The trial concludes and the jury reaches a verdict. Daisy’s loved ones grapple with its aftermath, and the defendant decides to speak on the record for the first time. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What happened during the jury deliberations and verdict?
A heads up. The second half of this episode includes some descriptions of violence, including intimate partner violence. Please listen with care. It was a Wednesday in May. Susie and her cousin Mimi were huddled on a bench in the hallway of the Compton Courthouse. It was the first day of jury deliberations, and Susie was nervous.
She'd been there all morning trying to pass the time, trying to distract herself. She'd called up a cousin in Tijuana. They sent each other funny voice memos. Stupid stuff, she told me.
In a room nearby, the jury was weighing the evidence, discussing the testimonies they'd heard over nearly the last two weeks, deciding whether Victor had done the horrendous thing he'd been accused of, first on social media, and now in a court of law. Around 11.40 a.m., Susie got a text message when she saw that it was from Leslie Hinshaw, the prosecutor. Her heart began racing.
The message said, the jury has reached a verdict. They had deliberated for less than three hours. Susie opened her mouth to share the news, but she couldn't get the words out. She told me that she felt like she was frozen. She was having a panic attack.
She'd been getting them a lot since her daughter's murder, a little more than a year earlier, but never anything quite this bad, quite as debilitating as this one, right there in the hallway of the courthouse. Her face turned pale. Her cousin reminded her to breathe, but all Susie wanted to do was scream, to run away.
And the feeling only got more intense when the jurors flooded out into the hallway. The elevator doors opened and the hallway filled with more people. There were newscasters and camera crews, like this one from ABC7.
A verdict has been reached against a man accused of killing his ex-girlfriend. The suspect was captured after videos on social media helped lead to his arrest in Mexico.
There was the judge and the bailiff and the clerk and a gaggle of sheriffs in uniform. They all filed into the courtroom. Susie felt like she could barely breathe. She watched as one of the jurors handed the judge an envelope. The clerk read a statement, and all Susie could think was, get to the point, get to the point, get to the point. Finally, she heard the words.
We, the jury, in the above-entitled action, find the defendant, Victor Sosa, guilty of the crime of the murder of Daisy Della O.
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Chapter 2: How did Susie react to the guilty verdict?
It's the little things you miss after all this chaos, she said. But all this chaos wasn't over just yet. I'm Jen Swan. From London Audio, iHeartRadio, and executive producer Paris Hilton, this is My Friend Daisy, Episode 9, After All This Chaos. Victor's sentencing hearing was held roughly five months after his trial ended.
It was October 12th, 2022, and Daisy's friends and family were nervous all over again. Nervous that after all this, after the TikToks and the Instagrams and the arrest and the courthouse protest and the testimonies and even the guilty verdict, Victor's sentence still wouldn't be quite harsh enough. Everyone in the courtroom was fidgeting in their seats.
And then Susie got up and walked to the front of the room to speak.
Good morning, Robin. Good morning, people of the court.
Her voice grew shaky as she recounted the day she had to identify Daisy's body. The day she said that no mother should have to live through.
I hate everything that this parasite represents. Everything. The way he viciously murdered her and the way he left her exposed to the world. Like she was nothing. I can't even imagine her last moments. And that horrible thought is in my head every day. I have to recognize my baby's body and tell my whole family that she was murdered.
To tell my mother, to tell my sons, to tell my whole family what this must have done to my baby. Nobody ever prepares you for that.
And nobody prepares you for every day after that.
I cry every single day. I smell a song. Anything reminds me of her. My sons are diagnosed with depression. All consequences to actions of this monster.
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Chapter 3: What was said during Victor's sentencing hearing?
Yeah, I mean, there have been times where I've had cases where I felt a lot of compassion for the defendants, just in terms of like, why did you make these choices? You know, it's kind of like, what did you go through in your life that led you to this point where you've made these choices that now you're going to be locked up for the rest of your life?
And that's kind of like, there's sort of a bit of exasperation with that. Like, what happened?
What happened? How could Victor have murdered Daisy with such brutality? Where did that come from? And how could he have shown no remorse at trial? He was silent the whole time in court. He didn't say anything at his sentencing hearing either. So I tried to talk with his family to try to answer that question. What happened? I went to see his mother.
You might remember she declined to speak with me. I also went to see his father. His house was located on a dirt road and it was surrounded by a chain link fence and guarded by big growling dogs. And at one point someone did come out and it sounds like they were yelling the name of the dog to try to tell them to like calm down.
And then I at one point saw the blinds kind of like open a little bit. It seemed like someone was peering out. And so they knew we were there. There's two cars outside the house. So I know someone's home and then they clearly just didn't want to come out and talk to us. I guess I will take that as a no comment. I left a letter in Victor's dad's mailbox. I never heard back.
I even went to the house of another one of his relatives. It was a place I'd heard that Victor sometimes stayed, you know, before he was arrested. And again, this time I was greeted by the sound of a dog barking. A woman's voice appeared from beyond the metal security door. I couldn't see her face, but she spent about 20 minutes talking with me as we stood on either side of the doorframe.
She seemed wary of me, but at the same time, it almost seemed like she was eager to tell me things. Like, more than once, she started sentences with, Did you know? Like, did you know that Victor had a tattoo of Daisy's face on his arm? No, I didn't, I said. Or, did you know that Victor's mother keeps a photo of Daisy in her living room? No, I didn't.
It was obvious to me that she and Victor's mother both cared deeply about Daisy. That they were devastated by her murder and destroyed by the actions of the person who had done it. This relative, I'm not using her name because she didn't want to be recorded and she wasn't mentioned in the court documents.
She told me that she talked to Victor on the phone sometimes, that he'd found God and seemed to be doing well in prison. She encouraged me to get in touch with him, to let him tell his side of the story. So I did. I wrote him a letter. I explained that I was making this show and that I had been talking to people who knew him and people who knew Daisy.
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Chapter 4: How does the prosecutor Leslie Hinshaw reflect on the case outcome?
I got the sense that maybe he just wanted to talk to me because he was bored, or because he thought that it might help his chances of getting paroled. His first parole hearing is tentatively scheduled for 2039. At that point, he will have spent 17 years behind bars. I called the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
They told me that Victor had earned credits for good behavior and for taking classes, and that had made him eligible for parole sooner. When I talked to Victor, it seemed to me like he was trying to maintain his innocence. He had never admitted to the murder. And I got the sense that he wasn't about to, that I wasn't going to get a genuine answer to any of my questions.
So we hung up, and that was that. Six months later, just as I was about to turn in this episode, I got a message on the app. Victor had changed his mind. He said he wanted to do the interview. I wasn't sure whether to take it seriously. But then, I got a phone call.
This is Global Tell Link. You have a prepaid call from... Victor Fofo. An incarcerated individual at... The R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility, San Diego, California.
I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood... She had been shot twice in the head and in the back behind the heart.
The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chapter 5: What efforts were made to understand Victor's background and remorse?
This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded. To accept this call, say or dial 5 now. Thank you for using Global Telelink.
When I got the call from Victor, I decided to get right into it. I had no time or interest in small talk. I started by asking about the skateboard attack. The attack that Daisy's younger brother had witnessed. The attack that resulted in her getting stitches. I asked Victor what happened that day.
Yeah, I'm sure you heard about that. I do remember what happened that day. We were getting an argument over...
I'll summarize what Victor said next. He said they got in a fight essentially because of his jealousy. He thought Daisy was texting somebody and he flipped out. He says it got physical on both sides, but let's be real that he was the one who ended up sending her to the hospital.
I didn't hit her intentionally with the skateboard. I was just trying to get away from her. While she was grabbing me, I was trying to shake her loose. And the way I was holding the sleepboard, like, hit her across the forehead. I didn't mean to, like, hit her directly.
Okay. Yeah, it sounds like you hit her pretty hard.
I mean, I didn't want to hit her. I was just trying to escape from her grip.
Well, it sounds like you had hit her in the past as well, so that was an ongoing thing. Would you have described yourself? It sounds like you were a little jealous or possessive. Does that sound right?
I mean, she would talk to, she would have a lot of friends, like guy friends, and she would link up with them.
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Chapter 6: How did Victor communicate from prison and what did the interview reveal?
So it sounds like you have regrets about that.
I do. I do because someone I really cared about that I thought was someone I could count on and like someone I could trust and I felt like this was the most important person in my life because in my life I didn't have any relationships with anybody not even with my family I saw alone so this is a person that feel that void and someone I could look up to as a partner. I felt love from her.
Every day I wake up, I feel regretful. I feel depressed, sad that I took someone's life and I wish I could take it back and not do the things that happened that night. Again, I wish I wouldn't seek help. I have dreams of, like, saving her life, saving Daisy's life, sort of, you know, taking it. And I wake up and I feel, like, so depressed, like,
I just wish I could have been someone better to her.
And why did you kill her?
Can we take a step back for a second? I know you wanted to ask me what we did that night,
Yeah, mm-hmm.
So, like, yeah, so... So, can you maybe get to that question in a bit? Can you ask me another question for now?
Yeah, so it's my understanding that, um, that she broke things off with you just a few weeks, um, before she was killed. Is that correct?
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