July 7, 2021 • 46 mins
Catherine Pileggi went from a flight attendant to a multimillionaire’s girlfriend. But after eighteen years, her relationship was on the rocks. Then one night—someone cracked. Was it him? Or was it her?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is it a sin?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Is it a crime? Loving you dear like I do.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you. Hi, everyone,
Welcome back to Criminal Broad's a true crime and history
podcast about wild women on the wrong side of the law.
I'm your host, Tory Telfer, author of Lady Killers and
(00:31):
Confident Women, and numerous articles online that span a long
freelance career. I have articles from think pieces on why
there are so many movies being made about Ted Bundy
to articles from about ten years ago that are like
the best Diy avocado honey mask to put on your face.
(00:52):
I never said I started out as a as the
billionaire true crime writer I am today. I started out
my freelance writing career writing beauty and fashion articles for
twenty five dollars a pop, three articles a day, all
due before noon, living in Chicago, waitressing at night, and
honestly wouldn't want to do it again. But I look
(01:14):
back on that time in my life fondly. And if
you want to start out as a freelance writer, you
might have to start with one of those soulless grind gigs.
But do it because one day you could be sitting
in your closet talking into a microphone all by yourself.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
I didn't mean to get into my life story here today.
That was just the first thing that came to mind.
I hope you're all doing well. I hope you're hydrating.
It's very hot out there in a lot of places
in the US right now. International listeners, I don't care
what the weather is like where you are. You need
to hydrate too. Hydration is very important. Okay, before we
get into today's story, I want to beg a moment
(01:52):
of your time. I don't have any ADS today, so
you don't have to sit through any ads.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Instead.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
I was hoping I could just direct you in lieuvi
Ad to check out this great organization that I recently found.
It's called Last Prisoner Project dot org, and they're basically
trying to grant clemency or have President Biden grant clemency
to quote, the thousands of people incarcerated due to or
otherwise still burdened by federal cannabis related convictions. Let me
(02:20):
try to put that in plain English. Pretty sure what
they're saying is, it's kind of ridiculous. We live in
a country where you can become a millionaire by selling
weed or selling like your fancy schmancy like you know,
product like weed infused products, while other people, mostly black
and brown people, languish in jail for having a little
(02:40):
bit of weed on them. So I'm really into this organization.
I think they look really cool and not to be shallow,
but they have some cool merch So check it out
Last Prisoner Project dot org.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I'll put the link in the show notes. All right,
Today's story is one in a way, I.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Feel like it's a quote unquote classic story of a
female murderer because it seems like it could appear on
Snapped or Deadly Women. I don't think it has. I
don't know. Honestly, I don't watch those shows. I don't
like how they treat the subject matter. Usually they're very silacious.
But this seems like one of those stories, you know,
if you just if I just summarized it for you
(03:18):
really quickly here, which I'm not going to because I
don't want to give it away.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
It sounds kind of like, ooh, she did what Now?
That's so like what a bad girl.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
And I'm not saying that happened was not bad, But
as with all things, that we find in this podcast.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Once you take a closer look, you realize.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Just how many twists and turns there are, and also
like some weird gaps in the reporting of the case.
That was one of the things that really struck me
when I was researching this, is like, there is a
huge chunk of information missing when you read about this
case in the contemporary newspaper coverage of it.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
It shocked me. It astounded me. So let's get into it.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Guys, going to Florida. We're going to spend most of
our time in South Florida, in Fort Lauderdale, which is
actually where our Rosemarks episode took place if you listened
to that one. And we're going back to the year long,
long time ago, the year twenty eleven.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Come with me.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
No one had much to say about Catherine Poligi, or
if they did, they weren't telling the media. She was
the oldest of eight children, but one of her sisters
was dead and the other had just finished suing her,
and wherever the rest of them were, they were keeping
their mouths shut. The people who were talking to the
(05:02):
press about Catherine always seemed to mention how quiet she was.
Her boyfriend's lawyer said that she was very quiet, real
soft spoken. Her ex husband, the one she was married
to for five months, said she was so easy going.
She never complained about anything. Her stepmother said in all honesty,
(05:24):
she wouldn't even say anything that would hurt somebody's feelings.
In contrast, everyone had a lot to say about Catherine's boyfriend.
He was the extroverted one, the colorful character, the one
who told dirty jokes, the one with a bad temper,
the drinker, the party animal, the guy who was in
great shape for being seventy. And you know, he was
(05:46):
the one found wrapped in a sleeping bag with a
bullet in his head and painter's tape holding his stomach.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Together.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
With details like that, of course, people were going to
focus on the boyfriend. And so Catherine very quiet, realsoft spoken,
so easygoing, never complained, never said anything that would hurt
anyone's feelings. She faded into the background, even though she
was the one who put that bullet in that head.
(06:30):
Here's the little we know about Catherine Marie Peleggie. She
was a white woman born in the fall of nineteen
fifty six in the little city of Grovetown, Georgia. She
was one of eight kids, the oldest. Those who knew
the Pelegi family back then remember them as being close.
Catherine went to high school at Harlem High School, and
(06:53):
she was the captain of the cheerleading squad. She also
participated in the Miss Columbia County Cattleman beauty content. She
was very pretty, very tiny. She graduated and went on
to work as a lab technician at a hospital. One
of her coworkers from that hospital had a big crush
on her. It couldn't help noticing that all the guys
(07:14):
who knew Catherine had crushes on her.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
She was hard not to fall for.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
He described her like this, she was a typical Southern girl, beautiful, smile, very,
very attractive, and outgoing personality. She wasn't quiet then she'd
get quiet later Now. She never married any of the
guys who had crushes on her, and this would become
a sore spot for Catherine. The never been married part
(07:41):
this would become significant later, but she also seemed to
want to see the world. At some point in the eighties,
when she would have been in her late twenties or
early thirties, she left her job at the hospital and
started working for Delta Airlines. As a flight attendant. In
nineteen ninety three, when she was about thirty seven, she
flew into San Diego and met another person who loved planes.
(08:06):
He would be her on and off boyfriend for the
next eighteen years. His name was Ron Vincey. Once Ron
Vincey enters the story, we suddenly get more details about everything.
We might know very little about Catherine's childhood, what she
really like beneath the cheerleading and the good looks. What
was life actually like in that house of eight children?
(08:30):
We don't get those details. But with Ron around, outgoing
millionaire Ron, everything springs into life. Ronald Charles Vincey was
born in nineteen forty, making him sixteen years older than Catherine.
He was a stereotypical self made American man, came from nothing,
(08:50):
made something of himself, and then spent his long retirement
drinking with his buddies and buying expensive toys like planes
and helicopters. Start selling Honda motorcycles in the nineteen sixties
with only about fifteen hundred dollars to his name, but
he turned it into a fortune, especially when Honda brought
over their first cars to the US and Ron started
(09:11):
selling those. You can imagine how much money he made,
said a friend of the family. People described Ron as
wealthy but down to earth. He liked a good deal
and he didn't go around wearing three piece suits or
anything like that, though for multimillionaires, down to earth is
a bit of a relative term. He lived in ritzy
Rancho Santa Fe, a place in California that's a little
(09:34):
bit cowboy and a whole lot billionaire. There, Ron irritated
his wealthy neighbors by building a helicopter landing pad on
his property. He liked to casually take a helicopter to work.
He would land it on the roof of one of
his Honda dealerships. His neighbors found the whole thing intensely irritating,
and you can imagine how loud it was, and so
(09:56):
they protested, and his permit for landing helicopters was revoked.
The whole drama made the papers. Ron told a journalist angrily,
the wives of a lot of these Rancho Santa Fe
types play bridge with people on the board of supervisors.
You fill in the blanks. So that's Ron's fortune. But
(10:17):
let's talk about his love life. He married his wife,
Pamela in nineteen sixty three. They were married for twenty years,
had a son together, and then divorced. This marriage was
mentioned in the papers later when Ron died, but no
one mentioned his second marriage, to a woman named Sandra.
The two of them got married in the early nineties
(10:38):
and then got divorced in nineteen ninety four. If you're
keeping track of all the dates here, nineteen ninety four
is a year after Ron and Catherine Pelegi were supposed
to have started dating. What does this mean, Well, perhaps
the start of the Ron Catherine relationship wasn't all that
tidy that would be fitting because the end of their
(11:02):
relationship certainly wasn't tidy either. It wasn't exactly a love
(11:26):
story for the Ages in the swoony romantic sense. From
the start, the two of them were very different. Catherine
was making a tiny salary as a flight attendant and
Ron was buying his own planes.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Who knows what.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Financial specifics they worked out behind the scenes, but from
the outside it was pretty obvious that they were living
on Ron's dime. That Catherine, when she became Ron's girlfriend,
got a pretty significant life upgrade. But they were on again,
off again. They broke up around the turn of the millennium,
and Ron dated a woman for several years. During that time,
(12:03):
Catherine did something she'd always wanted to do.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
She got married.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Now, excuse me while I theorize, but we know that
Catherine felt sad about marriage because of something she told
of this husband. And why did she feel sad? Well,
there's a lot of pressure on women to get married,
a lot of skepticism given from society. Two women who
aren't married, you know what's wrong with you? Are you
pathetic or something? But I wonder if she felt a
(12:31):
more specific pressure. Her mother died in two thousand and three,
and in the obituary you can find the long list
of Catherine's siblings, Frankie, Debbie, Becky, Angela, Patricia, Melissa, and Michael.
Now all of the girls other than Katherine have new
last names. This means that Catherine had watched all five
(12:53):
of her little sisters walk down the aisle while nothing
changed for her. You can imagine the sorts of comments
she might have gotten at those weddings, the little painful
barbs slung at her. But now she was married, She
was finally married. It all happened fast. The man was
(13:15):
a retired insurance executive named Duilio Corgliano. They met in
April of two thousand and one through a mutual friend,
and they got married one month later at the courthouse.
Like Ron, Duilio was older than Catherine. He found her
quiet and laid back, and he really liked that about her.
She was so easy going, he said. She never complained
(13:37):
about anything. It was kind of like having a little
pussy cat. She did complain about one thing, though, She
complained about her ex Ron. She told Duilio that Ron
was verbally abusive to her when he got drunk, and
that he often got drunk. She said that she hated
his habit of making sexually explicit comments about a women
(14:00):
to his friends, and she told Duelio that Ron hadn't
wanted to marry her. She was kind of sad because
she had never been married before, said Duilio. Her family
didn't believe she was ever going to get married. In fact,
her family was so convinced that she would never marry
Ron that years later, her father told the press that
(14:21):
neither Catherine or Ron had any plans to get married,
but it seemed like he was wrong. It was Ron
who had no plans to get married, but Catherine might
have had her secret hopes.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
After a few months of.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Marriage to Duilio, the calm little pussy cat changed. Catherine
started asking her new husband for very large amounts of money,
four thousand to five thousand dollars a month. She said
things like, well, that's what my friends get from their boyfriends.
She told him she needed the money for her sister,
who was addicted to cocaine. And then she said she
(14:58):
wanted flying lessons. He gave her the money for those,
and then she told him she lost the check. Duilio
didn't like this new version of Catherine, in this quiet
little mouse. There was a sudden change, he said. He
told her the marriage had been a mistake. After only
five months, they got divorced. He kept all his money,
(15:19):
she kept hers. His assets were worth four million, five
hundred and sixty five thousand, three hundred dollars. She had
eight thousand. The divorce was fairly pleasant as far as
divorces go. But afterward she sat there on the sofa
in the condo that she was going to have to leave,
and she said, what's the point of living? Things never
(15:44):
work out, There's just no point. She wasn't single, for long, though,
(16:08):
because eventually Catherine and Ron got back together. Maybe she
loved him passionately and had loved him all along. Maybe
she just needed the money. It had to be said
that their lifestyle was pretty fabulous, like taking private planes
down to the Bahamas. Fabulous. In two thousand and five,
Ron decided to move down to South Florida to really
(16:29):
live out his retired party boy dreams, and Catherine went
with him. He bought a couple of condos in a house,
and he partied. His friends would come over to his
house almost every day. They called it the Clubhouse. Sometimes
he'd take them to a beach bar called the Treasure
Trove for one dollar taco Tuesdays. Other nights he'd party
(16:51):
at this night club called Exit sixty six, where he'd
be drinking and rubbing elbows with all the spring breakers.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
He was full of.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Jokes, and he liked to make fun of his own age.
He told one waiter, you're a waiter. Yeah, my son's
a waiter too. He's waiting for me to die. He
liked to go up to the biggest guy in the
bar and yell jokingly, you want to fight. His friends
remembered that he liked women, looked at women, and made
plenty of raunchy comments about women, which Catherine hated. But
(17:21):
he wasn't sleeping around. Instead, he'd joke with women about
being too old, saying, you know, I've got a dead dick.
Where was Catherine during these long drunken nights at home.
Probably Ron's friends don't remember seeing her in the foreground much.
(17:41):
She didn't drink a lot, She didn't talk much. She
would retreat into the background and hang out with herself.
Sometimes she watched true crime documentaries or TV shows for hours.
Other times she would appear and just play bartender. Ron
often said make me a drink, and he'd do it.
He preferred gin and tonics jin with a splash of tonic.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
That is.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
It wasn't like they never hung out as a couple,
though sometimes they explored the water together, but this was
fraught because Catherine was terrified of the ocean. Ron would
try to set up activities like scuba diving to help
her conquer her fear, but it never worked. She couldn't
get over it. If she feared the deep, she didn't
mind the air, though apparently she had learned to fly
(18:30):
at some point because Ron would let her fly his
private planes whenever she wanted to. Sometimes she'd take one
to Georgia, where she had unfinished business with her family.
See Catherine and her family, specifically, two of her sisters
had a really odd thing going on. Maybe they really
were happy and close knit when they were all kids,
(18:52):
as some locals remember, but as grown women, Catherine and
her sisters Angela and Melissa had a strange anti pagonistic relationship.
Catherine and Angela got along even though Angela had a
drug problem and Catherine worried about her, But neither of
them seemed to get along with Melissa, and Melissa certainly
(19:12):
didn't get along with them. The first sign of antagonism
that I could find in the papers happened after Catherine's
divorce from Duilio Corgliano. After it happened, her sister Melissa
called up Duilio and said that Catherine had stolen jewelry
from him.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Was this true?
Speaker 1 (19:32):
I have no idea, but it wasn't the only time
the girls flung accusations at each other. At one point,
Melissa gave some money to Catherine, and then she filed
a civil suit against her sister, saying that Catherine hadn't
repaid her. Catherine argued in court that the money had
been a gift. Melissa argued that it had been alone.
The judge agreed with Catherine. It gets weirder. Apparently Melissa
(19:57):
dated Phil Specter, once the famous producer for acts like
Ike and Tina Turner and the Beatles. In two thousand
and three, Phil Spector murdered the actress Lena Clarkson, and
Melissa testified against him at one of his trials. She
got up on the witness stand and said that she
had dated Phil Spector and that when she tried to
(20:19):
leave his house one night, he pointed a gun at her.
And then another Pelegi sister took the stand, Angela. Angela
was there to testify against Melissa. She called her sister
a liar. She said that Melissa was a fame whore
who was making the whole thing up and who just
wanted to get on court TV. The prosecutor brought up
(20:41):
Melissa's shady past. Apparently, in nineteen eighty nine, she had
been convicted for embezzling money from a bank where she worked.
In response, Melissa said that Angela was a drug addict
who was probably being paid by Phil Spector. Here's her quote.
My sister is a drug addict. I put her in rehab.
I stopped giving her money, and I think now Specter
(21:01):
is giving her money. That's why she is doing this
against me. Are you still with me? We've gotten pretty
far from Catherine's story, but this shows you what sort
of family environment she came from. Most siblings don't sue
each other, don't rat each other out to their ex husbands,
don't take the witness stand against each other. There was
(21:24):
some darkness there hovering in the air between the girls,
and things were only going to get worse. Despite all
their drama with Melissa, Katherine and Angela got along. Like
I said, Catherine felt protective of her little sister. She
probably wanted her to be happy. Her life as an
(21:45):
addict hadn't been easy, and so one day in two
thousand and nine, Katherine invited her little sister to come
along on her wealthy boyfriend's yacht. The three of them, Catherine, Ron,
(22:15):
and Angela took Ron's yacht south. This yacht was eighty
feet long and called the Captain Ron, and they took
it fifteen hundred miles south of Florida, through the blue
Green Sea and all the vivid sunsets the Caribbean could
muster until they arrived at tiny Saint Lucia, an island
in the West Indies. There they tied up the yacht
(22:37):
in a harbor and staggered onto dry land. Before long,
Angela had hit it off with the guy who worked
there in the harbor, and soon enough the two of
them were hopping onto mopeds to explore the island. Later
that evening, everyone reunited at the harbor to party. At
one point, Ron gave Angela a handful of pills, some
(22:58):
of his antidepressant pills he knew she liked pills. By
ten pm, Catherine and Ron were tired, and so they
went back to the yacht to sleep, but Angela and
her friend from the harbor continued to party. It was
early in the morning when Angela's new friend brought her
back to the yacht.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
She was sick.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
She could hardly talk. She'd been having convulsions. Catherine sprang
into action and started performing CPR on her little sister.
They got a taxi and rushed to the hospital. As
Catherine kept trying to get Angela to wake up, but
nothing worked. Angela was pronounced dead at the Hospital of
(23:43):
Cardi respiratory arrest due to acute intoxication. It was the pills,
Catherine thought, How could Ron have given Angela, a known
drug addict, pills. It was the pills that killed her,
the pills that put her over the edge, and she
(24:04):
told Ron this. Ron told a friend later that as
far as Angela's death went, Catherine quote blames me one
hundred percent. Imagine the last horrifying moments of Angela's life.
Imagine being Catherine speeding along in a cab fifteen hundred
(24:26):
miles from home, trying desperately to keep your little sister breathing.
Imagine the slow creeping rage that would fill you once
the panic died down, The thought that your sister would
still be alive if your boyfriend hadn't been such a fool,
such a pathetic party animal. Imagine holding on to that
(24:47):
rage for the next two years. It wasn't the sort
of thing you could just forget. By twenty eleven, Katherine
(25:11):
and Ron were more like brother and sister than boyfriend
and girlfriend. According to a friend, they didn't sleep in
the same bed anymore. They often stayed in different houses.
Ron wanted to break up, but Catherine didn't. All of
Ron's friends knew that he wanted to break it off.
He kept talking about it. To one of them, he
(25:32):
said that the relationship had run its course, but that
he would make sure Catherine would be well provided for.
He told another friend that he'd wanted to end the
relationship for the past five years. His friends knew things
weren't great between the two of them. They'd seen the
couple fight. They knew Ron could be a bit, shall
we say much when he drank. Once he pointed a
(25:53):
gun at a friend. He'd wave it around when he
was drunk. It was always that drinking that got him
into trouble. One too many jins with a splash of
tonics and he'd be off. One of his former employees
described Ron as having two personalities. He was kind when
sober and cruel when drunk. He'd be so abusive, said
(26:15):
the employee, and in the morning he's sorry, everything's good.
You know. He'd make you feel like a million dollars again.
So it was I think maybe for Catherine it was
just a vicious cycle. This same employee once saw Ron
push Catherine down the stairs on his boat. Another time,
he heard Ron's snap that Catherine had nothing without him,
(26:42):
So from the outside it might have looked like Ron
held all the power in their relationship, but did he.
One day, he was struck by abdominal pains so bad
that he went to the hospital. Later, he told several
of his friends his dark suspicion was Matherne poisoning him.
(27:02):
One of those friends looked at a bottle of Ron's
beloved Tanka ray gin and noticed that it was suspiciously cloudy.
Ron still had the gumption to buy real estate, though,
even though he already owned multiple properties, he couldn't resist
buying a new house in June of twenty eleven. The
address was one oh one Coconut Drive, and it was
(27:24):
a steal at three million dollars. Seriously, it was a steal.
It was valued at almost five million. This house had
everything five bedrooms, six bathrooms, a dock on the water,
a pool, a jacuzzi and marble floors, oh and an elevator.
Four days after buying the home, Ron had one of
(27:46):
his friends break up with Catherine for him. The friend,
Spencer Gordon, did it dutifully. Spencer and Catherine were in
a plane together flying from the Bahamas back to Florida
and in the sky spent told Catherine that Ron wanted
to end things, but that he would let her stay
at his condo until he sold it, and that he
would also pay her one million dollars. Catherine responded, I'm
(28:11):
not interested. They didn't talk about it again. A week
after that, Catherine stopped by one of Ron's other homes
looking for something. Two days after that, Ron confided in
a friend that he couldn't find his passport or one
(28:33):
of his guns. The next day was June twenty seventh.
(29:00):
Catherine kept busy. She went to a store called Brownie's
Yacht Diver, where Ron had an account, and she bought
some diving weights. She told the clerk that the weights
were for Ron, and she explained how much Ron weighed.
The thinking would be that the weights needed to be
heavy enough to bring his body all the way down
to the bottom of the ocean floor. Right, that was
what you did when you dove. She spent two hundred
(29:22):
dollars on them. That evening, she and Ron had friends
over for dinner. Well, they had Ron's friends over. The
friend's names were Terry Leipzig and Spencer Gordon. The one
who tried to break up with Catherine in the plane
by proxy. They ate Chinese food, which Catherine had heated up.
Ron complained that the food tasted bitter.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
They drank.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Ron was drinking his usual tank Ray with a hint
of tonic, and Catherine mixed them up dutifully. He complained
to her that they were too strong, and they were strong.
By seven fifteen, Ron was passed out on the cow coach.
Spencer and Terry left. That was weird, they thought. Drinking
usually turned Ron into quite the party animal. He was
(30:08):
never the type to pass out before it was even
dark outside, but oh well. They went home. The next morning,
Spencer got a strange call. The caller was Ron's handyman,
a man named Rainaldo Silva. Rainnaldo was totally panicking. He
(30:28):
kept saying Ron's past, Ron's passed. Spencer thought, Ron's passed out. Yeah,
sounds about right, But why the fear in Rainnaldo's voice.
So Spencer called Terry, who had been there with him
the previous evening, and they headed over to one hundred
and one Coconut Drive. When they got there, Catherine met
(30:51):
them at the door. She told them that Ron was
out with a friend. They thought this was strange because
frankly they knew all his friends. No, it's a friend
from out of town, she said. Meanwhile, Rainnaldo was standing
behind her, looking terrified. He pointed to the bedroom. When
(31:12):
Catherine wasn't paying attention, he whispered.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
There's a bag. Ron's in the bag.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Spencer said he needed to uh use the bathroom. He
snuck into the bedroom instead. It looked normal. He came
back out behind the bed, said Rainaldo. Spencer went back
in and looked behind the bed. He saw a huge
Duffel bag, all zipped up. He unzipped it, stuck his
(31:46):
hand inside, felt something, something that felt like.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Ron.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
He zipped it right back up. He went to the group. Rinaldo, Terry,
why don't you leave for a second, he said. When
he was alone with Catherine, he asked her for the truth.
Where is Ron and what is in that bag? Catherine
(32:19):
started crying, He's dead, she said. He went down the stairs.
He went down the stairs. He went down the stairs.
He went down the stairs. He went down the stairs.
I messed him up. Spencer got Terry and along with Catherine,
they all went back into the bedroom. There they opened
(32:42):
the bag a bit further. There was a sleeping bag inside,
and a bunch of sheets and plastic bags, and everything
was covered with coffee grounds. Spencer looked closer, he saw
something a human hand. Okay, he was done here. He
closed the bag for the second time and asked Catherine
(33:04):
what she was going to.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Tell the police.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
I don't think they're going to believe it was an accident,
she said, why not? Spencer asked, because, said Catherine, there's
a bullet hole in him. Eight days after killing Ron,
(33:36):
Catherine turned herself in. She had a lawyer by then,
a lawyer that Spencer helped her find. Her lawyer told
her that she was wanted on charges of first degree murder,
and so she took herself to the police. The papers
exploded with the story. Her stepmother told a journalist, in
all honesty, she wouldn't even say anything that would hurt
(33:56):
somebody's feelings. And that was about all the information we
got about Catherine. Details about the crime, though, leaked out
in the press from warrants and affidavits. The police found
a large blue storage container that Catherine had bought at
home depot the morning after Ron's death. They noted the
(34:17):
diving weights and the coffee grounds. In the warrant, they
wrote that all this indicated a thought out plan of
getting rid of the body and concealing the odor of
the body. One journalist pointed out that using coffee grounds
to cover up smells was an old flight attendant trick.
Detectives also found Catherine's diary and they took it in
(34:39):
as evidence, noting that it contained a heavy emphasis on
Ron's moods and actions. Several months after the murder, the
police went back to one oh one Coconut Drive and
took in Ron's tank ray the bottle that was cloudy.
They tested it and found that it contained an insecticide
called bethenthrin. Had Catherine been poisoning Ron all along? Kind
(35:04):
of looked like it, but it was hard to know
for sure. The autopsy showed that Ron's body contained none
of that insecticide, and there had been a lag between
the murder and the bottle being taken in as evidence,
so you just never know. Catherine appeared in court silent
and stonefaced. According to one journalist, she pled not guilty
(35:25):
and was held without bail as the case against her progressed. Bizarrely,
her sister Melissa called up the police and told them
that they should keep looking further because she thought Catherine
had something to do with Angela's death in Saint Lucia
back in two thousand and nine. Clearly, the animosity between
the sisters ran deep first degree murder charges or no
(35:47):
first degree murder charges. It wasn't until Catherine's trial started
three years later in twenty fourteen that her story of.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
The murder emerged.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
By then, she was no longer dying her long brown
hand and so she had gone completely gray. Her defense
argued that she was a battered woman and she had
killed Ron in an act of self defense. Her version
of the night went like this. Ron was mad at
her because he was trying to sell his condo and
she interrupted the showing of it to a potential buyer.
(36:19):
So they fought and fought some more. He was drunk
and raging. The fight got bad. He pulled out a
gun and he pointed it at her as she knelt
before him, and he said that she didn't deserve to live.
I lost control of my bowels, she testified. Her voice
(36:39):
was quiet and a bit wavery. My whole body was shaking.
Then he lowered the gun and I got up and
ran up the stairs. Ron chased her, but he tripped,
fell back down the stairs and bashed his head. That
ended the fight for the moment. She helped him up
(37:00):
his wound, took him into the bedroom, and helped him
lie down in the bed. Then she took a bath,
changed her filthy clothes, and then she saw the gun
and she picked it up, and she realized that it
had been loaded that whole time, the whole time he
was pointing it at her. Everything changed when I saw that,
(37:24):
she said, it was like an out of body experience.
The fear I had, the anger all came together. I
was afraid. I was mad like I've never been before.
I put the bullets back in the gun. Then I
went back in the bedroom. I went to the opposite
side of where he was. I held the gun out,
(37:45):
closed my eyes, and pulled the trigger. When Catherine fired,
she hit Ron Vincey in the head. And then she
stabbed him in the chest, and she slit his throat,
hit his head with a hammer, wrapped him up as
(38:07):
though she were trying to reverse all the damage, stuffed
paper towels in his mouth, taped up his stomach with
blue painter's tape, wrapped him in a mattress, cover a sheet, towels,
plastic bags, and finally put the whole thing into a
red sleeping bag. She cut the bloody spots out of
the mattress and hid them in the garage, along with
her bloody clothes and the gun and the knife. At
(38:31):
one am, she called Rainaldo the handyman, asking him to
rent a U haul and come over. Then she texted
him never mind. He came over at eight thirty am
the next morning, and she showed him the sleeping bag
shaped so horribly like a body, and said he fell
down the stairs. She told Rainaldo that Ron's dream had
(38:55):
always been to be buried at sea, so would he
help Ron at she this dream by flinging his body
into the ocean. Of course, poor Raynaldo was completely freaked
out by this point, but he held it together installed
for time, saying something like, uh, one sec. The body's
a little bit heavy. I'm gonna have to go get
(39:15):
a dolly. That was when he ran off and called Spencer,
saying Ron's past, Ron's Past. In the meantime, Catherine went
to home depot and bought that huge blue plastic container,
presumably to act as Ron's makeshift coffin.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Do you believe you were in danger.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Her defense lawyer asked her on the witness stand, Yes,
she said. Do you believe he would have gotten up
and killed you in the middle of the night?
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Yes? Did you plan any of this?
Speaker 1 (39:49):
No?
Speaker 2 (39:49):
I didn't. Do you still love him? Yes?
Speaker 1 (39:55):
I do? Bullshit, said the prosecution, a self defense killing
(40:17):
when the man in question was passed out in bed
with a head wound. They argued that there was far
too much time between when Ron allegedly threatened her with
the gun and when she came back to kill him
with that same gun. She could have run out of
the house, they said. They also brought up the fact
that Catherine had broken up with Ron before, back in
the two thousands, before she had that brief marriage. If
(40:40):
she was so terrified of him, how was she able
to break up with him then but couldn't do it now.
There was no evidence of physical abuse, they argued, and
what about all her viciousness the violence of the murder.
The defense brought in a psychologist who argued that the
overkill bashing and stabbing, and the hammer to the head
(41:02):
was quote consistent with battered spouse syndrome. Despite details like
the buying of the diving weights and the use of
coffee grounds. Apparently neither sheer Ron drink coffee, so the
fact that she even had coffee grounds on hand seemed significant.
Despite all that, the judge decided that there wasn't enough
evidence of premeditation for a first degree murder charge, so
(41:25):
by the time the jury sat down to deliberate, they
were looking at a second degree murder charge. They debated
for thirteen hours and then found her guilty. The judge
gave her twenty five years and that was that. Today,
Catherine Pelegi is at Hernando Correctional Institution, three hundred and
(41:45):
three miles away from her old life of luxury at
one oh one Coconut Drive. Her release date is August six,
twenty thirty four. Today she's almost sixty five, but her
skin looks smooth, luminous in her current mugshot. In article
(42:05):
after article about the case, Ron Vincy's personality is examined
like someone turning a piece of sea glass over and over.
He was a complicated man. The articles conclude, there was
the fun loving Ron, the joker at one dollar Taco Tuesdays,
the wealthy retiree who flew his own planes. And then
(42:28):
there was the dark Ron, the heavy gin drinker, the
guy who asked a friend to break up with his girlfriend,
the guy who once pushed that girlfriend down the stairs
of the yacht named after himself. But where were the
articles examining the life of Catherine Peleggie. I was shocked
(42:49):
to see how little was written about her as a person.
People usually trip over themselves trying to figure out female murderers,
and Catherine had two important things going for her when
it came to getting press coverage. She was pretty and
she was white. Plus her past was dotted with these
mysterious and tantalizing tidbits. The brief marriage, the dead sister,
(43:12):
the inter sibling lawsuits, the cheerleader turned flight attendant turned murderess.
Who was this woman? What did she want? Hell?
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Why was she so afraid of water?
Speaker 1 (43:25):
No one answered any of these questions, and without answers
and context, it's hard to know how to interpret her
claim in the courtroom that Ron had abused her physically
and sexually and verbally for years. We know she was
quiet and that Ron bullied her, and we know about
the incident with the stairs on the yacht. But we
(43:47):
also know that she wasn't someone who just sat there.
She was a planner, someone who said no, I won't
break up with him, and then went out and bought
diving weights. What could a woman like that do. There's
a great long form article about this case from twenty
(44:08):
twelve that was published in the Broward Palm Beach New Times.
In it, a journalist visits one oh one Coconut Drive,
which is full of Ron's friends. Ron's presence fills the
house and the story. One of his friends tells the
journalists that she's heard Ron's ghost going around the house
(44:28):
and slamming the doors.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
As usual.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
Catherine is in the background of it all, quiet, gray haired,
now alone with her secrets, almost a ghost herself. The end,
(45:09):
And that is the story of Catherine Peleggi, who sits
in prison to this day. Her release date is sometime
in the two thousand and thirties, which actually sounds sort
of soon. I was on that soon though, she will
be I believe seventy eight or seventy nine when she
is released. All right, I hope you enjoy this episode,
(45:29):
or if enjoyed is not quite the right word, I
hope you took something from this episode, and I'd like
to thank this episode's two amazing, intelligent and gorgeous patrons,
Melissa T.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
And Justin W.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Thank you for supporting the podcast. If anyone else wants
to support the podcast, there are many ways you can
do this. You can always use a promo code for
one of my advertisers.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
That's very helpful.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
You can go to patreon dot com slash criminal Broads
to donate, and you can leave a review saying best
podcast ever, but in your words, because I would never
tell you what to say. Okay, love you all so much,
thanks for being the best listeners ever. And I'll meet
you here next week, same time, same place.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
Maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Maybe I'm wrong loving youd like I do. If it's
a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty loving you.
Is it a sin?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Is it a crime? Loving you dear like I do.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you. Hi, everyone,
Welcome back to Criminal Broad's a true crime and history
podcast about wild women on the wrong side of the law.
I'm your host, Tory Telfer, author of Lady Killers and
(00:31):
Confident Women, and numerous articles online that span a long
freelance career. I have articles from think pieces on why
there are so many movies being made about Ted Bundy
to articles from about ten years ago that are like
the best Diy avocado honey mask to put on your face.
(00:52):
I never said I started out as a as the
billionaire true crime writer I am today. I started out
my freelance writing career writing beauty and fashion articles for
twenty five dollars a pop, three articles a day, all
due before noon, living in Chicago, waitressing at night, and
honestly wouldn't want to do it again. But I look
(01:14):
back on that time in my life fondly. And if
you want to start out as a freelance writer, you
might have to start with one of those soulless grind gigs.
But do it because one day you could be sitting
in your closet talking into a microphone all by yourself.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
I didn't mean to get into my life story here today.
That was just the first thing that came to mind.
I hope you're all doing well. I hope you're hydrating.
It's very hot out there in a lot of places
in the US right now. International listeners, I don't care
what the weather is like where you are. You need
to hydrate too. Hydration is very important. Okay, before we
get into today's story, I want to beg a moment
(01:52):
of your time. I don't have any ADS today, so
you don't have to sit through any ads.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Instead.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
I was hoping I could just direct you in lieuvi
Ad to check out this great organization that I recently found.
It's called Last Prisoner Project dot org, and they're basically
trying to grant clemency or have President Biden grant clemency
to quote, the thousands of people incarcerated due to or
otherwise still burdened by federal cannabis related convictions. Let me
(02:20):
try to put that in plain English. Pretty sure what
they're saying is, it's kind of ridiculous. We live in
a country where you can become a millionaire by selling
weed or selling like your fancy schmancy like you know,
product like weed infused products, while other people, mostly black
and brown people, languish in jail for having a little
(02:40):
bit of weed on them. So I'm really into this organization.
I think they look really cool and not to be shallow,
but they have some cool merch So check it out
Last Prisoner Project dot org.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I'll put the link in the show notes. All right,
Today's story is one in a way, I.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Feel like it's a quote unquote classic story of a
female murderer because it seems like it could appear on
Snapped or Deadly Women. I don't think it has. I
don't know. Honestly, I don't watch those shows. I don't
like how they treat the subject matter. Usually they're very silacious.
But this seems like one of those stories, you know,
if you just if I just summarized it for you
(03:18):
really quickly here, which I'm not going to because I
don't want to give it away.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
It sounds kind of like, ooh, she did what Now?
That's so like what a bad girl.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
And I'm not saying that happened was not bad, But
as with all things, that we find in this podcast.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Once you take a closer look, you realize.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Just how many twists and turns there are, and also
like some weird gaps in the reporting of the case.
That was one of the things that really struck me
when I was researching this, is like, there is a
huge chunk of information missing when you read about this
case in the contemporary newspaper coverage of it.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
It shocked me. It astounded me. So let's get into it.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Guys, going to Florida. We're going to spend most of
our time in South Florida, in Fort Lauderdale, which is
actually where our Rosemarks episode took place if you listened
to that one. And we're going back to the year long,
long time ago, the year twenty eleven.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Come with me.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
No one had much to say about Catherine Poligi, or
if they did, they weren't telling the media. She was
the oldest of eight children, but one of her sisters
was dead and the other had just finished suing her,
and wherever the rest of them were, they were keeping
their mouths shut. The people who were talking to the
(05:02):
press about Catherine always seemed to mention how quiet she was.
Her boyfriend's lawyer said that she was very quiet, real
soft spoken. Her ex husband, the one she was married
to for five months, said she was so easy going.
She never complained about anything. Her stepmother said in all honesty,
(05:24):
she wouldn't even say anything that would hurt somebody's feelings.
In contrast, everyone had a lot to say about Catherine's boyfriend.
He was the extroverted one, the colorful character, the one
who told dirty jokes, the one with a bad temper,
the drinker, the party animal, the guy who was in
great shape for being seventy. And you know, he was
(05:46):
the one found wrapped in a sleeping bag with a
bullet in his head and painter's tape holding his stomach.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Together.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
With details like that, of course, people were going to
focus on the boyfriend. And so Catherine very quiet, realsoft spoken,
so easygoing, never complained, never said anything that would hurt
anyone's feelings. She faded into the background, even though she
was the one who put that bullet in that head.
(06:30):
Here's the little we know about Catherine Marie Peleggie. She
was a white woman born in the fall of nineteen
fifty six in the little city of Grovetown, Georgia. She
was one of eight kids, the oldest. Those who knew
the Pelegi family back then remember them as being close.
Catherine went to high school at Harlem High School, and
(06:53):
she was the captain of the cheerleading squad. She also
participated in the Miss Columbia County Cattleman beauty content. She
was very pretty, very tiny. She graduated and went on
to work as a lab technician at a hospital. One
of her coworkers from that hospital had a big crush
on her. It couldn't help noticing that all the guys
(07:14):
who knew Catherine had crushes on her.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
She was hard not to fall for.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
He described her like this, she was a typical Southern girl, beautiful, smile, very,
very attractive, and outgoing personality. She wasn't quiet then she'd
get quiet later Now. She never married any of the
guys who had crushes on her, and this would become
a sore spot for Catherine. The never been married part
(07:41):
this would become significant later, but she also seemed to
want to see the world. At some point in the eighties,
when she would have been in her late twenties or
early thirties, she left her job at the hospital and
started working for Delta Airlines. As a flight attendant. In
nineteen ninety three, when she was about thirty seven, she
flew into San Diego and met another person who loved planes.
(08:06):
He would be her on and off boyfriend for the
next eighteen years. His name was Ron Vincey. Once Ron
Vincey enters the story, we suddenly get more details about everything.
We might know very little about Catherine's childhood, what she
really like beneath the cheerleading and the good looks. What
was life actually like in that house of eight children?
(08:30):
We don't get those details. But with Ron around, outgoing
millionaire Ron, everything springs into life. Ronald Charles Vincey was
born in nineteen forty, making him sixteen years older than Catherine.
He was a stereotypical self made American man, came from nothing,
(08:50):
made something of himself, and then spent his long retirement
drinking with his buddies and buying expensive toys like planes
and helicopters. Start selling Honda motorcycles in the nineteen sixties
with only about fifteen hundred dollars to his name, but
he turned it into a fortune, especially when Honda brought
over their first cars to the US and Ron started
(09:11):
selling those. You can imagine how much money he made,
said a friend of the family. People described Ron as
wealthy but down to earth. He liked a good deal
and he didn't go around wearing three piece suits or
anything like that, though for multimillionaires, down to earth is
a bit of a relative term. He lived in ritzy
Rancho Santa Fe, a place in California that's a little
(09:34):
bit cowboy and a whole lot billionaire. There, Ron irritated
his wealthy neighbors by building a helicopter landing pad on
his property. He liked to casually take a helicopter to work.
He would land it on the roof of one of
his Honda dealerships. His neighbors found the whole thing intensely irritating,
and you can imagine how loud it was, and so
(09:56):
they protested, and his permit for landing helicopters was revoked.
The whole drama made the papers. Ron told a journalist angrily,
the wives of a lot of these Rancho Santa Fe
types play bridge with people on the board of supervisors.
You fill in the blanks. So that's Ron's fortune. But
(10:17):
let's talk about his love life. He married his wife,
Pamela in nineteen sixty three. They were married for twenty years,
had a son together, and then divorced. This marriage was
mentioned in the papers later when Ron died, but no
one mentioned his second marriage, to a woman named Sandra.
The two of them got married in the early nineties
(10:38):
and then got divorced in nineteen ninety four. If you're
keeping track of all the dates here, nineteen ninety four
is a year after Ron and Catherine Pelegi were supposed
to have started dating. What does this mean, Well, perhaps
the start of the Ron Catherine relationship wasn't all that
tidy that would be fitting because the end of their
(11:02):
relationship certainly wasn't tidy either. It wasn't exactly a love
(11:26):
story for the Ages in the swoony romantic sense. From
the start, the two of them were very different. Catherine
was making a tiny salary as a flight attendant and
Ron was buying his own planes.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Who knows what.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Financial specifics they worked out behind the scenes, but from
the outside it was pretty obvious that they were living
on Ron's dime. That Catherine, when she became Ron's girlfriend,
got a pretty significant life upgrade. But they were on again,
off again. They broke up around the turn of the millennium,
and Ron dated a woman for several years. During that time,
(12:03):
Catherine did something she'd always wanted to do.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
She got married.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Now, excuse me while I theorize, but we know that
Catherine felt sad about marriage because of something she told
of this husband. And why did she feel sad? Well,
there's a lot of pressure on women to get married,
a lot of skepticism given from society. Two women who
aren't married, you know what's wrong with you? Are you
pathetic or something? But I wonder if she felt a
(12:31):
more specific pressure. Her mother died in two thousand and three,
and in the obituary you can find the long list
of Catherine's siblings, Frankie, Debbie, Becky, Angela, Patricia, Melissa, and Michael.
Now all of the girls other than Katherine have new
last names. This means that Catherine had watched all five
(12:53):
of her little sisters walk down the aisle while nothing
changed for her. You can imagine the sorts of comments
she might have gotten at those weddings, the little painful
barbs slung at her. But now she was married, She
was finally married. It all happened fast. The man was
(13:15):
a retired insurance executive named Duilio Corgliano. They met in
April of two thousand and one through a mutual friend,
and they got married one month later at the courthouse.
Like Ron, Duilio was older than Catherine. He found her
quiet and laid back, and he really liked that about her.
She was so easy going, he said. She never complained
(13:37):
about anything. It was kind of like having a little
pussy cat. She did complain about one thing, though, She
complained about her ex Ron. She told Duilio that Ron
was verbally abusive to her when he got drunk, and
that he often got drunk. She said that she hated
his habit of making sexually explicit comments about a women
(14:00):
to his friends, and she told Duelio that Ron hadn't
wanted to marry her. She was kind of sad because
she had never been married before, said Duilio. Her family
didn't believe she was ever going to get married. In fact,
her family was so convinced that she would never marry
Ron that years later, her father told the press that
(14:21):
neither Catherine or Ron had any plans to get married,
but it seemed like he was wrong. It was Ron
who had no plans to get married, but Catherine might
have had her secret hopes.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
After a few months of.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Marriage to Duilio, the calm little pussy cat changed. Catherine
started asking her new husband for very large amounts of money,
four thousand to five thousand dollars a month. She said
things like, well, that's what my friends get from their boyfriends.
She told him she needed the money for her sister,
who was addicted to cocaine. And then she said she
(14:58):
wanted flying lessons. He gave her the money for those,
and then she told him she lost the check. Duilio
didn't like this new version of Catherine, in this quiet
little mouse. There was a sudden change, he said. He
told her the marriage had been a mistake. After only
five months, they got divorced. He kept all his money,
(15:19):
she kept hers. His assets were worth four million, five
hundred and sixty five thousand, three hundred dollars. She had
eight thousand. The divorce was fairly pleasant as far as
divorces go. But afterward she sat there on the sofa
in the condo that she was going to have to leave,
and she said, what's the point of living? Things never
(15:44):
work out, There's just no point. She wasn't single, for long, though,
(16:08):
because eventually Catherine and Ron got back together. Maybe she
loved him passionately and had loved him all along. Maybe
she just needed the money. It had to be said
that their lifestyle was pretty fabulous, like taking private planes
down to the Bahamas. Fabulous. In two thousand and five,
Ron decided to move down to South Florida to really
(16:29):
live out his retired party boy dreams, and Catherine went
with him. He bought a couple of condos in a house,
and he partied. His friends would come over to his
house almost every day. They called it the Clubhouse. Sometimes
he'd take them to a beach bar called the Treasure
Trove for one dollar taco Tuesdays. Other nights he'd party
(16:51):
at this night club called Exit sixty six, where he'd
be drinking and rubbing elbows with all the spring breakers.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
He was full of.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Jokes, and he liked to make fun of his own age.
He told one waiter, you're a waiter. Yeah, my son's
a waiter too. He's waiting for me to die. He
liked to go up to the biggest guy in the
bar and yell jokingly, you want to fight. His friends
remembered that he liked women, looked at women, and made
plenty of raunchy comments about women, which Catherine hated. But
(17:21):
he wasn't sleeping around. Instead, he'd joke with women about
being too old, saying, you know, I've got a dead dick.
Where was Catherine during these long drunken nights at home.
Probably Ron's friends don't remember seeing her in the foreground much.
(17:41):
She didn't drink a lot, She didn't talk much. She
would retreat into the background and hang out with herself.
Sometimes she watched true crime documentaries or TV shows for hours.
Other times she would appear and just play bartender. Ron
often said make me a drink, and he'd do it.
He preferred gin and tonics jin with a splash of tonic.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
That is.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
It wasn't like they never hung out as a couple,
though sometimes they explored the water together, but this was
fraught because Catherine was terrified of the ocean. Ron would
try to set up activities like scuba diving to help
her conquer her fear, but it never worked. She couldn't
get over it. If she feared the deep, she didn't
mind the air, though apparently she had learned to fly
(18:30):
at some point because Ron would let her fly his
private planes whenever she wanted to. Sometimes she'd take one
to Georgia, where she had unfinished business with her family.
See Catherine and her family, specifically, two of her sisters
had a really odd thing going on. Maybe they really
were happy and close knit when they were all kids,
(18:52):
as some locals remember, but as grown women, Catherine and
her sisters Angela and Melissa had a strange anti pagonistic relationship.
Catherine and Angela got along even though Angela had a
drug problem and Catherine worried about her, But neither of
them seemed to get along with Melissa, and Melissa certainly
(19:12):
didn't get along with them. The first sign of antagonism
that I could find in the papers happened after Catherine's
divorce from Duilio Corgliano. After it happened, her sister Melissa
called up Duilio and said that Catherine had stolen jewelry
from him.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Was this true?
Speaker 1 (19:32):
I have no idea, but it wasn't the only time
the girls flung accusations at each other. At one point,
Melissa gave some money to Catherine, and then she filed
a civil suit against her sister, saying that Catherine hadn't
repaid her. Catherine argued in court that the money had
been a gift. Melissa argued that it had been alone.
The judge agreed with Catherine. It gets weirder. Apparently Melissa
(19:57):
dated Phil Specter, once the famous producer for acts like
Ike and Tina Turner and the Beatles. In two thousand
and three, Phil Spector murdered the actress Lena Clarkson, and
Melissa testified against him at one of his trials. She
got up on the witness stand and said that she
had dated Phil Spector and that when she tried to
(20:19):
leave his house one night, he pointed a gun at her.
And then another Pelegi sister took the stand, Angela. Angela
was there to testify against Melissa. She called her sister
a liar. She said that Melissa was a fame whore
who was making the whole thing up and who just
wanted to get on court TV. The prosecutor brought up
(20:41):
Melissa's shady past. Apparently, in nineteen eighty nine, she had
been convicted for embezzling money from a bank where she worked.
In response, Melissa said that Angela was a drug addict
who was probably being paid by Phil Spector. Here's her quote.
My sister is a drug addict. I put her in rehab.
I stopped giving her money, and I think now Specter
(21:01):
is giving her money. That's why she is doing this
against me. Are you still with me? We've gotten pretty
far from Catherine's story, but this shows you what sort
of family environment she came from. Most siblings don't sue
each other, don't rat each other out to their ex husbands,
don't take the witness stand against each other. There was
(21:24):
some darkness there hovering in the air between the girls,
and things were only going to get worse. Despite all
their drama with Melissa, Katherine and Angela got along. Like
I said, Catherine felt protective of her little sister. She
probably wanted her to be happy. Her life as an
(21:45):
addict hadn't been easy, and so one day in two
thousand and nine, Katherine invited her little sister to come
along on her wealthy boyfriend's yacht. The three of them, Catherine, Ron,
(22:15):
and Angela took Ron's yacht south. This yacht was eighty
feet long and called the Captain Ron, and they took
it fifteen hundred miles south of Florida, through the blue
Green Sea and all the vivid sunsets the Caribbean could
muster until they arrived at tiny Saint Lucia, an island
in the West Indies. There they tied up the yacht
(22:37):
in a harbor and staggered onto dry land. Before long,
Angela had hit it off with the guy who worked
there in the harbor, and soon enough the two of
them were hopping onto mopeds to explore the island. Later
that evening, everyone reunited at the harbor to party. At
one point, Ron gave Angela a handful of pills, some
(22:58):
of his antidepressant pills he knew she liked pills. By
ten pm, Catherine and Ron were tired, and so they
went back to the yacht to sleep, but Angela and
her friend from the harbor continued to party. It was
early in the morning when Angela's new friend brought her
back to the yacht.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
She was sick.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
She could hardly talk. She'd been having convulsions. Catherine sprang
into action and started performing CPR on her little sister.
They got a taxi and rushed to the hospital. As
Catherine kept trying to get Angela to wake up, but
nothing worked. Angela was pronounced dead at the Hospital of
(23:43):
Cardi respiratory arrest due to acute intoxication. It was the pills,
Catherine thought, How could Ron have given Angela, a known
drug addict, pills. It was the pills that killed her,
the pills that put her over the edge, and she
(24:04):
told Ron this. Ron told a friend later that as
far as Angela's death went, Catherine quote blames me one
hundred percent. Imagine the last horrifying moments of Angela's life.
Imagine being Catherine speeding along in a cab fifteen hundred
(24:26):
miles from home, trying desperately to keep your little sister breathing.
Imagine the slow creeping rage that would fill you once
the panic died down, The thought that your sister would
still be alive if your boyfriend hadn't been such a fool,
such a pathetic party animal. Imagine holding on to that
(24:47):
rage for the next two years. It wasn't the sort
of thing you could just forget. By twenty eleven, Katherine
(25:11):
and Ron were more like brother and sister than boyfriend
and girlfriend. According to a friend, they didn't sleep in
the same bed anymore. They often stayed in different houses.
Ron wanted to break up, but Catherine didn't. All of
Ron's friends knew that he wanted to break it off.
He kept talking about it. To one of them, he
(25:32):
said that the relationship had run its course, but that
he would make sure Catherine would be well provided for.
He told another friend that he'd wanted to end the
relationship for the past five years. His friends knew things
weren't great between the two of them. They'd seen the
couple fight. They knew Ron could be a bit, shall
we say much when he drank. Once he pointed a
(25:53):
gun at a friend. He'd wave it around when he
was drunk. It was always that drinking that got him
into trouble. One too many jins with a splash of
tonics and he'd be off. One of his former employees
described Ron as having two personalities. He was kind when
sober and cruel when drunk. He'd be so abusive, said
(26:15):
the employee, and in the morning he's sorry, everything's good.
You know. He'd make you feel like a million dollars again.
So it was I think maybe for Catherine it was
just a vicious cycle. This same employee once saw Ron
push Catherine down the stairs on his boat. Another time,
he heard Ron's snap that Catherine had nothing without him,
(26:42):
So from the outside it might have looked like Ron
held all the power in their relationship, but did he.
One day, he was struck by abdominal pains so bad
that he went to the hospital. Later, he told several
of his friends his dark suspicion was Matherne poisoning him.
(27:02):
One of those friends looked at a bottle of Ron's
beloved Tanka ray gin and noticed that it was suspiciously cloudy.
Ron still had the gumption to buy real estate, though,
even though he already owned multiple properties, he couldn't resist
buying a new house in June of twenty eleven. The
address was one oh one Coconut Drive, and it was
(27:24):
a steal at three million dollars. Seriously, it was a steal.
It was valued at almost five million. This house had
everything five bedrooms, six bathrooms, a dock on the water,
a pool, a jacuzzi and marble floors, oh and an elevator.
Four days after buying the home, Ron had one of
(27:46):
his friends break up with Catherine for him. The friend,
Spencer Gordon, did it dutifully. Spencer and Catherine were in
a plane together flying from the Bahamas back to Florida
and in the sky spent told Catherine that Ron wanted
to end things, but that he would let her stay
at his condo until he sold it, and that he
would also pay her one million dollars. Catherine responded, I'm
(28:11):
not interested. They didn't talk about it again. A week
after that, Catherine stopped by one of Ron's other homes
looking for something. Two days after that, Ron confided in
a friend that he couldn't find his passport or one
(28:33):
of his guns. The next day was June twenty seventh.
(29:00):
Catherine kept busy. She went to a store called Brownie's
Yacht Diver, where Ron had an account, and she bought
some diving weights. She told the clerk that the weights
were for Ron, and she explained how much Ron weighed.
The thinking would be that the weights needed to be
heavy enough to bring his body all the way down
to the bottom of the ocean floor. Right, that was
what you did when you dove. She spent two hundred
(29:22):
dollars on them. That evening, she and Ron had friends
over for dinner. Well, they had Ron's friends over. The
friend's names were Terry Leipzig and Spencer Gordon. The one
who tried to break up with Catherine in the plane
by proxy. They ate Chinese food, which Catherine had heated up.
Ron complained that the food tasted bitter.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
They drank.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Ron was drinking his usual tank Ray with a hint
of tonic, and Catherine mixed them up dutifully. He complained
to her that they were too strong, and they were strong.
By seven fifteen, Ron was passed out on the cow coach.
Spencer and Terry left. That was weird, they thought. Drinking
usually turned Ron into quite the party animal. He was
(30:08):
never the type to pass out before it was even
dark outside, but oh well. They went home. The next morning,
Spencer got a strange call. The caller was Ron's handyman,
a man named Rainaldo Silva. Rainnaldo was totally panicking. He
(30:28):
kept saying Ron's past, Ron's passed. Spencer thought, Ron's passed out. Yeah,
sounds about right, But why the fear in Rainnaldo's voice.
So Spencer called Terry, who had been there with him
the previous evening, and they headed over to one hundred
and one Coconut Drive. When they got there, Catherine met
(30:51):
them at the door. She told them that Ron was
out with a friend. They thought this was strange because
frankly they knew all his friends. No, it's a friend
from out of town, she said. Meanwhile, Rainnaldo was standing
behind her, looking terrified. He pointed to the bedroom. When
(31:12):
Catherine wasn't paying attention, he whispered.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
There's a bag. Ron's in the bag.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Spencer said he needed to uh use the bathroom. He
snuck into the bedroom instead. It looked normal. He came
back out behind the bed, said Rainaldo. Spencer went back
in and looked behind the bed. He saw a huge
Duffel bag, all zipped up. He unzipped it, stuck his
(31:46):
hand inside, felt something, something that felt like.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Ron.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
He zipped it right back up. He went to the group. Rinaldo, Terry,
why don't you leave for a second, he said. When
he was alone with Catherine, he asked her for the truth.
Where is Ron and what is in that bag? Catherine
(32:19):
started crying, He's dead, she said. He went down the stairs.
He went down the stairs. He went down the stairs.
He went down the stairs. He went down the stairs.
I messed him up. Spencer got Terry and along with Catherine,
they all went back into the bedroom. There they opened
(32:42):
the bag a bit further. There was a sleeping bag inside,
and a bunch of sheets and plastic bags, and everything
was covered with coffee grounds. Spencer looked closer, he saw
something a human hand. Okay, he was done here. He
closed the bag for the second time and asked Catherine
(33:04):
what she was going to.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Tell the police.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
I don't think they're going to believe it was an accident,
she said, why not? Spencer asked, because, said Catherine, there's
a bullet hole in him. Eight days after killing Ron,
(33:36):
Catherine turned herself in. She had a lawyer by then,
a lawyer that Spencer helped her find. Her lawyer told
her that she was wanted on charges of first degree murder,
and so she took herself to the police. The papers
exploded with the story. Her stepmother told a journalist, in
all honesty, she wouldn't even say anything that would hurt
(33:56):
somebody's feelings. And that was about all the information we
got about Catherine. Details about the crime, though, leaked out
in the press from warrants and affidavits. The police found
a large blue storage container that Catherine had bought at
home depot the morning after Ron's death. They noted the
(34:17):
diving weights and the coffee grounds. In the warrant, they
wrote that all this indicated a thought out plan of
getting rid of the body and concealing the odor of
the body. One journalist pointed out that using coffee grounds
to cover up smells was an old flight attendant trick.
Detectives also found Catherine's diary and they took it in
(34:39):
as evidence, noting that it contained a heavy emphasis on
Ron's moods and actions. Several months after the murder, the
police went back to one oh one Coconut Drive and
took in Ron's tank ray the bottle that was cloudy.
They tested it and found that it contained an insecticide
called bethenthrin. Had Catherine been poisoning Ron all along? Kind
(35:04):
of looked like it, but it was hard to know
for sure. The autopsy showed that Ron's body contained none
of that insecticide, and there had been a lag between
the murder and the bottle being taken in as evidence,
so you just never know. Catherine appeared in court silent
and stonefaced. According to one journalist, she pled not guilty
(35:25):
and was held without bail as the case against her progressed. Bizarrely,
her sister Melissa called up the police and told them
that they should keep looking further because she thought Catherine
had something to do with Angela's death in Saint Lucia
back in two thousand and nine. Clearly, the animosity between
the sisters ran deep first degree murder charges or no
(35:47):
first degree murder charges. It wasn't until Catherine's trial started
three years later in twenty fourteen that her story of.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
The murder emerged.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
By then, she was no longer dying her long brown
hand and so she had gone completely gray. Her defense
argued that she was a battered woman and she had
killed Ron in an act of self defense. Her version
of the night went like this. Ron was mad at
her because he was trying to sell his condo and
she interrupted the showing of it to a potential buyer.
(36:19):
So they fought and fought some more. He was drunk
and raging. The fight got bad. He pulled out a
gun and he pointed it at her as she knelt
before him, and he said that she didn't deserve to live.
I lost control of my bowels, she testified. Her voice
(36:39):
was quiet and a bit wavery. My whole body was shaking.
Then he lowered the gun and I got up and
ran up the stairs. Ron chased her, but he tripped,
fell back down the stairs and bashed his head. That
ended the fight for the moment. She helped him up
(37:00):
his wound, took him into the bedroom, and helped him
lie down in the bed. Then she took a bath,
changed her filthy clothes, and then she saw the gun
and she picked it up, and she realized that it
had been loaded that whole time, the whole time he
was pointing it at her. Everything changed when I saw that,
(37:24):
she said, it was like an out of body experience.
The fear I had, the anger all came together. I
was afraid. I was mad like I've never been before.
I put the bullets back in the gun. Then I
went back in the bedroom. I went to the opposite
side of where he was. I held the gun out,
(37:45):
closed my eyes, and pulled the trigger. When Catherine fired,
she hit Ron Vincey in the head. And then she
stabbed him in the chest, and she slit his throat,
hit his head with a hammer, wrapped him up as
(38:07):
though she were trying to reverse all the damage, stuffed
paper towels in his mouth, taped up his stomach with
blue painter's tape, wrapped him in a mattress, cover a sheet, towels,
plastic bags, and finally put the whole thing into a
red sleeping bag. She cut the bloody spots out of
the mattress and hid them in the garage, along with
her bloody clothes and the gun and the knife. At
(38:31):
one am, she called Rainaldo the handyman, asking him to
rent a U haul and come over. Then she texted
him never mind. He came over at eight thirty am
the next morning, and she showed him the sleeping bag
shaped so horribly like a body, and said he fell
down the stairs. She told Rainaldo that Ron's dream had
(38:55):
always been to be buried at sea, so would he
help Ron at she this dream by flinging his body
into the ocean. Of course, poor Raynaldo was completely freaked
out by this point, but he held it together installed
for time, saying something like, uh, one sec. The body's
a little bit heavy. I'm gonna have to go get
(39:15):
a dolly. That was when he ran off and called Spencer,
saying Ron's past, Ron's Past. In the meantime, Catherine went
to home depot and bought that huge blue plastic container,
presumably to act as Ron's makeshift coffin.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Do you believe you were in danger.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Her defense lawyer asked her on the witness stand, Yes,
she said. Do you believe he would have gotten up
and killed you in the middle of the night?
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Yes? Did you plan any of this?
Speaker 1 (39:49):
No?
Speaker 2 (39:49):
I didn't. Do you still love him? Yes?
Speaker 1 (39:55):
I do? Bullshit, said the prosecution, a self defense killing
(40:17):
when the man in question was passed out in bed
with a head wound. They argued that there was far
too much time between when Ron allegedly threatened her with
the gun and when she came back to kill him
with that same gun. She could have run out of
the house, they said. They also brought up the fact
that Catherine had broken up with Ron before, back in
the two thousands, before she had that brief marriage. If
(40:40):
she was so terrified of him, how was she able
to break up with him then but couldn't do it now.
There was no evidence of physical abuse, they argued, and
what about all her viciousness the violence of the murder.
The defense brought in a psychologist who argued that the
overkill bashing and stabbing, and the hammer to the head
(41:02):
was quote consistent with battered spouse syndrome. Despite details like
the buying of the diving weights and the use of
coffee grounds. Apparently neither sheer Ron drink coffee, so the
fact that she even had coffee grounds on hand seemed significant.
Despite all that, the judge decided that there wasn't enough
evidence of premeditation for a first degree murder charge, so
(41:25):
by the time the jury sat down to deliberate, they
were looking at a second degree murder charge. They debated
for thirteen hours and then found her guilty. The judge
gave her twenty five years and that was that. Today,
Catherine Pelegi is at Hernando Correctional Institution, three hundred and
(41:45):
three miles away from her old life of luxury at
one oh one Coconut Drive. Her release date is August six,
twenty thirty four. Today she's almost sixty five, but her
skin looks smooth, luminous in her current mugshot. In article
(42:05):
after article about the case, Ron Vincy's personality is examined
like someone turning a piece of sea glass over and over.
He was a complicated man. The articles conclude, there was
the fun loving Ron, the joker at one dollar Taco Tuesdays,
the wealthy retiree who flew his own planes. And then
(42:28):
there was the dark Ron, the heavy gin drinker, the
guy who asked a friend to break up with his girlfriend,
the guy who once pushed that girlfriend down the stairs
of the yacht named after himself. But where were the
articles examining the life of Catherine Peleggie. I was shocked
(42:49):
to see how little was written about her as a person.
People usually trip over themselves trying to figure out female murderers,
and Catherine had two important things going for her when
it came to getting press coverage. She was pretty and
she was white. Plus her past was dotted with these
mysterious and tantalizing tidbits. The brief marriage, the dead sister,
(43:12):
the inter sibling lawsuits, the cheerleader turned flight attendant turned murderess.
Who was this woman? What did she want? Hell?
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Why was she so afraid of water?
Speaker 1 (43:25):
No one answered any of these questions, and without answers
and context, it's hard to know how to interpret her
claim in the courtroom that Ron had abused her physically
and sexually and verbally for years. We know she was
quiet and that Ron bullied her, and we know about
the incident with the stairs on the yacht. But we
(43:47):
also know that she wasn't someone who just sat there.
She was a planner, someone who said no, I won't
break up with him, and then went out and bought
diving weights. What could a woman like that do. There's
a great long form article about this case from twenty
(44:08):
twelve that was published in the Broward Palm Beach New Times.
In it, a journalist visits one oh one Coconut Drive,
which is full of Ron's friends. Ron's presence fills the
house and the story. One of his friends tells the
journalists that she's heard Ron's ghost going around the house
(44:28):
and slamming the doors.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
As usual.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
Catherine is in the background of it all, quiet, gray haired,
now alone with her secrets, almost a ghost herself. The end,
(45:09):
And that is the story of Catherine Peleggi, who sits
in prison to this day. Her release date is sometime
in the two thousand and thirties, which actually sounds sort
of soon. I was on that soon though, she will
be I believe seventy eight or seventy nine when she
is released. All right, I hope you enjoy this episode,
(45:29):
or if enjoyed is not quite the right word, I
hope you took something from this episode, and I'd like
to thank this episode's two amazing, intelligent and gorgeous patrons,
Melissa T.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
And Justin W.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Thank you for supporting the podcast. If anyone else wants
to support the podcast, there are many ways you can
do this. You can always use a promo code for
one of my advertisers.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
That's very helpful.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
You can go to patreon dot com slash criminal Broads
to donate, and you can leave a review saying best
podcast ever, but in your words, because I would never
tell you what to say. Okay, love you all so much,
thanks for being the best listeners ever. And I'll meet
you here next week, same time, same place.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
Maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Maybe I'm wrong loving youd like I do. If it's
a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty loving you.
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