff.
Yeah, they were very close friends. They lived together, as you said. And according to investigators, there was some history there with Brandon not liking Justine. And also, according to Christine, Justine's sister, Justine had believed that Brandon had been cheating on his girlfriends in the past, so she didn't like him either.
So, you know, there definitely was this tense and toxic relationship in this sort of between Danny and Brandon and Justine being the one in the middle. According to Danny's testimony, he, at one point, was so heartbroken because he believed that Justine was cheating on him, he was thinking of taking his own life. But Brandon said, why kill yourself? Why don't you kill her instead?
So that's sort of where this...
But the defense denies that Brandon ever said anything to encourage him. So all of that stuff kind of goes to motive, right?
A fascination with violence. Have they been in trouble with the law before? Because that is quite a leap to go from having a fascination with murder and actually committing one.
Prosecutors tell us that there was nothing serious, criminally serious in these guys' backgrounds, but they both had brushes with the law as juveniles. Danny reportedly had been involved in some burglaries and possession of stolen property. Brandon had been prosecuted for hacking. He was a computer whiz. So we don't have access to their juvenile records, obviously, but, you know,
Again, prosecution says nothing that would lead you to believe that they could be dangerous on this level.
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Chapter 5: What was revealed in Brandon Fernandez's interrogation?
First, he says he saw Justine after she was dead. And then he describes her breathing, which would indicate that she was actually alive as she was breathing. So he must have seen her while she was alive as well. And then at the end of this interrogation, he writes one letter to Justine and one letter to her parents and reads it to investigators. Did not make it into the hour.
I want to play some of that right now.
This is to the parents. Donna Lynette, I want you to know that your daughter's death has not been in vain. I want you to know that I made promises to Justine. I prayed for her. I did not want any of this to happen. I didn't know it was going to happen. I lied to you because I could not break my promises to Justine. I promised her I would avenge her death. I have. I've protected those she loves.
I was so scared. I wanted to let you know everything. You knew I knew Dawn. It hurt you. You knew I was scared. I lost two friends in one night. I lost Justine and I lost Danny. I was left with protecting everybody else. I care. I do. I am sorry it had to be this way.
Wow. As you heard there, Brandon sort of casting himself as a hero. The prosecution felt this was sort of a telling reaction because if Brandon was truly so fearful of Danny that he felt powerless to be able to stop him or to go for help, he should have cast himself as the victim in the letter. And his narrative was sort of like, I'm the avenger in her death, right?
And, you know, I'm going to do right by you. But yet he was witnessing her take her last breaths. He did nothing to stop that from happening. Absolutely.
What did the FBI agents who interrogated him think?
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Chapter 6: What letters did Brandon Fernandez write to Justine's family?
Yeah, Jeff Reinach, I mean, he is a skilled interrogator. And he told us that he usually has people write a letter to to the victims at the end or to their families. And so this is sort of part of his strategy, I guess, in a way to maybe see what they reveal, you know, in writing.
And he said that, you know, it was almost as if he was trying to rewrite, as if Brandon was trying to rewrite his role in what happened.
Welcome back, everyone. Danny Besimer and Brandon Fernandez ultimately took plea deals, and they're currently serving life sentences in prison. What was it like for Justine's family to realize that this young man... that they welcomed into their home. It was nothing like who he had presented himself to be to them.
The Vandershoots did everything to include Danny. He had a key to the house. He was welcomed into their home whenever he wanted to come in. Don gave him a job at the Mercedes-Benz dealership where he worked. So he hooked him up.
And this is what happened to them. I think their emotions have really run the gamut over the last two decades. Having to... you know, kind of relive this over and over again every time that they have to face these guys at a parole hearing or, you know, now with Brandon, the second go-around for the petition to be resentenced. So...
It's just really hard to encapsulate what they're feeling because it's just such a range of emotions, you know, obviously anger in there, but a determination to make sure these guys don't get out.
You guys use a lot of the local news coverage from when she initially was missing. I thought it was so unnerving because you see him, right? You see Danny, uh, And we've seen this before, you know, appealing to the cameras for help. But he's not just doing that. He's trying to throw investigators off. And he does it flawlessly. He doesn't look nervous.
It is absolutely chilling. It's chilling. It is chilling. And I said to Guyane, like, I kept looking at his eyes, trying to read his body language, trying to get a sense of, you know, Where was his mindset? Like, what was he possibly thinking, being able to do that, go in front of the media the way he was, holding up her picture and saying, I did everything for that girl.
And let's not forget, he had dinner with the Vandershoots on the night that he was planning to then take their daughter into that forested area and kill her. The level of... of depravity and sickness is just so outrageous.
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