Andrea Canning reports on the latest twists and turns in the case in which firefighters discovered a New Jersey man dead in a house fire, but an autopsy revealed he had been shot to death.Andrea Canning and Josh Mankiewicz go behind the scenes of the making of this episode in ‘Talking Dateline’:Listen on Apple: https://apple.co/4irpumhListen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5f5ih5mp9jGwNUBO1AAouT
Chapter 1: What happened on the night of the fire?
Tonight on Dateline. If the police were right, this was a diabolical murder plot carried out on your brother.
He did it that night. And he was still out there, and who else would he hurt?
The back of the house is on fire. OK, get everybody out.
My sister-in-law told me that Rob had died in the fire. Right away, I knew there was something suspicious.
It was actually a murder. He had been murdered.
Why would someone bring Rob Cantor down into a basement bedroom and then murder him execution style? We focused on motive, his relationship with Sophie. That was very important.
She was head over heels for Rob.
Yeah, he adored her. I don't think anybody imagined that this is something we should be wary of.
Evidence of stalking, fake email accounts. You could see the evil. You could just see it.
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Chapter 2: Who was Rob Cantor?
As soon as I saw that there was a bright amber glow, I knew that was a definite fire. So I decided to just quickly run back to my girlfriend, said, listen, call 911. There's a house that's on fire.
Okay, get everybody out of the house.
You're a former volunteer firefighter. Are you thinking, I've got to spring into action here in case someone needs to be rescued?
I started yelling. I started pounding on the door as hard as I could just to see if there was any activity, see if anybody was home. Anything? All the lights were off. Everything was quiet. When I went around to the side, the amount of smoke and the amount of flames, the basement was fully engulfed.
You have no gear? Nothing.
I also noticed that the neighbor had a spigot nearby. I was pouring water on the windowsill, but that fire inside was rolling.
Once inside the house, firefighters looked to see where the fire began. A blackened trail led them to the basement, into what looked like a bedroom. And there it was, unmistakable, a badly burned body. Bergen County arson investigator Sergeant Terry Lawler said by the time he arrived, the body had been removed from the house.
The body had suffered severe burns, the front of the body more so than the back, which wasn't as badly burned.
The victim was the owner of the house, 59-year-old Rob Cantor. He'd been a software engineer, a father, a husband, a runner. Lawler thought it was strange that Rob died so close to where the fire started in that basement bedroom.
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Chapter 3: What clues pointed to murder instead of an accident?
It just had no reality to me at all.
When Rob's sister, Leslie Padron, got word her brother was dead, her first thought? Heart attack. Then she heard the word fire and didn't know what to think.
I said, something's not right. He couldn't have died in a fire. Why didn't you think he could die in a fire? People die in fires. Well, he could have only if he had like a major heart attack or if something exploded in the basement. And my brother was a triathlete. There's no way I could imagine he would have died in a fire.
Finally, we made our way to Teaneck to the house and it was horrible.
The story didn't make sense to Rob's friend, Mehrdad Sanai, either. He couldn't see Rob rushing to the basement to put out a raging fire.
He was intelligent. He was not stupid. He wouldn't risk his life, right? Unless he committed suicide, he set himself on fire. He was not, no.
You could see some indication that this wasn't just somebody that was smoking in his bed in the bedlit fire.
After county prosecutor John Mullinelli examined the scene, he was all but certain the fire had been intentionally set.
What was your gut telling you as to what this could be, what you're looking at?
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of the basement bedroom?
She said Susan seemed devastated by Rob's death. Even so, Love wanted to hear an alibi. Susan explained she'd been alone in her new home on the phone with a friend.
Nothing really led us to believe that she had any involvement in this.
So if not Susan, who? Rob's friends told investigators they needed to speak to another woman right away.
Her name was Sophie Manu. Rob and Sophie were involved in this relationship.
So a day after Rob's murder, the detective called Sophie, who described how she and Rob met more than a year earlier at a science lecture. The French-born Sophie was 40, 19 years younger than Rob. She lived just across the river in Manhattan. They shared interests, running, philosophy, and science. But there was one problem.
Sophie was married and raising three daughters, roughly ages 4 to 9, with her husband, Tony Tung. Sophie was living a bit of a secret life.
Initially, yes. But it wasn't too long before it all came out. She thought the woman's grief was genuine. She was crying. She knew that he was deceased. Did you tell her that he had been murdered? Later on in the interview, yes. What was her reaction? She was shocked. like anyone would be if you found out that information.
Sophie told the detective she'd seen Rob hours before he died.
Rob, with his two friends, had gone to New York City to meet Sophie and her daughter, her eight-year-old daughter, at a museum. How open is Sophie to you? She was a very open person. When I asked her why would Rob Cantor be found in the basement bedroom, she broke down and she began to cry. What was significant about the basement bedroom?
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Chapter 5: Who were the key suspects in Rob's murder?
This is where he had sex with your wife.
I'm confronting someone who's having a affair with my wife. Might as well see the rest of it.
What could you gain by seeing that room?
I guess in a way how he treated her. I remember I was... A little upset.
That it was a room in the basement?
Yeah. You took Sophie down here? What the hell is wrong with you? You can't go to a hotel? Before I left, he said, what do you want? I was like, well, I'd like to just stop seeing my wife. What did he say? He said, I can't answer you right now.
And get this. Tony went back two more times.
And third time, I was like, you know, this is pointless.
And he's still letting you in?
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Chapter 6: What evidence connected Tony Tung to the crime?
Something was taken from that car. That something, I suggest to you, is the gun.
In one of the trial's most anticipated moments, the state called the woman at the center of it all, Sophie.
Please state your name for the record and spell your last name.
Sophie told the court her marriage was already in trouble when she met Rob in the fall of 2009.
I was wearing a T-shirt that had Paris Marathon on it. So Rob was like, oh, you run? And I was like, yeah. And he said, oh, I run too. So we started talking about that.
As the weeks passed, their friendship turned into something more.
I knew that, you know, he had feelings for me. And I started to develop feelings for him as well.
On Valentine's weekend, 2010, she said the relationship became intimate at Rob's house in Teaneck.
He said that there was a bedroom in his basement. It was a bedroom that the kids used when they were teenagers. And so we went down in that bedroom and we met love.
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Chapter 7: What was the outcome of the investigation?
That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.