December 17, 2025 • 44 mins
Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, were killed in their Brentwood home, and their middle son, Nick, has been arrested.
The murders have shocked Hollywood and have brought tributes from young and old who know the family. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack break down the latest information about the double homicides:
- Where were the Reiners' bodies found?
- Did Billy Crystal see the bodies before officials closed off the crime scene?
- What did Nick Reiner's hotel room look like the day his mother and father were found murdered?
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.03 Introduction: All in the Family
03:14.78 Reiner family not much different than other families
06:16.28 The impact of All in the Family
10:10.10 Rob Reiner breathing life into movies like "Stand by Me"
15:13.79 Nick Reiner failed after rehab
20:25.82 Gap in information being released
25:11.64 Nick Reiner at Conan party treating guests harshly
29:57.30 Truth about Throat Slashing
34:08.99 Issue of humanity, not news story
39:58.17 Reiner checks into hotel at 4am
44:50.16 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quody times, but Joseph's gotten more. The first time I
ever saw all in the family, I was with my
grandparents and we were sitting around there their television and
their little home in North Louisiana. And what's really interesting
about that era of Tom is that when one family
(00:26):
watched television, everybody watched television. You didn't have all of
these selections that are out there, you know, kind of
floating about, you know. For us, I literally think we
had three channels on kind of a moderate day. An
exceptional day, we might have one more that came out
of some undisclosed location in Arkansas, and that was about
(00:47):
the extent of it. And so what we did know
is that on a Saturday night, which I think is
when it was, you could sit down and all in
the family would come home and we would watch and
I think a lot of families around the United States
watched it. And it was at that point in time
we became familiar with Rob Reiner, aka Meathead, and he
(01:10):
was the foil to Archie Bunker, and we got great
laughs out of that. It was a different time in
this country at that point in time, but he left
an impression, certainly in the years that followed his life.
My kids still to this day quote Princess Bride, and
I do too. I mean, it's just one of the
things that's integrated into the grain of who we are.
(01:34):
You know. The thing about Hollywood is that we esteem
these people so much, and we put them up on
a pedestal, and when the dirt and the grime of
the streets comes upon them and visits upon them, you
suddenly come to a realization that they are in fact human.
(01:55):
And there is nothing that, from my perspective, encapsulate the
human experience more than death, particularly brutal death, because at
the end of the day, we all bleed red. I'm
Josephcott Morgan and this is bodybags, you know, Brother Dave.
(02:17):
I'm not going to say that the moment that I
found out about the news that Rob Reiner and his
wife Michelle Singer had been killed in their home is
one of those moments that will mark my life that
I'll remember where I was at that particular time. However,
I will say this, it's something that kind of shocked
(02:40):
me to a great degree because you don't think about
events happening like this. To the exclusion of oj in Brentwood,
you think that it's going to you know that the
I don't know, the death angel kind of passes over
that area, and that it doesn't the violence doesn't visit
upon these people. You know, as our earlier stated, this
(03:02):
is a violent event. People have messed up families, and
they have people with a lot of pathology in their families.
And I think that that's what we're seeing on display here.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yeah, I think in this respect this shows you how
normal their family is. The difference being income and neighborhood,
living in a thirteen point five million dollar home with
a guesthouse in Brentwood. You know, that's about it. I was.
I was impacted heavily by all in the family as
(03:34):
a as a child because my parents. You mentioned that
it was on Saturday nights. Well you realize that it
didn't start out there, and being a bit of a
TV buff, the first season it was on the air
was on Tuesdays. That was seventy one in nineteen seventy two,
And that's what you're talking about. The season two rather
from seventy one to seventy five, that's when it was
on Saturday nights.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Wait is Tuesday where shows used to go to die
or survive. Is that is that kind of how it
works out?
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Exactly? Sure, but you're right. It was on seventy on
Saturday nights in that that period where it became boom,
you know. And I remember an argument with my parents
because my parents didn't think it was acceptable for children
to watch All in the Family. And we had five
kids in my family and the two little ones didn't count,
they were too young. But they wanted us to watch
Emergency with Kevin Tye and Randolph Manto.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I tell you all loved Emergency as well.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, I figured you did, Yeah, and I fought it.
They made it. They turned it on the big in
the living room, you know, on the TV in there,
and they said, well, if you want to watch All
in the Family, you go in our room, because you
remember how your parents used to have it. They had it,
but there's a little black and white one, you know.
That was the second TV. That's where I watched it
All in the Family. And then I started feeling weird
because they started having popcorn and stuff like that watching Emergency.
(04:47):
So I was like, well, dang, I'll go watch that.
So the thing is is that All in the Family
was if you look at the politics that were expressed
on that show. The actors played a part very well stivic.
You know, Meathead ended up being pretty much what Rob
(05:08):
Reiner's politics were in life, very liberal, very outspoken liberal. Meanwhile,
Carol O'Connor, who played Archie, he was not conservative by
any stretch as a man. As a character, he played
the character brilliantly. But anyway, I think it's a brilliant
show for the time, even though it was a rip
off from Great Britain. Yeah, it was very Americanized and
without Carol O'Connor and Rob Reiner, that show would not
(05:29):
have been anywhere. And you know, Geene Stapleton got at
her in there. She was oh boy, yeah, you know
she played the first they did the first rape. Yeah,
network television. Yeah, and that episode, to my course still
because she was like could have been your mom, you know,
it was.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
It was incredibly traumatizing. There was a lot of controversy
around that. Yeah, and of course, you know, we can't
forget Sally Struthers, you know, walking around begging for money
in the slums. Yeah, do you remember later found out
but yeah, but do.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
You remember the episode when they had moved away, when
when meat had they had moved out to California, right,
and they're getting a divorce and Archie and Edith's going
to visit and Archie assumes they're divorcing because Rob cheated
on you know, on his on his daughter. And I'll
never forget this line because of the when he finds
out the truth that it was his daughter, Sally who
(06:19):
cheated on Mike. That's when Carol O'Connor looks at him.
He said, all these years, I thought you weren't good
enough for my daughter. Yeah, and it turns out she
wasn't good enough for you, right, And that, I mean,
that's still to this day when you can quote something
from a sitcom, a world renowned sitcom, and all we're
doing is talking about the things that made you cry,
(06:41):
right right, that's a powerful show.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, it is. I think probably one of my favorite
episodes was one where Sammy Davis Junior may Archie. Yeah. Yeah,
that was that was pretty wild, but yeah, it was.
It was certainly groundbreaking, and you know, and that that
just kind of started, you know, Rob Ryner on this journey.
Of course, I think that it started before that, you know,
with his dad.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Can you imagine that I saw an interview with Rob
and Nick. Okay, after they did was it being Charlie Charlie?
They did this interview and they were asking Nick about
growing up as the son of, you know, and he goes, well,
he's and Rob says, you know, it's not just the
son of, it's also the grandson of, right, right, And
that's who you know. You think about Rob Reiner's background,
(07:25):
Carl Reiner. You know, Carl Reiner had this amazing career
and created the Dick Van Dyke show. He actually created
it for himself. He created the Rob Petrie roll for himself.
He wrote it for himself and shot a pilot with
him as the star as Rob Petrie, and they turned
it down. And that's when they cast Dick Van Dyke
and he was like, Okay, I'll beat the producer and
(07:47):
you know.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
I'll be rich. And he was brilliant it, I mean,
he really was. You know, Maury Amsterdam and Rose Marie
two of the greatest comics to ever grace a television
screen as far as I'm concerned. But you have that lineage, Joe.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, And that's why I'm saying you think about how
what we can talk about with the family name and
now that family name has been really ripped up by
allegedly reportedly a son. Now, Rob Reiner. You mentioned his
career on television, you know, during the seventies. He was
married to another big time star of TV at the time,
(08:23):
Penny Marshall, who was on Laverne and Shirley. At first,
she was the secretary on the Odd Couple if you remember.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
That, Imber.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Then she ends up on Laverne and Shirley and anyway,
so they're on two of the hottest shows on television
at the time at the same time in a married
couple at that Rob actually adopted Penny Marshall's daughter, Tracy
from a previous marriage, and her she's Tracy Reiner. And
(08:51):
even after they divorced, Tracy still was his daughter, you know,
and we watched their careers after the TV shows. After
all in the family, what does he do. He goes
out and mix this mockumentary spinal tap. This is final tap,
that boom that launched Brian b. Reiner. It was just
(09:13):
holy moly. And then he had a number of hits
in the eighties, I mean, stand by me. That's another
one that comes when people think about great impactful movies.
Stand By Me is one of them.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yes, And so as a matter of fact, Rob actually
stated that that that Gordo was kind of a reflection
of him, you know, the character played by Will I
can't Yeah, Will Wheaton, you know that. You know, my
dad hates me. That faintus line. He states with with
(09:46):
with River Phoenix, and it was really touching. And I
identified with that movie, you know, wholeheartedly. I watched it.
I can't tell you how many times because you can always,
you know, dig out more nuggets in that particular and
it's really a vignette. You know, it's based on a
short story I think that Stephen King had actually written,
and it was not It was horrible, but it wasn't
(10:09):
a horror in the horror genre. It was just something
that Rob Reiner breathed life into. And yeah, you know
you've got all this, you know, when Harry Mint Sally
and of course a few good men. But for me,
it was always stand by Me because I loved that movie.
And that was the thing about his movies is that.
And he said in an interview that I was fascinated
(10:30):
by He said, you know, I don't have people going
to other galaxies. I don't have people blowing up. And
he says, I just try to tell stories about real
people in their lives and things that they identify with.
And I think that all of us can identify with that.
And I think that that goes to the DNA of
the kind of family man he was. That he through
tick and tent, he loved his kids. You know that
(10:52):
there was that emotion that kind of hooked into it. Now, look,
you know, we can't sit here. I don't think in judgment.
It would be very easy to sit here in judgment
and say what would you do? But you know, I
got to tell you, I don't know what's going on
with his son, Nick. I know that he's been charged,
but I can tell you he's got other kids. Yeah,
that didn't show up at his house and do this allegedly.
(11:15):
And they're successful people and they're you know, they're well balanced.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Well let's get into this, okay. So Rob Reiner famously
married to Penny Marshall throughout the seventies. In nineteen eighty one,
they divorced after ten years. Penny Marshall moved on, Rob
Reiner moved on. But you know what the movie when
Harry met Sally is actually was written about Rob Reiner
and his years after Penny Marshall because he hadn't met anybody,
(11:40):
and he was after several years thinking I'm never gonna
get married. I'm never going to find anybody. That's why he'shot.
It was written that way. But the end of the
movie when Harry met Sally, when Billy Crystal and me
Meg Ryan get together at the end, the romantic ending, right, Yeah,
the ending of the movie was rewritten to include that,
(12:02):
not because it didn't test well, because Rob had Matt
Michelle Singer in the process of making that movie in
that time period, and so the ending was rewritten to
incorporate that he does have this new love in his life.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Woll life imitating art, art imitating life very close.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
And so when we look at all of this and
how impactful because of our age is how his life
in TV and film impacted our life, it only stands
to reason that we would now look at it and go, Okay,
he had his first batch of being married and being
a dad, and then divorce, separates, he spends a decade
without and then he's back. He has a new wife, Michelle,
(12:42):
and they get married in the early nineties, he is
seventy well, he's seventy eight at his death. And so
you know, you talk about thirty five years ago. Okay,
you got a guy that's in his early forties and
he and Michelle they have three kids, and he's established.
They have money, you know, they have all the trappings.
(13:04):
And now they've got three wonderful kids. They've got Jake, Nick,
and Romy. Jake's the oldest, Nick's the middle, and Romy's
the youngest. Romy is the one who discovered her parents. Now,
Jake and Romy are both well adjusted and well thought
of in the Hollywood community. The children of Rob and Michelle.
You got to remember that Rob Ryner and Michelle are
(13:25):
very active in politics, very active in a lot of things.
They do with a lot of social activities, and people
were very involved with their family and their lives. People,
if you actually read the people talking about their relationships,
there are three or four different people that we raised
our children together, right, and Demi Moore wrote that, so
did Schwarzenegger his ex wife. Anyway, Maria Maria Shriver, we
(13:50):
raised our children together in the nineties. So these three children, Jake, Nick,
and Romy grow up. And Nick, from a very early
age was pointed out as the bad seed. This is
the kid who just wow. You know, he's the song
black sheep of the family. You know, he's the guy
(14:11):
that they can't figure out. He just wiring's not right.
He's not like everyone else, and he's not responding to treatment.
They started doing treatment with this kid early on. We're
talking about doing family yoga to try to redirect him
so he wouldn't have this spontaneous aggressive outbursts of aggression,
of anger, of just violence. And we're talking about from
(14:33):
five and six years old, Joe. We're not talking about
teen drug addicts. We're talking ten years before then. So
Jake and Romey grow up well adjusted. Nick does not.
This is before drugs, after drugs became a part of it.
The Reiner family, they put him in rehabs as early
(14:55):
as fifteen. My understanding is seventeen rehabs. That's the same
number as many other addicts who fail at it. Okay,
that fail at rehab, that do not work the program.
It works if you work at friends. But if you
go to the program taking a magic pill thinking I'm
going to go in here for thirty days and get
out and be fine. No, you're not you're in there
(15:16):
for twenty eight days, because that's what insurance pays for.
If you're in a longer, extended period of time, great,
that's a great way to start. But you know what,
it's easy to be sober when you're in a sober
house where there are no alcohol or drugs and you're
covered by a lot of other people. It's what happens
when you leave, and that's where you owe it to
yourself and those you love that have gone this far
with you to actually work the program. It's not magic.
(15:38):
You have to work it. And Nick failed at working
it routinely, over and over again, and his outbursts became
more often than not in public. The movie Being Charlie
that has been written about over the last couple of
days is not a movie. A lot of people saw
it's autobiographical and that Nick wrote part of the script
while he was in rehab. Rob directed it, and I
(15:59):
haven't it. I'm only reading about it now, And it
was a very personal story. But it's not the first
time a personal story about Nick and the family came up. Really, No,
the first time a personal story was written about Nick
and the family. It was written about them with Rob
and Michelle's permission, but just changing the name of Nick
(16:20):
because they didn't want their six year old son to
know that he was being written about in a book
about dealing with a problem child.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Holy smoke. So I don't think I was not aware
of that.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Now most people aren't. And what I'm trying to get
to is this is going to be blamed on a
lot of things. People are going to say they were
very indulgent. Well, you know what, when you have a
drug addled child that isn't responding to treatment, then you
can sing your own song. Until then, I pray you
don't step in that hole because it will bite you.
I've dealt with it personally on a very personal level.
(16:53):
This is a very personal story, and I have tried
to help people. I'm the guy that gets to call
at three am from a friend who he says, Dave,
I have a nephew. Okay, where is he? Where is she?
You know, I'm that guy. And this is a case
where they did everything they could to get him help,
but he had spun to a point. Nick had Nick
had spent the last twelve fifteen years of his life
(17:15):
living homeless, living from Massachusetts to Texas to Oregon to
LA and in homeless shelters and on the street. And
he even said in twenty seventeen, when they said what
got you off the street, he said, I frobally get
tired of it. You know, I'm lucky to be alive.
He was in rehab when he said this. You know,
he's he was sober in rehab and he was giving
(17:35):
an interview about I'm just thankful I'm alive. I'm thankful
I have this opportunity. And you know, he sounded great.
It's easy to sound great when you're sober in a
recovery program. It's not so easy to do it when
you face the rigors of daily life and you're not
working the program.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Yeah, and I'd have to agree with you, Dave. You know,
you see the symptomology almost as if a train is
coming down the track and you see that little pin
of light off in the distance and you cannot get
off of the track either way. The train is coming
and it's powerful and anything in its path will get wrecked.
I guarantee you. Unfortunately, there are many many families out
(18:15):
there right now, as Dave and I lay the sound
down that are struggling with these same issues right now,
probably your neighbors, people around your city, people from coast
to coast. It just so happens that one of the
luminaries in Hollywood has brought this through their death into focus.
(18:52):
I've had to turn people down, Dave in the last
nine hours, because I have so many of these producers
that have been reaching out to me to make comment
on Robin Michelle's homicide. And you know, there's only so
many hours in the day. You know, you run a
(19:14):
gas and.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
We struggle to not call you personally being siat yeah,
because I have some questions for you about this.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Well, it's yeah, you only have so much gas in
the tank, and right now we you know, this is
the downside of this. I felt like we needed to
come on air and address this right now. But here's
the downside. We don't have as much data as we
will have probably a month from now, or maybe a
month and a half from now. And I beg again,
like I do with most of the things I comment
(19:42):
in the media, I beg patience on everybody's part. Crime
scene investigation, death investigation is not a microwave science. It's
not something that you can just pop it in the microwave.
It's going to be ready for you in a minute.
It doesn't happen like this. This is something that takes time,
and I beg you to show a little latitude and
(20:05):
mercy perhaps to the people at LAPD relative to the information.
One of the big things that came out that I heard,
and I want to kind of set this aside right now,
there was a gap in information that was being released.
It seemed like that there was kind of some double
speak going on in the sense of what was happening
(20:29):
outside of the residence in Brentwood relative to press release
and all of these sorts of things. You have to
understand something. They are working an active double homicide scene,
and yes you do. There is no constitutional exception to
a warrant when it comes to homicides. Homicides are treated
(20:51):
no differently under the constitution, say, for instance, compared to
breaking and entering, vandalism or whatever the case might be.
Still have to go through the rigor of writing up
a warrant, a search warrant, getting that signed by judge,
and then you enter and this is how it works.
I really want to set the table with this. Once
police have entered into a domicile where a homicide is
(21:14):
obviously taking place. This is what they do. They walk in.
The first thing they're going to do is verify if
the people are deceased or not. Then they're going to
do a sweep through the house, see if there's anybody
else that's injured. Then they're going to see if there
is an active assailant inside of the house and bring
them into custody. After that, you cannot go searching through closets,
(21:38):
You cannot go digging through chest of drawers, You cannot
even open open up the cupboard in a house without
a warrant. You have to understand their son, Nick was
actually domiciled at this location and so this is in
fact his residence now, and that's the way the court
(21:59):
looks at this. He has a right to privacy. Okay,
So you have to back out, secure the scene. You
put the tape up, you put all of the security
around it necessary, and those bodies are not going anywhere.
I know this sounds very cold, but you have to
go write up a search warrant, go to a magistrate
or judge, have them sign off on it, and then
you come back out to the scene and work the scene.
(22:21):
That's the way it works. That's the way it always
has worked. Hopefully as a matter of fact, because it
hasn't worked this way in the past. There have been
homicide cases that have been thrown out as a result
of faulty searches. And trust me, as intense as a
light is going to be on this and you know
what I'm talking about, brother Dave. With this, you have
to make sure that all of the te's are crossed
(22:41):
and the eyes are dotted. The slightest misstep in this
and the whole thing is going to be burned to
the ground.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Yeah, now, Joe, I'm glad you brought that up, because
those are important things to note on how it's worked.
But let me lay it out leave even a little
bit further. Here Nick, the thirty two year old adult
middle side of Rob and Michelle. He's actually living on
the property in a house out back, a guesthouse, and
he's been there for the last five years on and off.
(23:09):
Now at three different times he has destroyed that house,
only to have it rebuilt by Rob and Michelle. Now
here's the part that really grinds my gears. He's in meetings,
by the way, when I say meetings. I'm talking about
either AA in a These are things that have been
public knowledge about him in meetings, bragging about how he
(23:30):
tore it all up and it got fixed. Now do
you want to go back to the fact that while
their other children grew up not having these problems, Nick
was different. So he's living on their backs and Rob
Reiner had had his fill. You know, at a certain
point in time, you no longer are a young person
(23:50):
with potential. You are what you are, and I, as
a parent owe it to you as a young adult
love you. I'm going to love you from a distance,
you know. And we all do that at our own time,
at our own pace, and in our own way. And
the Rob and Michelle had been at this point now
it had been on and off because they is your son,
(24:14):
is your child. You know, you love your children for
crying out loud. It's not an easy button to switch.
But they were at a party with Conan O'Brien, not
with at Conan O'Brien's house. A Jewish gathering is the
way it has been pitched to me.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
This first NIGHTE to Hankah.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
I think, well, yeah, yeah, and then so you've got
the Jewish families in Hollywood are all there and it's
an annual event that Conan does regularly. And most of
the attendees there were friends who had been friends for
a long time. The friends that had been there a
long time saw Nick and he was acting wrong at
the party he was going up to You got a
(24:51):
lot of celebrities there, but they're not all celebrities. You know,
Celebrities are normal people and they have friends that are
not in the business. You know, they have friends that
are just people from you know, church or softball or whatever.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
You know.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
I mean, you have friends outside of the industry. And
Nick Reiner with his with Rob Reiner, his seventy eight
year old father, his wife Michelle, amongst all of their
friends at Conan O'Brien's house and Nick Ryan is walking
around poking people. Are you famous? What are you famous for?
How are you famous? And it was really embarrassing. It
(25:27):
was also very aggressive, and it was that way he
was treating guests at Conan O'Brien's party that made Rob
pull him off to the side, trying to get him
to stop, and he wouldn't. Now you're in public with
a thirty two year old man who has a pension
for alcohol and drugs and violence, and you're a guest.
(25:51):
I mean, the humiliation and embarrassment goes beyond anything because
everyone at the party heard this argument become a fight,
a verbal fight. Now based on that was Saturday night, Joe,
Saturday Night, Eric Idle comedian, Oh yeah, I know, Eric.
He spent an hour on the phone with Rob that night.
Rob Reiner, I'm guessing it was after they left Conan
(26:15):
O'Brien's party. They all left, and we know Nick lives
in the pool house or the guest house out in
the backyard of the three point five million dollar mansion property.
Rob and Michelle go home from Conan O'Brien's party. We
know he talks to Eric Idol, but we don't know
exactly when they were killed, but we can get some
(26:39):
hints here. Joe, between Saturday night at Conan O'Brien's house,
a Sunday afternoon at three thirty, when daughter Romy shows
up at their house, and when Romy gets there because
she can't get her mom and dad on the phone,
and she arrives at the house, lets herself in and
finds her mom and dad. They are in bed and
there's blood everywhere. She calls for paramedics, calls nine to
(27:03):
one one and when the firemen the paramedics arrived Joe,
they stop everything and say call the LAPD homicide, we
need back up. There was nothing they could do. Now
that's three thirty in the afternoon. We know that. Let's
just start the clock at say midnight. You know from
midnight Sunday Saturday night they get homes midnight, sometime between
(27:26):
the time they get home from Connor of Bryan's party
and all day Sunday to three thirty they were murdered.
We know that they were murdered in their bed. So
I'm going to go on an assumption. I know it's
bad to assume. I'm going to assume they were in bed.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Yeah, And you know, I got to tell you thanks
for telling me this, because all along I've had visions
of them in various locations of the home. I've thought
about maybe a family room form, a living room, the
dining area. The thing that jumped to mind the first,
because they were talking about sharforce injuries. My default position
was kitchen, right, and so that's what I was thinking.
(28:02):
But when you say bed and not just bedroom, you're
seeing bed yes, so that paints this in a completely
different light. You're talking about gaining access to somebody to
arguably other than I guess the bathroom the most personal
area of someone's home. I don't just let anyone into
(28:23):
my bedroom. That's my sancto sectorium. That's just you know,
my place, all right, You're not supposed to be there
at all. Period into paragraph. And the fact that they
are in bed, that gives you an indication that whoever
perpetrated this, they would have to have intimate knowledge. First off,
of the hours that Rob and Michelle kept. When do
(28:47):
they go to bed? Oh, here's another piece. How deeply
do they sleep? You know? Is this like if I
walked into the room, are they going to you know,
is she a light sleeper? Is he a light sleeper?
Or they just going to pop up in bed? Well,
obviously they felt comfortable whoever this is to go into
the bedroom. And if this is accurate where they are
in bed, I have to assume that there is at
(29:11):
least some possibility that the perpetrator may have climbed into
bed with them. And this is one of the reasons
I say this, because we're talking about a crime that
has been committed, and you and I have talked about
sharp forces injuries a lot over the years together. Dave
arguably the most personal of all deaths that exist out there.
(29:36):
The thing that I have heard repeatedly by all of
these talking heads is the word slashing, and it has
been mentioned over and over again. I have no way
to validate that, but just go with me here. If
their throats were in fact slashed, it's not like on
television where somebody comes to the door and someone sweeps
(29:57):
a knife blade over the antior aspect the neck. It
doesn't work like that, I guess. I suppose that it could,
but the line's share of the time, you have to
have a body or a person that is shored against
a surface like a bed or a wall or a floor,
where you can apply your weight literally to their throat
(30:19):
and press down with a knife to get the knife
to go through the depth of their neck DC. So
in order to do that, I guess you could stand
alongside them, off to either side of the bed and
cut their throat. But we're also hearing this idea that
there were multiple stab ones over and over and over
and over again, so this is very intimate. The person
(30:44):
had power it's always I'm always thinking that if there
are two subjects, male and female. Rob Reiner is not
a small guy. I mean, he's like six to two
or something like this. If it were if it were
the average person choosing a target, even though he's considerably
(31:05):
older than his wife, he's seventy eight, you're probably going
to go after him first. He's the most robust. He
presents the biggest threat. You would have to knock him
down in some way. Did he cry out? Did he
alert Michelle to what was going on? Because if they're
deep sleepers, I guess this could have happened and neither
(31:26):
one of them would have been aware that the other
one was being harmed. That's a possibility. Perhaps we don't
know anything about their sleeping habits, but if it's all
contained in here, David, this is one other point I
want to make, and I'm not going to give away
too much here. I will say, just let me finish
up with this. If in fact the subject gets into
(31:46):
the bed with them and attacks them like this, not
only are their bedclothes, the mattress, their pajamas, and their
bodies going to be super saturated with blood. The perpetrator
will be covered from head to toe with that blood
(32:07):
as well. Just for a second, just imagine the hands
that held you, caressed you, comforted you, took care of
(32:31):
you while you were sick, saw you off to your
first day of school, held your children. Because they're now grandparents.
You're staring down at their bodies and they're saturated with blood.
They have literally been butchered. I cannot imagine, Dave, what
(32:54):
Rob and Michelle's daughter Romie was experiencing at that moment
that she walked into their residents and saw her parents
there deceased. It is something that will haunt her dreams
forever and ever.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
You know, it's interesting the number of stories we've already
heard about where Nick Reiner was taken into custody, and
they tend to be different, you know, different stories. But
the one story we've heard of romy finding her parents
was because she couldn't get them on the phone, she
(33:28):
went to the house and let herself in because she
was concerned. And she is the one that found her
mother and father in their bed dead. Now, Joe I,
Billy Crystal and his wife, you know Billy, and they
were very close, Billy Crystal and Rob Ryner and Billy
(33:49):
Crystal is seen leaving the scene as tape is being
put up. You know, don't cross this line tape. And
the word is that he actually was able to take
a to rob, that he actually had a private before
they were removed from the house. And you've been at
plenty of crime scenes. Does that sound real or does
that sound made up? I do see a video of
(34:12):
Billy and his wife walking away in the dark, and
I'm gonna be honest with you. You and I cover a
lot of crimes. We cover a lot of these stories,
and I always try to think of the humanity. But
when you're watching somebody walking away from the home of
their friend and their friend is dead, and you see
them wiping tears, it doesn't matter how famous or rich
they are. They're crushed emotionally and they're walking down the
(34:33):
street holding hands with their loved one and just wondering
why this happened to this man, you know, And it's
a humanity issue there. It's not something to be poked
at and prodded at. And yet we got to know
what happened, because man, this is something that happens. And
you know, how many people, how many parents this year
have been killed by a child by their own spot,
(34:55):
you know, their own child, who killed them for any
number of reasons that they come to mind. I don't know.
There have been a few because we've covered them.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
There are people that make their way onto scenes. I
hope that any kind of I hope that no contamination happened, okay,
within this environment, because that can be problematic the fact
that mister Crystal and perhaps his why or whomever gained
access to this location. I understand the emotion that's involved here,
(35:29):
I truly do, but this is at this point, you
had no idea, No one had any idea that the
sun was a suspect. I'm sure that people might have
toyed with it at that moment, Tom, but you're talking
early on in this investigation. The problem is is that
anytime you insert yourself as a civilian into a scene
that we like to think is still pristine, that maybe
(35:51):
only contains the DNA perhaps of the decedent and the victims.
You don't want to drag anything else into this environment.
And I understand people want to grieve and all these
sorts of things. There's a time and a place for everything,
and I just hope that the bodies were not touched
(36:13):
any way. I hope that. I don't know that. I
hope that certainly whoever was in their exercise restraint because
that can be problematic. And I say that could be
problematic because I take the long view of this. I
know how lawyers are, and they will use anything. They
will say, oh, well, these people just straped through the
(36:35):
pain and had access to the bodies because their job
is to try to get the defendant off.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
And that's why I wondered if that was the truth.
I saw the video of him walking away, but I
wonder if all the other stuff about it was made up.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Yeah, I know, And you have to take it all
with a grain of salt when it comes down to Hollywood.
I have to say that. And look, if I'm offending
you and you're from Hollywood, Oh, I don't care. It's
just the reality of the real world that we kind
of exist in, and this is you know, this is
this is where the real world actually touches Hollywood. All
of a sudden, you know, they found something they kind
(37:09):
of Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
All right, Remember you and I were both talking about
we'd heard about him being arrested in his hotel room,
and they're being blood Yep, he wasn't arrested in his
hotel room, Joe, but I think I found something you
need to know, all right. He was arrested in a
public area of Los Angeles Exposition Park neighborhood, which is
(37:32):
located near the USC campus. But Ryder checked into the
pier Side Santa Monica Hotel on Colorado Avenue around four
a m. Sunday morning. After he checked out later that
Sunday morning. After he checked out later that Sunday morning,
(37:57):
hotel staff discovered a room covered in blood, including a
shower described as full of blood and blood on the bed.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Okay, hang on one second, you've checked into hotels. I've
checked into hotels, all right, I've checked into ceed motels.
I'm sure you have as well. When you didn't have
a lot of money, such as been my case for
much of my life. How do you check in at
the desk and you're super saturated with blood and no
one sees this? I don't. I don't. That's one thing
(38:30):
that's that's baffling to me.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Could he have checked in for him? Let because they
get into the fight at Conan's, he grabs a bag,
and because he's been reported out of your things. Yeah,
I'm out of here. He goes to the hotel. He
checks in at four a m. He's fine, No blood,
no nothing, just mad gets in the hotel room. Things.
I'm getting them. I'm done.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Look, let me, I got to ask you a question,
because you're going to have you might have first hand
knowledge of this. I'm not sure Brentwood is like a
poke from Santa Monica. I mean, it's not like they're
not like right on top of one another. I mean,
it's not something you're going to I guess you could
do uber, you could do a cab, but it's better
if you have your own wheels. Most people, you know,
that's what La is known for. Everybody has their own
(39:11):
car out there, right, And so it's kind of the
standard trope about layah. But you know, how do you
how far away is it? It's not some kind of
track you're going to make on foot.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
No, you wouldn't walk it. But you're talking about He
was about twenty miles away from the hotel when they
found him at Exposition Park, Okay, Okay. And Exposition Park
is near usc Okay, So that's yeah. So it's well,
(39:44):
USC is well south of yes, Okay, that's what I thought.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
Okay, gotcha.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
But he's in the Santa Monica hotel is where he
checked in, So yeah, there is some distance here, which
is very normal for LA. So I'm thinking, and again,
you know what this is where we're making up based
on right, right, because you couldn't check into a hotel, bloody,
and you know, nobody's checking in like that. You wouldn't
let them come in there. But a guy who's mad
at his folks and needs place to stay at four
(40:10):
in the morning. Yeah, and it makes sense that okay
checks in. Now he's sitting there grinding his gears boom.
So now we know sometime after he checks into the
hotel at four am and before his sister eleven and
a half hours later comes into the house, they've been killed.
Also reports the rigor mortis had set in by the
time they were actually discovered by fire rescue. That's the report.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Yeah, and so yeah, and that was you know, I
found it interesting earlier when you actually and you kind
of stopped when you said it. It's like the police,
the fire service walked in and they said, whoa, whoa, whoa,
you need to call the PD. Well, one of the things,
believe or not. One of the things that first responders
they will do. The first thing you're doing is checked
for a pulse. And even folks might not realize this
(40:56):
even when you have and you know, I know medical
people do. But just you know our friends out there
that listen to us, you don't necessarily know this. You
don't walk around with latex gloves on. You can sense
body heat very well demonstrated through latex gloves. You can
also sense rigidity because that's like a force you can manipulate,
and those sorts of things. You check the jaw, you
check the arms. One of the things you obviays see
(41:17):
firefighters go for us. They're going to go for the wrist.
They go for the risk because they can also check
for a pulse, and they can also bend the elbow.
If they sense that the individual is deceased, they're going
to try to move the arm. If there's any kind
of rigidity there, that's going to give them a clue.
So the police have a starting place, I think with
the timeline relative to what may have gone down, the
(41:40):
times involved, and the beauty of all of this is
that if this suspect Nick is carrying a phone, you're
going to have that time stamp. You go back to
the party earlier, which you know we've talked about now
kind of extensively, that there's this fight or brewjaha that
breaks out. At the fight, people probably looked at their
(42:01):
phone and looked at their watch. I don't know if
the Rhiners made it out of the door early, like
they make an early exit. I've been in parties like
that where things have gone down it's like, I don't
need this, I'm leaving right now, and I make note
of the time that I leave. Perhaps people are going
to be aware of this. This is not this is
a lot not like Joe Schmoe walking out the door.
(42:22):
This is Rob Ryan or walking out the door. People
are going to pay attention, and particularly if his son
has created a scene here and he's been engaging with
all of these people around there. There's been rumors that
have been floating around about who exactly the son had
engaged with at the scene. One of the names that
has surfaced is Bill Hayter, who if you're not familiar
(42:45):
with him, he's the guy that does the imitations that's hilarious.
I don't know, I can't verify that, but you know,
again one of those rumored things that kind of circulates
through Hollywood. But anyway, we know that it's a star
studed event. There's people that are watching this, so you
can go back in time. I would imagine that LAPD
(43:07):
is going to be speaking to everybody that was at
that party. And I'm being you know, I guess a
little bit snarky by saying this. I wonder if they
have to contact their agent in order to get a
statement from them. They will be taking statements and trying
to nail down this timeline relative to what precisely happened
at that scene. I can tell you this, This is
(43:30):
arguably one of the most brutal cases certainly to emerge
out of Hollywood in recent memory. It has affected an
iconic family. We are just beginning to understand some of
the nuances involved in this case, and trust me, my friends,
there will be more. We will hear more coming out
(43:51):
over the following days, weeks, months, as this scene kind
of wins its way through the court system. We know
that there is a lot more to be told. The
one thing you have to be very very careful of here,
and you guys need to remind me of this as well.
There is a reason that fact in Hollywood becomes fiction,
(44:13):
and fiction sometimes becomes a fact. You have to wait
everything that comes out of Hollywood, you have to measure
it and try to understand is this real or is
this a fantasy? I know this. There are two people
that are now dead and it would appear that someone
(44:34):
in their inner circle has butchered them. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is bodybags
Quody times, but Joseph's gotten more. The first time I
ever saw all in the family, I was with my
grandparents and we were sitting around there their television and
their little home in North Louisiana. And what's really interesting
about that era of Tom is that when one family
(00:26):
watched television, everybody watched television. You didn't have all of
these selections that are out there, you know, kind of
floating about, you know. For us, I literally think we
had three channels on kind of a moderate day. An
exceptional day, we might have one more that came out
of some undisclosed location in Arkansas, and that was about
(00:47):
the extent of it. And so what we did know
is that on a Saturday night, which I think is
when it was, you could sit down and all in
the family would come home and we would watch and
I think a lot of families around the United States
watched it. And it was at that point in time
we became familiar with Rob Reiner, aka Meathead, and he
(01:10):
was the foil to Archie Bunker, and we got great
laughs out of that. It was a different time in
this country at that point in time, but he left
an impression, certainly in the years that followed his life.
My kids still to this day quote Princess Bride, and
I do too. I mean, it's just one of the
things that's integrated into the grain of who we are.
(01:34):
You know. The thing about Hollywood is that we esteem
these people so much, and we put them up on
a pedestal, and when the dirt and the grime of
the streets comes upon them and visits upon them, you
suddenly come to a realization that they are in fact human.
(01:55):
And there is nothing that, from my perspective, encapsulate the
human experience more than death, particularly brutal death, because at
the end of the day, we all bleed red. I'm
Josephcott Morgan and this is bodybags, you know, Brother Dave.
(02:17):
I'm not going to say that the moment that I
found out about the news that Rob Reiner and his
wife Michelle Singer had been killed in their home is
one of those moments that will mark my life that
I'll remember where I was at that particular time. However,
I will say this, it's something that kind of shocked
(02:40):
me to a great degree because you don't think about
events happening like this. To the exclusion of oj in Brentwood,
you think that it's going to you know that the
I don't know, the death angel kind of passes over
that area, and that it doesn't the violence doesn't visit
upon these people. You know, as our earlier stated, this
(03:02):
is a violent event. People have messed up families, and
they have people with a lot of pathology in their families.
And I think that that's what we're seeing on display here.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yeah, I think in this respect this shows you how
normal their family is. The difference being income and neighborhood,
living in a thirteen point five million dollar home with
a guesthouse in Brentwood. You know, that's about it. I was.
I was impacted heavily by all in the family as
(03:34):
a as a child because my parents. You mentioned that
it was on Saturday nights. Well you realize that it
didn't start out there, and being a bit of a
TV buff, the first season it was on the air
was on Tuesdays. That was seventy one in nineteen seventy two,
And that's what you're talking about. The season two rather
from seventy one to seventy five, that's when it was
on Saturday nights.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Wait is Tuesday where shows used to go to die
or survive. Is that is that kind of how it
works out?
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Exactly? Sure, but you're right. It was on seventy on
Saturday nights in that that period where it became boom,
you know. And I remember an argument with my parents
because my parents didn't think it was acceptable for children
to watch All in the Family. And we had five
kids in my family and the two little ones didn't count,
they were too young. But they wanted us to watch
Emergency with Kevin Tye and Randolph Manto.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I tell you all loved Emergency as well.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, I figured you did, Yeah, and I fought it.
They made it. They turned it on the big in
the living room, you know, on the TV in there,
and they said, well, if you want to watch All
in the Family, you go in our room, because you
remember how your parents used to have it. They had it,
but there's a little black and white one, you know.
That was the second TV. That's where I watched it
All in the Family. And then I started feeling weird
because they started having popcorn and stuff like that watching Emergency.
(04:47):
So I was like, well, dang, I'll go watch that.
So the thing is is that All in the Family
was if you look at the politics that were expressed
on that show. The actors played a part very well stivic.
You know, Meathead ended up being pretty much what Rob
(05:08):
Reiner's politics were in life, very liberal, very outspoken liberal. Meanwhile,
Carol O'Connor, who played Archie, he was not conservative by
any stretch as a man. As a character, he played
the character brilliantly. But anyway, I think it's a brilliant
show for the time, even though it was a rip
off from Great Britain. Yeah, it was very Americanized and
without Carol O'Connor and Rob Reiner, that show would not
(05:29):
have been anywhere. And you know, Geene Stapleton got at
her in there. She was oh boy, yeah, you know
she played the first they did the first rape. Yeah,
network television. Yeah, and that episode, to my course still
because she was like could have been your mom, you know,
it was.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
It was incredibly traumatizing. There was a lot of controversy
around that. Yeah, and of course, you know, we can't
forget Sally Struthers, you know, walking around begging for money
in the slums. Yeah, do you remember later found out
but yeah, but do.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
You remember the episode when they had moved away, when
when meat had they had moved out to California, right,
and they're getting a divorce and Archie and Edith's going
to visit and Archie assumes they're divorcing because Rob cheated
on you know, on his on his daughter. And I'll
never forget this line because of the when he finds
out the truth that it was his daughter, Sally who
(06:19):
cheated on Mike. That's when Carol O'Connor looks at him.
He said, all these years, I thought you weren't good
enough for my daughter. Yeah, and it turns out she
wasn't good enough for you, right, And that, I mean,
that's still to this day when you can quote something
from a sitcom, a world renowned sitcom, and all we're
doing is talking about the things that made you cry,
(06:41):
right right, that's a powerful show.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, it is. I think probably one of my favorite
episodes was one where Sammy Davis Junior may Archie. Yeah. Yeah,
that was that was pretty wild, but yeah, it was.
It was certainly groundbreaking, and you know, and that that
just kind of started, you know, Rob Ryner on this journey.
Of course, I think that it started before that, you know,
with his dad.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Can you imagine that I saw an interview with Rob
and Nick. Okay, after they did was it being Charlie Charlie?
They did this interview and they were asking Nick about
growing up as the son of, you know, and he goes, well,
he's and Rob says, you know, it's not just the
son of, it's also the grandson of, right, right, And
that's who you know. You think about Rob Reiner's background,
(07:25):
Carl Reiner. You know, Carl Reiner had this amazing career
and created the Dick Van Dyke show. He actually created
it for himself. He created the Rob Petrie roll for himself.
He wrote it for himself and shot a pilot with
him as the star as Rob Petrie, and they turned
it down. And that's when they cast Dick Van Dyke
and he was like, Okay, I'll beat the producer and
(07:47):
you know.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
I'll be rich. And he was brilliant it, I mean,
he really was. You know, Maury Amsterdam and Rose Marie
two of the greatest comics to ever grace a television
screen as far as I'm concerned. But you have that lineage, Joe.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, And that's why I'm saying you think about how
what we can talk about with the family name and
now that family name has been really ripped up by
allegedly reportedly a son. Now, Rob Reiner. You mentioned his
career on television, you know, during the seventies. He was
married to another big time star of TV at the time,
(08:23):
Penny Marshall, who was on Laverne and Shirley. At first,
she was the secretary on the Odd Couple if you remember.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
That, Imber.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Then she ends up on Laverne and Shirley and anyway,
so they're on two of the hottest shows on television
at the time at the same time in a married
couple at that Rob actually adopted Penny Marshall's daughter, Tracy
from a previous marriage, and her she's Tracy Reiner. And
(08:51):
even after they divorced, Tracy still was his daughter, you know,
and we watched their careers after the TV shows. After
all in the family, what does he do. He goes
out and mix this mockumentary spinal tap. This is final tap,
that boom that launched Brian b. Reiner. It was just
(09:13):
holy moly. And then he had a number of hits
in the eighties, I mean, stand by me. That's another
one that comes when people think about great impactful movies.
Stand By Me is one of them.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yes, And so as a matter of fact, Rob actually
stated that that that Gordo was kind of a reflection
of him, you know, the character played by Will I
can't Yeah, Will Wheaton, you know that. You know, my
dad hates me. That faintus line. He states with with
(09:46):
with River Phoenix, and it was really touching. And I
identified with that movie, you know, wholeheartedly. I watched it.
I can't tell you how many times because you can always,
you know, dig out more nuggets in that particular and
it's really a vignette. You know, it's based on a
short story I think that Stephen King had actually written,
and it was not It was horrible, but it wasn't
(10:09):
a horror in the horror genre. It was just something
that Rob Reiner breathed life into. And yeah, you know
you've got all this, you know, when Harry Mint Sally
and of course a few good men. But for me,
it was always stand by Me because I loved that movie.
And that was the thing about his movies is that.
And he said in an interview that I was fascinated
(10:30):
by He said, you know, I don't have people going
to other galaxies. I don't have people blowing up. And
he says, I just try to tell stories about real
people in their lives and things that they identify with.
And I think that all of us can identify with that.
And I think that that goes to the DNA of
the kind of family man he was. That he through
tick and tent, he loved his kids. You know that
(10:52):
there was that emotion that kind of hooked into it. Now, look,
you know, we can't sit here. I don't think in judgment.
It would be very easy to sit here in judgment
and say what would you do? But you know, I
got to tell you, I don't know what's going on
with his son, Nick. I know that he's been charged,
but I can tell you he's got other kids. Yeah,
that didn't show up at his house and do this allegedly.
(11:15):
And they're successful people and they're you know, they're well balanced.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Well let's get into this, okay. So Rob Reiner famously
married to Penny Marshall throughout the seventies. In nineteen eighty one,
they divorced after ten years. Penny Marshall moved on, Rob
Reiner moved on. But you know what the movie when
Harry met Sally is actually was written about Rob Reiner
and his years after Penny Marshall because he hadn't met anybody,
(11:40):
and he was after several years thinking I'm never gonna
get married. I'm never going to find anybody. That's why he'shot.
It was written that way. But the end of the
movie when Harry met Sally, when Billy Crystal and me
Meg Ryan get together at the end, the romantic ending, right, Yeah,
the ending of the movie was rewritten to include that,
(12:02):
not because it didn't test well, because Rob had Matt
Michelle Singer in the process of making that movie in
that time period, and so the ending was rewritten to
incorporate that he does have this new love in his life.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Woll life imitating art, art imitating life very close.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
And so when we look at all of this and
how impactful because of our age is how his life
in TV and film impacted our life, it only stands
to reason that we would now look at it and go, Okay,
he had his first batch of being married and being
a dad, and then divorce, separates, he spends a decade
without and then he's back. He has a new wife, Michelle,
(12:42):
and they get married in the early nineties, he is
seventy well, he's seventy eight at his death. And so
you know, you talk about thirty five years ago. Okay,
you got a guy that's in his early forties and
he and Michelle they have three kids, and he's established.
They have money, you know, they have all the trappings.
(13:04):
And now they've got three wonderful kids. They've got Jake, Nick,
and Romy. Jake's the oldest, Nick's the middle, and Romy's
the youngest. Romy is the one who discovered her parents. Now,
Jake and Romy are both well adjusted and well thought
of in the Hollywood community. The children of Rob and Michelle.
You got to remember that Rob Ryner and Michelle are
(13:25):
very active in politics, very active in a lot of things.
They do with a lot of social activities, and people
were very involved with their family and their lives. People,
if you actually read the people talking about their relationships,
there are three or four different people that we raised
our children together, right, and Demi Moore wrote that, so
did Schwarzenegger his ex wife. Anyway, Maria Maria Shriver, we
(13:50):
raised our children together in the nineties. So these three children, Jake, Nick,
and Romy grow up. And Nick, from a very early
age was pointed out as the bad seed. This is
the kid who just wow. You know, he's the song
black sheep of the family. You know, he's the guy
(14:11):
that they can't figure out. He just wiring's not right.
He's not like everyone else, and he's not responding to treatment.
They started doing treatment with this kid early on. We're
talking about doing family yoga to try to redirect him
so he wouldn't have this spontaneous aggressive outbursts of aggression,
of anger, of just violence. And we're talking about from
(14:33):
five and six years old, Joe. We're not talking about
teen drug addicts. We're talking ten years before then. So
Jake and Romey grow up well adjusted. Nick does not.
This is before drugs, after drugs became a part of it.
The Reiner family, they put him in rehabs as early
(14:55):
as fifteen. My understanding is seventeen rehabs. That's the same
number as many other addicts who fail at it. Okay,
that fail at rehab, that do not work the program.
It works if you work at friends. But if you
go to the program taking a magic pill thinking I'm
going to go in here for thirty days and get
out and be fine. No, you're not you're in there
(15:16):
for twenty eight days, because that's what insurance pays for.
If you're in a longer, extended period of time, great,
that's a great way to start. But you know what,
it's easy to be sober when you're in a sober
house where there are no alcohol or drugs and you're
covered by a lot of other people. It's what happens
when you leave, and that's where you owe it to
yourself and those you love that have gone this far
with you to actually work the program. It's not magic.
(15:38):
You have to work it. And Nick failed at working
it routinely, over and over again, and his outbursts became
more often than not in public. The movie Being Charlie
that has been written about over the last couple of
days is not a movie. A lot of people saw
it's autobiographical and that Nick wrote part of the script
while he was in rehab. Rob directed it, and I
(15:59):
haven't it. I'm only reading about it now, And it
was a very personal story. But it's not the first
time a personal story about Nick and the family came up. Really, No,
the first time a personal story was written about Nick
and the family. It was written about them with Rob
and Michelle's permission, but just changing the name of Nick
(16:20):
because they didn't want their six year old son to
know that he was being written about in a book
about dealing with a problem child.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Holy smoke. So I don't think I was not aware
of that.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Now most people aren't. And what I'm trying to get
to is this is going to be blamed on a
lot of things. People are going to say they were
very indulgent. Well, you know what, when you have a
drug addled child that isn't responding to treatment, then you
can sing your own song. Until then, I pray you
don't step in that hole because it will bite you.
I've dealt with it personally on a very personal level.
(16:53):
This is a very personal story, and I have tried
to help people. I'm the guy that gets to call
at three am from a friend who he says, Dave,
I have a nephew. Okay, where is he? Where is she?
You know, I'm that guy. And this is a case
where they did everything they could to get him help,
but he had spun to a point. Nick had Nick
had spent the last twelve fifteen years of his life
(17:15):
living homeless, living from Massachusetts to Texas to Oregon to
LA and in homeless shelters and on the street. And
he even said in twenty seventeen, when they said what
got you off the street, he said, I frobally get
tired of it. You know, I'm lucky to be alive.
He was in rehab when he said this. You know,
he's he was sober in rehab and he was giving
(17:35):
an interview about I'm just thankful I'm alive. I'm thankful
I have this opportunity. And you know, he sounded great.
It's easy to sound great when you're sober in a
recovery program. It's not so easy to do it when
you face the rigors of daily life and you're not
working the program.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Yeah, and I'd have to agree with you, Dave. You know,
you see the symptomology almost as if a train is
coming down the track and you see that little pin
of light off in the distance and you cannot get
off of the track either way. The train is coming
and it's powerful and anything in its path will get wrecked.
I guarantee you. Unfortunately, there are many many families out
(18:15):
there right now, as Dave and I lay the sound
down that are struggling with these same issues right now,
probably your neighbors, people around your city, people from coast
to coast. It just so happens that one of the
luminaries in Hollywood has brought this through their death into focus.
(18:52):
I've had to turn people down, Dave in the last
nine hours, because I have so many of these producers
that have been reaching out to me to make comment
on Robin Michelle's homicide. And you know, there's only so
many hours in the day. You know, you run a
(19:14):
gas and.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
We struggle to not call you personally being siat yeah,
because I have some questions for you about this.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Well, it's yeah, you only have so much gas in
the tank, and right now we you know, this is
the downside of this. I felt like we needed to
come on air and address this right now. But here's
the downside. We don't have as much data as we
will have probably a month from now, or maybe a
month and a half from now. And I beg again,
like I do with most of the things I comment
(19:42):
in the media, I beg patience on everybody's part. Crime
scene investigation, death investigation is not a microwave science. It's
not something that you can just pop it in the microwave.
It's going to be ready for you in a minute.
It doesn't happen like this. This is something that takes time,
and I beg you to show a little latitude and
(20:05):
mercy perhaps to the people at LAPD relative to the information.
One of the big things that came out that I heard,
and I want to kind of set this aside right now,
there was a gap in information that was being released.
It seemed like that there was kind of some double
speak going on in the sense of what was happening
(20:29):
outside of the residence in Brentwood relative to press release
and all of these sorts of things. You have to
understand something. They are working an active double homicide scene,
and yes you do. There is no constitutional exception to
a warrant when it comes to homicides. Homicides are treated
(20:51):
no differently under the constitution, say, for instance, compared to
breaking and entering, vandalism or whatever the case might be.
Still have to go through the rigor of writing up
a warrant, a search warrant, getting that signed by judge,
and then you enter and this is how it works.
I really want to set the table with this. Once
police have entered into a domicile where a homicide is
(21:14):
obviously taking place. This is what they do. They walk in.
The first thing they're going to do is verify if
the people are deceased or not. Then they're going to
do a sweep through the house, see if there's anybody
else that's injured. Then they're going to see if there
is an active assailant inside of the house and bring
them into custody. After that, you cannot go searching through closets,
(21:38):
You cannot go digging through chest of drawers, You cannot
even open open up the cupboard in a house without
a warrant. You have to understand their son, Nick was
actually domiciled at this location and so this is in
fact his residence now, and that's the way the court
(21:59):
looks at this. He has a right to privacy. Okay,
So you have to back out, secure the scene. You
put the tape up, you put all of the security
around it necessary, and those bodies are not going anywhere.
I know this sounds very cold, but you have to
go write up a search warrant, go to a magistrate
or judge, have them sign off on it, and then
you come back out to the scene and work the scene.
(22:21):
That's the way it works. That's the way it always
has worked. Hopefully as a matter of fact, because it
hasn't worked this way in the past. There have been
homicide cases that have been thrown out as a result
of faulty searches. And trust me, as intense as a
light is going to be on this and you know
what I'm talking about, brother Dave. With this, you have
to make sure that all of the te's are crossed
(22:41):
and the eyes are dotted. The slightest misstep in this
and the whole thing is going to be burned to
the ground.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Yeah, now, Joe, I'm glad you brought that up, because
those are important things to note on how it's worked.
But let me lay it out leave even a little
bit further. Here Nick, the thirty two year old adult
middle side of Rob and Michelle. He's actually living on
the property in a house out back, a guesthouse, and
he's been there for the last five years on and off.
(23:09):
Now at three different times he has destroyed that house,
only to have it rebuilt by Rob and Michelle. Now
here's the part that really grinds my gears. He's in meetings,
by the way, when I say meetings. I'm talking about
either AA in a These are things that have been
public knowledge about him in meetings, bragging about how he
(23:30):
tore it all up and it got fixed. Now do
you want to go back to the fact that while
their other children grew up not having these problems, Nick
was different. So he's living on their backs and Rob
Reiner had had his fill. You know, at a certain
point in time, you no longer are a young person
(23:50):
with potential. You are what you are, and I, as
a parent owe it to you as a young adult
love you. I'm going to love you from a distance,
you know. And we all do that at our own time,
at our own pace, and in our own way. And
the Rob and Michelle had been at this point now
it had been on and off because they is your son,
(24:14):
is your child. You know, you love your children for
crying out loud. It's not an easy button to switch.
But they were at a party with Conan O'Brien, not
with at Conan O'Brien's house. A Jewish gathering is the
way it has been pitched to me.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
This first NIGHTE to Hankah.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
I think, well, yeah, yeah, and then so you've got
the Jewish families in Hollywood are all there and it's
an annual event that Conan does regularly. And most of
the attendees there were friends who had been friends for
a long time. The friends that had been there a
long time saw Nick and he was acting wrong at
the party he was going up to You got a
(24:51):
lot of celebrities there, but they're not all celebrities. You know,
Celebrities are normal people and they have friends that are
not in the business. You know, they have friends that
are just people from you know, church or softball or whatever.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
You know.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
I mean, you have friends outside of the industry. And
Nick Reiner with his with Rob Reiner, his seventy eight
year old father, his wife Michelle, amongst all of their
friends at Conan O'Brien's house and Nick Ryan is walking
around poking people. Are you famous? What are you famous for?
How are you famous? And it was really embarrassing. It
(25:27):
was also very aggressive, and it was that way he
was treating guests at Conan O'Brien's party that made Rob
pull him off to the side, trying to get him
to stop, and he wouldn't. Now you're in public with
a thirty two year old man who has a pension
for alcohol and drugs and violence, and you're a guest.
(25:51):
I mean, the humiliation and embarrassment goes beyond anything because
everyone at the party heard this argument become a fight,
a verbal fight. Now based on that was Saturday night, Joe,
Saturday Night, Eric Idle comedian, Oh yeah, I know, Eric.
He spent an hour on the phone with Rob that night.
Rob Reiner, I'm guessing it was after they left Conan
(26:15):
O'Brien's party. They all left, and we know Nick lives
in the pool house or the guest house out in
the backyard of the three point five million dollar mansion property.
Rob and Michelle go home from Conan O'Brien's party. We
know he talks to Eric Idol, but we don't know
exactly when they were killed, but we can get some
(26:39):
hints here. Joe, between Saturday night at Conan O'Brien's house,
a Sunday afternoon at three thirty, when daughter Romy shows
up at their house, and when Romy gets there because
she can't get her mom and dad on the phone,
and she arrives at the house, lets herself in and
finds her mom and dad. They are in bed and
there's blood everywhere. She calls for paramedics, calls nine to
(27:03):
one one and when the firemen the paramedics arrived Joe,
they stop everything and say call the LAPD homicide, we
need back up. There was nothing they could do. Now
that's three thirty in the afternoon. We know that. Let's
just start the clock at say midnight. You know from
midnight Sunday Saturday night they get homes midnight, sometime between
(27:26):
the time they get home from Connor of Bryan's party
and all day Sunday to three thirty they were murdered.
We know that they were murdered in their bed. So
I'm going to go on an assumption. I know it's
bad to assume. I'm going to assume they were in bed.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Yeah, And you know, I got to tell you thanks
for telling me this, because all along I've had visions
of them in various locations of the home. I've thought
about maybe a family room form, a living room, the
dining area. The thing that jumped to mind the first,
because they were talking about sharforce injuries. My default position
was kitchen, right, and so that's what I was thinking.
(28:02):
But when you say bed and not just bedroom, you're
seeing bed yes, so that paints this in a completely
different light. You're talking about gaining access to somebody to
arguably other than I guess the bathroom the most personal
area of someone's home. I don't just let anyone into
(28:23):
my bedroom. That's my sancto sectorium. That's just you know,
my place, all right, You're not supposed to be there
at all. Period into paragraph. And the fact that they
are in bed, that gives you an indication that whoever
perpetrated this, they would have to have intimate knowledge. First off,
of the hours that Rob and Michelle kept. When do
(28:47):
they go to bed? Oh, here's another piece. How deeply
do they sleep? You know? Is this like if I
walked into the room, are they going to you know,
is she a light sleeper? Is he a light sleeper?
Or they just going to pop up in bed? Well,
obviously they felt comfortable whoever this is to go into
the bedroom. And if this is accurate where they are
in bed, I have to assume that there is at
(29:11):
least some possibility that the perpetrator may have climbed into
bed with them. And this is one of the reasons
I say this, because we're talking about a crime that
has been committed, and you and I have talked about
sharp forces injuries a lot over the years together. Dave
arguably the most personal of all deaths that exist out there.
(29:36):
The thing that I have heard repeatedly by all of
these talking heads is the word slashing, and it has
been mentioned over and over again. I have no way
to validate that, but just go with me here. If
their throats were in fact slashed, it's not like on
television where somebody comes to the door and someone sweeps
(29:57):
a knife blade over the antior aspect the neck. It
doesn't work like that, I guess. I suppose that it could,
but the line's share of the time, you have to
have a body or a person that is shored against
a surface like a bed or a wall or a floor,
where you can apply your weight literally to their throat
(30:19):
and press down with a knife to get the knife
to go through the depth of their neck DC. So
in order to do that, I guess you could stand
alongside them, off to either side of the bed and
cut their throat. But we're also hearing this idea that
there were multiple stab ones over and over and over
and over again, so this is very intimate. The person
(30:44):
had power it's always I'm always thinking that if there
are two subjects, male and female. Rob Reiner is not
a small guy. I mean, he's like six to two
or something like this. If it were if it were
the average person choosing a target, even though he's considerably
(31:05):
older than his wife, he's seventy eight, you're probably going
to go after him first. He's the most robust. He
presents the biggest threat. You would have to knock him
down in some way. Did he cry out? Did he
alert Michelle to what was going on? Because if they're
deep sleepers, I guess this could have happened and neither
(31:26):
one of them would have been aware that the other
one was being harmed. That's a possibility. Perhaps we don't
know anything about their sleeping habits, but if it's all
contained in here, David, this is one other point I
want to make, and I'm not going to give away
too much here. I will say, just let me finish
up with this. If in fact the subject gets into
(31:46):
the bed with them and attacks them like this, not
only are their bedclothes, the mattress, their pajamas, and their
bodies going to be super saturated with blood. The perpetrator
will be covered from head to toe with that blood
(32:07):
as well. Just for a second, just imagine the hands
that held you, caressed you, comforted you, took care of
(32:31):
you while you were sick, saw you off to your
first day of school, held your children. Because they're now grandparents.
You're staring down at their bodies and they're saturated with blood.
They have literally been butchered. I cannot imagine, Dave, what
(32:54):
Rob and Michelle's daughter Romie was experiencing at that moment
that she walked into their residents and saw her parents
there deceased. It is something that will haunt her dreams
forever and ever.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
You know, it's interesting the number of stories we've already
heard about where Nick Reiner was taken into custody, and
they tend to be different, you know, different stories. But
the one story we've heard of romy finding her parents
was because she couldn't get them on the phone, she
(33:28):
went to the house and let herself in because she
was concerned. And she is the one that found her
mother and father in their bed dead. Now, Joe I,
Billy Crystal and his wife, you know Billy, and they
were very close, Billy Crystal and Rob Ryner and Billy
(33:49):
Crystal is seen leaving the scene as tape is being
put up. You know, don't cross this line tape. And
the word is that he actually was able to take
a to rob, that he actually had a private before
they were removed from the house. And you've been at
plenty of crime scenes. Does that sound real or does
that sound made up? I do see a video of
(34:12):
Billy and his wife walking away in the dark, and
I'm gonna be honest with you. You and I cover a
lot of crimes. We cover a lot of these stories,
and I always try to think of the humanity. But
when you're watching somebody walking away from the home of
their friend and their friend is dead, and you see
them wiping tears, it doesn't matter how famous or rich
they are. They're crushed emotionally and they're walking down the
(34:33):
street holding hands with their loved one and just wondering
why this happened to this man, you know, And it's
a humanity issue there. It's not something to be poked
at and prodded at. And yet we got to know
what happened, because man, this is something that happens. And
you know, how many people, how many parents this year
have been killed by a child by their own spot,
(34:55):
you know, their own child, who killed them for any
number of reasons that they come to mind. I don't know.
There have been a few because we've covered them.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
There are people that make their way onto scenes. I
hope that any kind of I hope that no contamination happened, okay,
within this environment, because that can be problematic the fact
that mister Crystal and perhaps his why or whomever gained
access to this location. I understand the emotion that's involved here,
(35:29):
I truly do, but this is at this point, you
had no idea, No one had any idea that the
sun was a suspect. I'm sure that people might have
toyed with it at that moment, Tom, but you're talking
early on in this investigation. The problem is is that
anytime you insert yourself as a civilian into a scene
that we like to think is still pristine, that maybe
(35:51):
only contains the DNA perhaps of the decedent and the victims.
You don't want to drag anything else into this environment.
And I understand people want to grieve and all these
sorts of things. There's a time and a place for everything,
and I just hope that the bodies were not touched
(36:13):
any way. I hope that. I don't know that. I
hope that certainly whoever was in their exercise restraint because
that can be problematic. And I say that could be
problematic because I take the long view of this. I
know how lawyers are, and they will use anything. They
will say, oh, well, these people just straped through the
(36:35):
pain and had access to the bodies because their job
is to try to get the defendant off.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
And that's why I wondered if that was the truth.
I saw the video of him walking away, but I
wonder if all the other stuff about it was made up.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Yeah, I know, And you have to take it all
with a grain of salt when it comes down to Hollywood.
I have to say that. And look, if I'm offending
you and you're from Hollywood, Oh, I don't care. It's
just the reality of the real world that we kind
of exist in, and this is you know, this is
this is where the real world actually touches Hollywood. All
of a sudden, you know, they found something they kind
(37:09):
of Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
All right, Remember you and I were both talking about
we'd heard about him being arrested in his hotel room,
and they're being blood Yep, he wasn't arrested in his
hotel room, Joe, but I think I found something you
need to know, all right. He was arrested in a
public area of Los Angeles Exposition Park neighborhood, which is
(37:32):
located near the USC campus. But Ryder checked into the
pier Side Santa Monica Hotel on Colorado Avenue around four
a m. Sunday morning. After he checked out later that
Sunday morning. After he checked out later that Sunday morning,
(37:57):
hotel staff discovered a room covered in blood, including a
shower described as full of blood and blood on the bed.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Okay, hang on one second, you've checked into hotels. I've
checked into hotels, all right, I've checked into ceed motels.
I'm sure you have as well. When you didn't have
a lot of money, such as been my case for
much of my life. How do you check in at
the desk and you're super saturated with blood and no
one sees this? I don't. I don't. That's one thing
(38:30):
that's that's baffling to me.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Could he have checked in for him? Let because they
get into the fight at Conan's, he grabs a bag,
and because he's been reported out of your things. Yeah,
I'm out of here. He goes to the hotel. He
checks in at four a m. He's fine, No blood,
no nothing, just mad gets in the hotel room. Things.
I'm getting them. I'm done.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Look, let me, I got to ask you a question,
because you're going to have you might have first hand
knowledge of this. I'm not sure Brentwood is like a
poke from Santa Monica. I mean, it's not like they're
not like right on top of one another. I mean,
it's not something you're going to I guess you could
do uber, you could do a cab, but it's better
if you have your own wheels. Most people, you know,
that's what La is known for. Everybody has their own
(39:11):
car out there, right, And so it's kind of the
standard trope about layah. But you know, how do you
how far away is it? It's not some kind of
track you're going to make on foot.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
No, you wouldn't walk it. But you're talking about He
was about twenty miles away from the hotel when they
found him at Exposition Park, Okay, Okay. And Exposition Park
is near usc Okay, So that's yeah. So it's well,
(39:44):
USC is well south of yes, Okay, that's what I thought.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
Okay, gotcha.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
But he's in the Santa Monica hotel is where he
checked in, So yeah, there is some distance here, which
is very normal for LA. So I'm thinking, and again,
you know what this is where we're making up based
on right, right, because you couldn't check into a hotel, bloody,
and you know, nobody's checking in like that. You wouldn't
let them come in there. But a guy who's mad
at his folks and needs place to stay at four
(40:10):
in the morning. Yeah, and it makes sense that okay
checks in. Now he's sitting there grinding his gears boom.
So now we know sometime after he checks into the
hotel at four am and before his sister eleven and
a half hours later comes into the house, they've been killed.
Also reports the rigor mortis had set in by the
time they were actually discovered by fire rescue. That's the report.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Yeah, and so yeah, and that was you know, I
found it interesting earlier when you actually and you kind
of stopped when you said it. It's like the police,
the fire service walked in and they said, whoa, whoa, whoa,
you need to call the PD. Well, one of the things,
believe or not. One of the things that first responders
they will do. The first thing you're doing is checked
for a pulse. And even folks might not realize this
(40:56):
even when you have and you know, I know medical
people do. But just you know our friends out there
that listen to us, you don't necessarily know this. You
don't walk around with latex gloves on. You can sense
body heat very well demonstrated through latex gloves. You can
also sense rigidity because that's like a force you can manipulate,
and those sorts of things. You check the jaw, you
check the arms. One of the things you obviays see
(41:17):
firefighters go for us. They're going to go for the wrist.
They go for the risk because they can also check
for a pulse, and they can also bend the elbow.
If they sense that the individual is deceased, they're going
to try to move the arm. If there's any kind
of rigidity there, that's going to give them a clue.
So the police have a starting place, I think with
the timeline relative to what may have gone down, the
(41:40):
times involved, and the beauty of all of this is
that if this suspect Nick is carrying a phone, you're
going to have that time stamp. You go back to
the party earlier, which you know we've talked about now
kind of extensively, that there's this fight or brewjaha that
breaks out. At the fight, people probably looked at their
(42:01):
phone and looked at their watch. I don't know if
the Rhiners made it out of the door early, like
they make an early exit. I've been in parties like
that where things have gone down it's like, I don't
need this, I'm leaving right now, and I make note
of the time that I leave. Perhaps people are going
to be aware of this. This is not this is
a lot not like Joe Schmoe walking out the door.
(42:22):
This is Rob Ryan or walking out the door. People
are going to pay attention, and particularly if his son
has created a scene here and he's been engaging with
all of these people around there. There's been rumors that
have been floating around about who exactly the son had
engaged with at the scene. One of the names that
has surfaced is Bill Hayter, who if you're not familiar
(42:45):
with him, he's the guy that does the imitations that's hilarious.
I don't know, I can't verify that, but you know,
again one of those rumored things that kind of circulates
through Hollywood. But anyway, we know that it's a star
studed event. There's people that are watching this, so you
can go back in time. I would imagine that LAPD
(43:07):
is going to be speaking to everybody that was at
that party. And I'm being you know, I guess a
little bit snarky by saying this. I wonder if they
have to contact their agent in order to get a
statement from them. They will be taking statements and trying
to nail down this timeline relative to what precisely happened
at that scene. I can tell you this, This is
(43:30):
arguably one of the most brutal cases certainly to emerge
out of Hollywood in recent memory. It has affected an
iconic family. We are just beginning to understand some of
the nuances involved in this case, and trust me, my friends,
there will be more. We will hear more coming out
(43:51):
over the following days, weeks, months, as this scene kind
of wins its way through the court system. We know
that there is a lot more to be told. The
one thing you have to be very very careful of here,
and you guys need to remind me of this as well.
There is a reason that fact in Hollywood becomes fiction,
(44:13):
and fiction sometimes becomes a fact. You have to wait
everything that comes out of Hollywood, you have to measure
it and try to understand is this real or is
this a fantasy? I know this. There are two people
that are now dead and it would appear that someone
(44:34):
in their inner circle has butchered them. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is bodybags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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