Three Days in the McKay Bay Trial, and the Jury Still Has Not Heard How She Died

Stephanie Crone-Overholts was 47. She came down from Erie, Pennsylvania, at the end of 2020, and by the fall of 2021, by the account this jury has heard, she was down on her luck and living partly out of the old Hyundai Elantra her parents had given her, until a man she met at a McDonald's offered her a room. At about five o'clock on the afternoon of Friday, November 5, 2021, she sent her mother a text. Her mother read it at Walmart a little after six and wrote back. She never heard from her daughter again. Six days later a father and son fishing under the 22nd Street Causeway watched something float into the channel that the son took for a squid, until it turned in the water and he could see the toes.

Three days into the trial of Robert Lee Kessler, the jury in a Tampa courtroom has heard seventeen witnesses. They have seen that leg on a police body camera. They have watched divers lift the rest of her out of McKay Bay and East Bay over six days, in pieces, from barges and rocks and mangroves. They have seen her debit card come up out of a hoodie pocket on the bottom of the channel, a man in a canoe describe bins going off the bridge, a stained carpet unrolled behind a children's gym, a kitchen cabinet that a crime scene technician thought had dried blood on it, and a twelve-year-old girl describe the night she was kept in the car while a man and a woman yelled inside the house.

What they have not heard, after three days, is how Stephanie died. The medical examiner was supposed to be the last witness on Thursday. At four in the afternoon the judge looked at the clock, looked at a two-hour direct and an hour of cross, and moved her to Monday morning.

That is where this trial sits tonight, and it is the question I want to hold every one of these three days up against. The State has spent almost all of its time on what happened after Stephanie died. The charge it most needs to prove is about what was in a man's head before she died. And the man it needs to prove that about has not sat in the courtroom for a single minute of testimony, by his own choice, while a jury, some of whom were talking about him in the jury room on the first morning, decides what the evidence means.

What the State has to prove, count by count

Before anything else, the charges, because everything in this article gets measured against them. Robert Kessler, who is 74 now and was 69 in November 2021, is charged with two crimes. He is not charged with Stephanie's death. He is charged with two specific acts, and the State has to prove each one, every piece of it, beyond a reasonable doubt.

Count 1 is first-degree premeditated murder. The State has to prove three things. That Stephanie Crone-Overholts is dead. That her death was caused by a criminal act of Robert Kessler. And that the killing was premeditated, which in Florida means he made a conscious decision to kill her before he did it, and that there was enough time between the decision and the act for him to reflect on it. The law says that time can be short. It cannot be nothing.

Count 2 is abuse of a dead human body. Two things: that her body was mutilated or grossly abused after death, and that he is the one who did it. Count 2 never asks who killed her or how. A jury can be certain about Count 2 and still hold a reasonable doubt on Count 1, and the defense has told this jury, in so many words, that it is counting on exactly that.

The State is not seeking death. A first-degree conviction carries life without parole. And as I said in my Day 2 reflection, a verdict form on a first-degree charge in Florida carries lesser offenses under it, second-degree murder and manslaughter among them, which means the defense's best argument does not send anyone home. It moves the jury down a line. Hold that, because by the end of Day 3 you can see the whole defense case pointing at that line.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 1 Judge Lets Legally Blind McKay Bay Defendant Robert Kessler Represent Himself / Pt 1

The empty chair

To understand Tuesday morning you need Monday. On the first day of jury selection, Kessler, who is legally blind, told the court he no longer wanted Maria Dunker, the assistant public defender who has had his case for about five years. The judge took him through the full waiver of counsel, let him represent himself, and kept Ms. Dunker in the room as standby counsel. Kessler picked his own jury. He did not object to a single juror struck or kept.

Tuesday morning, before the jury came in, Ms. Dunker stood up and told the judge that Kessler wanted her back. "Really?" the judge said. He put Kessler under oath at 9:12, asked him to turn toward the voice since he cannot see the bench, and asked whether it was his own free decision. It was. The judge allowed it, with one condition said plainly to the man's face: no flip-flopping for the rest of the trial. The case is five years old, and it has to move.

Then Ms. Dunker had a second thing. Kessler did not want to be in the courtroom for his trial at all.

The judge laid out the history. The week before, the defense had said Kessler's health would make sitting through a full day hard. Then on Monday he had represented himself through jury selection until about four o'clock, asked for three or four breaks and got every one. The bailiff who sat beside him all day said the only thing Kessler complained about was being cold, and the bailiff got him a jacket. So the judge ruled that the jury would be told only that Kessler has a right to be present and a right to be absent, and that he is exercising it. Not that it is medical. "It doesn't look good," the judge told him, and called it a really bad choice. He spelled out what it would cost with an example: if a witness says the car was blue and you know it was red, and your lawyer doesn't, there will be nobody at that table to tell her.

And then he said the thing that matters most about this whole first morning. Had this come up before the jury was sworn, both sides could have asked the jurors whether an empty chair would bother them. That ship had sailed. Ms. Dunker asked him to bring the jurors back and ask them anyway, all fifteen including the alternates. The State said the jurors had sworn to follow the law and the instruction told them flatly not to hold his absence against him. The judge agreed with the State and denied it. He said he had never in all his years seen a jury questioned again once a trial had begun.

WATCH: THE CLIP McKay Bay Defendant Robert Kessler Asks for the Lawyer He Dropped One Day Earlier WATCH: CASE STORY PT 2 McKay Bay Defendant Robert Kessler Takes Back His Lawyer and Waives His Right to Be at Trial / Pt 2

I want to give the judge his due here, because he earned it. He swore Kessler in again at lunch, and since Wednesday he has had him on a video screen from the jail twice a day, under oath, with every accommodation read back to him: a suit waiting, a seat beside his lawyer, a reader for documents, and a court employee ready to describe the trial to him "much like a radio" at a ballgame. Kessler has said no every time, and on Wednesday said he did not even want the audio. That is a record an appeals court will read someday when somebody argues a nearly blind 74-year-old did not understand what he gave up, and it is being built carefully.

But notice what it cost. The State's eyewitnesses could no longer point across the room at him, so both sides agreed to a single photograph of Kessler from 2021, marked State's Exhibit E, as the man on trial. And remember the judge's refusal at ten o'clock on Tuesday to ask a sworn jury about the empty chair, because by five o'clock that afternoon he had asked every one of them, twice, and what some of them had been talking about before a single witness was sworn was the man who was not there.

WATCH: THE CLIP Judge Tells McKay Bay Defendant Robert Kessler Skipping His Own Trial Is a Really Bad Choice

"We will not know": two openings and one gap

The lead prosecutor, Scott Harmon, did not open with a timeline. He opened with the wounds. "He stabbed her," he told the jury, four times in the soft tissue of her neck, into the jugular, two of the wounds deep on either side, angling in and down. And she fought, he said: she grabbed the blade and it cut her palm, the wound the medical examiner will call a classic defensive wound.

Then he named the gap at the center of this case himself. "We will not know, and you will not know the full extent of her injuries." Her head was never found. Neither was her left arm. The medical examiner, Dr. Ashley Perkins, does not have the upper neck or the carotid arteries, and wrote the cause of death as stab wounds and "homicidal violence" because she cannot know what else was done. The State's answer to that gap was to put it on the defendant: you will not have those parts, Mr. Harmon told the jury, because he hid them, from you, from her, and from the police.

WATCH: THE CLIP Prosecutor Opens Robert Kessler's McKay Bay Trial on Four Stab Wounds and a Defensive Wound

From there the State spent more than an hour on what came after. Her body cut and sawed into at least seven pieces. Black yard bags and plastic storage totes. A Dodge Caravan driven down to the causeway on more than one day. Phone records showing a flurry of calls and texts between Kessler and Stephanie from about 5:30 to 9:30 on the night of November 5, and nothing after. Kessler's phone traveling to the 22nd Street Causeway and back on the Sunday morning, twice, and again before her car was left in a parking lot. Her blood in his kitchen. A carpet behind a gym. And at the end of it, a Walmart parking lot on November 22, Kessler slumped behind the wheel of a rental car with about four grams of fentanyl in him, revived with Narcan, and, the prosecutor said, telling the staff at Tampa General he took it because he knew a murder charge was coming.

WATCH: THE CLIP Prosecutor Says McKay Bay Defendant Robert Kessler Overdosed on Fentanyl to Avoid a Murder Charge

The State closed its opening with an image of a sea that "stinks and reeks with the evidence of his murderous guilt." That is a closing argument, delivered before the first witness was sworn. Nobody objected to it.

Ms. Dunker's opening started where the law starts. Kessler is presumed innocent, she said, and that presumption does not go away after an opening statement, or after the first photograph or the hundredth. And then she said the line that defined the defense for the next three days. You just sat through an hour and a half, she told them, that told you almost everything about what happened after Stephanie died and nothing about what happened to her. Was it premeditated? A fight? The heat of passion? An accident? DNA, she said, can tell you whose blood was left behind. It cannot tell you when or how. Stephanie lived in that house. Of course her DNA is there.

Then she went further than I have heard a defense lawyer go in an opening on a first-degree case. Hypothetically, she said, even if at the end of this case you are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Kessler cut up Stephanie and put her body in the bay, that does not mean he committed first-degree premeditated murder. You decide that count on its own.

WATCH: THE CLIP Robert Kessler's Lawyer Tells McKay Bay Jury Body Parts in the Bay Don't Prove Premeditated Murder

The judge sustained three objections for crossing from preview into argument, which is fair; she was arguing. But it was the right argument, and the State's own words handed it to her. Read every day after this one through her sentence, because it explains almost every cross she has done and almost every cross she has not.

When the jury came back from the break after openings, the judge started with a question one of them had asked his bailiff out loud. Juror nineteen wanted to know why Kessler had represented himself the day before and had a lawyer today, and whether Ms. Dunker was really his lawyer or only speaking his words. She is his lawyer, the judge told them, and neither choice should affect their decision. Hold that question too. By the end of the day it turned out the jurors had been talking about the same thing among themselves before anyone asked it.

WATCH: THE CLIP McKay Bay Juror Asks the Judge if Robert Kessler's Lawyer Is Just Speaking His Words

One more promise from that opening is worth writing down now, because I will come back to it. Mr. Harmon told the jury that Kessler had vision problems now but did not have them in 2021, and that "the evidence will prove it." Ms. Dunker, remarkably, volunteered the same thing herself: his condition now is very different from 2021. Three days in, nobody has proved it. Nobody has needed to, because nobody is fighting it.

A mother, a text, and a tattoo

The State's first witness was Susan George, Stephanie's mother, who had been allowed to sit through the openings. She identified her daughter's car with the Pennsylvania plate still on it, a photograph of Stephanie, and then the photograph Tampa police released to the public on November 12, 2021: the lower right leg, with three names tattooed on it. Sean, Greg and Zach. "My three grandsons," she said. Sean was in the courtroom.

On Friday, November 5, 2021, Stephanie texted her at about 5:04 in the evening. Susan read it at 6:19, at Walmart, and wrote back. Nothing came back, then or ever. On November 9 she walked into the Erie police department and reported her daughter missing, then started calling Tampa: the police, the hospitals, the medical examiner. Then somebody sent her a news release with a picture of a tattoo.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 4 Victim's Mother Tells Kessler's McKay Bay Jury She Knew the Tattoo in a Police Release / Pt 4 WATCH: THE CLIP (LIVE FRI OCT 30, 12:00 PM ET) Victim's Mother Tells Kessler's McKay Bay Jury the Last Text She Ever Got From Her Daughter

The defense's cross was gentle and short. Did she know where her daughter was living at the end of October? "Not with this person," she said. She did not know. The prosecutor closed with two small things the State promised to tie in later: a partly burned cigarette was found in Stephanie's car, and yes, her daughter smoked; and sweatshirts were "her thing." Hold both. On Day 2 the divers brought up a sweatshirt, and on Day 3 a crime scene technician showed the jury exactly where that cigarette was.

WATCH: FULL TESTIMONY Susan George: Full Testimony, Stephanie's Mother Opens the State's Case in the McKay Bay Trial

The man on the bridge, and one photograph

Reynaldo Pecina has fished the 22nd Street Causeway with his father for more than twenty years, from the wooden fenders that run out from the bridge on either side of the boat channel. On the afternoon of November 11, 2021, something came floating into the channel, "dead center." He thought it was a squid. Then he saw a bone sticking up out of it, and then it turned and he could see all the toes. The dispatcher, at one point, told him to pick it up. "I wasn't gonna grab a leg," he said.

WATCH: THE CLIP Fisherman Tells Kessler's McKay Bay Jury the Floating Leg Looked Like a Squid Until He Saw the Toes

But that was not why the State called him. Three or four days earlier, he told the jury, he and his father had been in the same spot in the afternoon when they heard "loud splashing noises," three or four of them, "like somebody was dropping cinder blocks into the water," from the north side of the bridge. Ten minutes later, from the south side, one huge splash, close enough that it sounded "like it was right behind me." He turned and looked up. On the bridge was an older man with a black yard bag in both hands, shaking it out. Nothing fell out of it. Then he let it go, and it floated past the fender. "I looked right into his eyes," Pecina said, "a good five, eight seconds." A white man, 65 to 72, grayish thinning hair. Then the man leaned on the rail and looked out toward the port, walked away, and Pecina heard a door slam that sounded like an older vehicle.

WATCH: THE CLIP (LIVE FRI OCT 30, 10:00 AM ET) Prosecutor Says McKay Bay Fishermen Heard Heavy Splashes and Saw Kessler's Caravan on the Bridge WATCH: CASE STORY PT 5 Fisherman Tells Kessler's McKay Bay Jury He Saw a Man Drop a Trash Bag Off the Bridge / Pt 5

Later, a detective showed him a photograph and asked whether it looked like the man. On the stand the prosecutor handed him State's Exhibit E. That's the photograph, Pecina said, and the person in it fits the man he saw. The hair? "The exact same."

Ms. Dunker's cross did three things well. She separated the splashes, which came from the north side and which he never saw, from the man, who was on the south side. She got him to agree he saw nothing come out of the bag, never checked what was in it, and watched it float on top of the water, not weighted. And then, at the very end: "They show you one photograph, correct?" "Yes, just one photograph."

WATCH: THE CLIP McKay Bay Eyewitness Tells Robert Kessler's Lawyer He Never Saw Anything Fall Out of the Bag WATCH: FULL TESTIMONY Reynaldo Pecina: Full Testimony, the McKay Bay Fisherman Who Saw a Man Drop a Bag Off the Bridge

On Wednesday the State called the second man on the water, Lazzaro Castro. On Tuesday evening, November 9, 2021, he was anchored in a canoe south of the bridge at about six or seven o'clock, the sun going down, when he heard splashes, "very loud splashes, couldn't have been a fish. I've been fishing all my life." On the center span, by the maintenance ladder at the top of the bridge, a man had a trunk open and was throwing storage bins over the rail, whole, five or six of them, red and clear and blue, no lids, black garbage bags inside. Castro used to sell used cars. He knew the vehicle "very well": a Dodge Caravan, about an '06 to an '08. He yelled up at the man. The man said nothing, stood there "really eerily" with his arms crossed, then leaned on the railing and watched the bins float toward the canoe. Castro pulled anchor and went over to the red one. Inside, he said, was "black sludge."

WATCH: THE CLIP Canoe Fisherman Tells Kessler's McKay Bay Jury a White-Haired Man Dumped Containers Off the Bridge

He went home and did not call anyone. Two days later, when traffic took him past a causeway full of police and someone told him a body part had been found, he called his parents and then the police. On November 15 detectives met him again and showed him a photograph. It was Exhibit E, the same single photograph Pecina saw. Did it look like the man on the bridge? Similar, he said. "May have been off on the haircut."

WATCH: THE CLIP Canoe Fisherman Says State's Photo Looked Like the McKay Bay Bridge Man Except Maybe the Haircut

Here is what I think about that, said plainly. As identifications, these two are weak, and they are weak because of how the police did it. A single photograph, shown by detectives who already believe they have their man, is the most suggestive way there is to put a face in front of a witness. It tells the witness who the police think did it. Pecina watched a man for a few seconds, looking up from the water. Castro watched one for three to five minutes from thirty to fifty yards, at dusk. Both were shown the same one photograph, and both, on the stand, described a resemblance. "Fits." "Similar." Neither was ever shown a lineup. And by the time Castro saw that photograph on November 15, the police had put the tattoo on the news three days earlier, on November 12, and local news crews had been filming at the bay since the 12th.

WATCH: THE CLIP Lead Detective Tells Kessler's McKay Bay Jury the Tattoo Search Came Up Empty

The strongest thing about both men is not the photograph. It is what they said before the photograph. Castro described an older white man, about five foot six, late sixties, with white hair cut low "almost like a bowl cut," on November 11, four days before he saw any face. Pecina's account of the haircut, as the State told it in opening, matched. And Castro's van is harder to be wrong about from fifty yards than a face: on November 14, when the lead detective went back to Kessler's house, there was a dark blue Dodge Caravan in the yard that had not been there two nights earlier.

But even the van has a crack in it already. Castro put it at an '06 to an '08. The plainclothes officer who followed that van on November 19 called it a 2002. Nobody on either side has asked about it.

Then there is what the defense did with it. Ms. Dunker asked Pecina one question about the single photograph and Castro none: nothing about the haircut he said was off, the van, or the two days he waited to call anyone. I read that as the same choice she made in opening. She is not fighting who was on the bridge. She is fighting what happened in the house. That may be the right call for her client. It also means this jury will deliberate on two single-photograph identifications that nobody ever really tested in front of them.

"A no-brainer": what was said in the jury room

Now the part of Day 1 I think will matter longest, and it happened with the jury out of the room.

Late Tuesday afternoon, after the fifth witness, the judge said there were two problems. A bailiff had noticed a juror who seemed to be asleep, a woman in sunglasses with a neck pillow. And a different juror had passed a note to the bailiff during testimony. The judge read it out: "she made the comment during the break that this is a no-brainer."

He handled what came next carefully, and he handled it in the open. He put the bailiff under oath. He brought in juror nine, the one who wrote the note, thanked her for doing exactly what she had been told to do, and asked her what happened. At lunch, in the jury room, the juror beside her had said it, quietly, so most likely only she heard. Was the other juror asleep that afternoon? "She was asleep," juror nine said. Zero question.

Then juror five came in. She denied sleeping; the pillow, she said, was "just due to my routine." Asked whether she had shared her impressions of the case, she said nothing "concrete." Asked straight whether she had told another juror this was a no-brainer, she repeated the word back, "Is it no-brainer?", and then said yes, she said it, to one juror. And then she volunteered something nobody had asked about. That morning, before any testimony, when she walked into the jury room, other jurors were already talking about "the guy that was sitting over there, the defendant," and why he would not be there, and why he did not have a lawyer.

Asked whether she could set her view aside and give Kessler a fair trial, juror five said: "Maybe I could be dismissed." She stood by it. From her perspective, it was a no-brainer. Both sides agreed, and she was released at about four o'clock. Juror thirteen, an alternate, took her seat.

WATCH: THE CLIP Judge Removes McKay Bay Juror Who Called Robert Kessler's Trial a No-Brainer and Denies a Mistrial

Ms. Dunker asked the judge to question every remaining juror about whether anyone had expressed opinions about the evidence, and moved for a mistrial. The mistrial was denied. The judge agreed to ask each juror, one at a time, only whether they had heard the dismissed juror say anything about a no-brainer.

Juror one had. She overheard it, and she said it was "something about Mr. Kessler." So the remark was not as private as the two jurors had described it. And then juror thirteen, the alternate who had just been seated, said yes, he had heard jurors give opinions. That morning, in the jury room, before they learned the defense had a lawyer again, two to four jurors had made "brief comments" about Kessler's appearance and his conduct during jury selection. One of the words, he thought, was "defeated."

WATCH: THE CLIP Judge Refuses to Question All 15 McKay Bay Jurors About Robert Kessler Skipping His Trial

Ms. Dunker renewed her motion. No other juror had reported any of it. The conversation he described happened before the morning question from the juror in the back row, so the judge's answer to that question could not have cleared it up. And jurors who are asked by a judge whether they can still be fair tend to say yes. The State called it "rampant hysteria" that "didn't come to fruition," and said that everything Kessler did on Monday, sitting in a red jail outfit and asking no questions, would make anyone look defeated. Denied, a second time. In the judge's words, "the system has worked."

Then, to the judge's credit, he agreed to a second round, a new question for jurors one through twelve: had anyone heard jurors talk about the defendant's appearance or the way he acted in court? Juror one said yes. A woman in the group, an older juror who works in an attorney's office, had talked to the room that morning about Kessler's appearance and whether he was "pretending to be one way versus another," whether the way he looked was "like a sympathy type thing" or really how he is. Was her impression negative? "Somewhat." The judge said he thought they had worked out who it was. Juror four had heard people in the hallway during jury selection, some of whom may never have been picked, saying Kessler "already knows what he's doing" and was representing himself "to make it last longer." Juror ten remembered "a brief question" that morning about why he had chosen to represent himself.

WATCH: THE CLIP Robert Kessler's Lawyer Says More McKay Bay Jurors Broke the Rules and Pushes Again for a Mistrial

No juror admitted to taking part in any of it. Ms. Dunker said there were now potentially three separate conversations among different groups of jurors, and that one, perhaps two, may have lied to the court, because a juror described a conversation in that room and none of the others would say they were in it. "My concerns are just growing and growing." The judge was unmoved. "We still got a good jury." Denied, a third time.

I am not going to tell you the judge got this wrong. The law is that a mistrial is the last resort, granted only when nothing less can cure the problem, and a trial judge who watched every one of those jurors answer under oath gets a great deal of deference on who was telling the truth. He removed the juror who had prejudged the case. He questioned the rest, twice, which is more than many judges would have done.

But I am going to ask the two questions this record leaves open, because that is our job. First: the woman who talked to the room about whether Kessler was faking for sympathy was identified in that courtroom, by her line of work and where she sat, and as far as our record shows she was never called back and asked about it by name. When she was asked the general question, she did not say she had been part of any such conversation. Somebody's answer in that room was wrong. Second: the thing those jurors were discussing, before a single witness was sworn, was whether the defendant's condition was an act. That is precisely the thing the judge's instruction about the empty chair told them not to weigh. At ten o'clock Tuesday morning he declined to ask a sworn jury about it because they had taken an oath. By five o'clock he knew some of them had already been talking about it.

The presumption of innocence is supposed to walk into that jury room with every one of them. On Day 1 of this trial, I do not think we can say for certain that it did. All three motions are preserved. If there is ever an appeal in this case, I expect this afternoon is the first chapter of it.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 9 McKay Bay Trial: A Juror Calls It a No-Brainer and Kessler's Lawyer Moves for a Mistrial / Pt 9

What came out of the water

Most of the State's evidence over these three days has been the bay, and the defense has let almost all of it in without a fight.

Officer Daniel Spears of the Tampa police marine unit narrated his own body camera from November 11: the boat coming under the causeway, the sheriff's boat already searching, the two crews splitting McKay Bay by hand signals, and then a small white shape in the water. "That's what we were looking for," he told the jury. "That's going to be the severed leg floating in the water." The Pecinas were in the corner of the frame in their canoe, back out to help because the light was going. Spears pulled it from the water himself, and the tattoo was "very, very visible."

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 6 Marine Officer's Body Camera Shows Kessler's McKay Bay Jury the Search That Found the Leg / Pt 6 WATCH: THE CLIP Marine Officer Tells Kessler's McKay Bay Jury How He Pulled the Tattooed Leg From the Water WATCH: FULL TESTIMONY Daniel Spears: Full Testimony, the McKay Bay Marine Officer Who Found the First Remains

Around him on Day 1 were the first officers on land. Officer Derek Nadeau got to the seawall within minutes, took the son's statement while another officer took the father's, and stayed three or four hours until homicide took over; the defense asked him nothing. Detective Jacob Wheeland went aboard the marine boat to look at the leg in its body bag that evening, and the next day walked out to the end of a barge at the shrimp docks to see the lower part of a torso. The defense asked him one thing that mattered: he had been in touch with Stephanie's mother on November 12, early in the investigation.

WATCH: FULL TESTIMONY (LIVE FRI OCT 30, 11:00 AM ET) Derek Nadeau: Full Testimony, the Tampa Officer Who Met the McKay Bay Callers at the Bridge WATCH: FULL TESTIMONY (LIVE FRI OCT 30, 1:00 PM ET) Jacob Wheeland: Full Testimony, the Tampa Homicide Detective at Both McKay Bay Recoveries

On Wednesday morning, Vincent Leto, a retired Tampa sergeant, walked the jury through November 12 on his body camera, silently, a few seconds at a time: binoculars on the shore, a walk across one barge to a red one, a thumbs-up to his sergeant, and a camera held out over the water. That was the second leg, at about noon. Within the hour came the lower part of her torso at the end of a dock by the shrimp docks, and at about three, her organs, caught in the rocks of a shoreline inside the port. Ms. Dunker's cross took about a minute. He documented three recoveries that day? Yes. All in the same water? Yes. She sat down. Half an hour of silent video, and the defense told the jury in four questions what it amounted to: an officer who found remains, and nothing about who put them there.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 7 Retired Tampa Sergeant Walks Kessler's McKay Bay Jury Through Three Recoveries in One Day / Pt 7 WATCH: THE CLIP Tampa Officer Flashes a Thumbs-Up From the McKay Bay Barge After Finding the Floating Remains WATCH: THE CLIP Tampa Officer Testifies He Saw Something by the McKay Bay Barge but Couldn't Tell What It Was

Then the commander of the Tampa police dive team, and the State spent ten minutes making him an authority on that water before it asked him a single question about this case. The night of November 11, homicide asked for the channel under the bridge to be searched, right then, in the dark. His divers went in at nine and came out at 11:30, working a weighted line fender to fender in two feet of visibility, by feel where they could not see, so thorough, he said, that "we see that soda can three times before we get past it." Was anything found? "No." And then, a beat later: "not underwater."

What they found was floating, before the dive began: a blue plastic tub, upside down, south of the bridge. The next morning sonar over McKay Bay found an old piling. Then the second leg, the lower torso and the organs, and then days of searching that turned up nothing. On November 16, two cadaver dogs borrowed from Pasco County. One of them, Diesel, alerted at a little cove of rocks and mangroves beside the port's ship berths, and the divers swam in with a sealed body bag to recover the upper part of her torso, with a bra on it, out of place. Thirty feet up in the mangroves, above the tide line, they found her right arm and hand. His read was that an animal, on land, had carried it there.

WATCH: THE CLIP (LIVE FRI OCT 30, 12:40 PM ET) Dive Commander Tells Kessler's McKay Bay Jury a Human Leg Was Already Recovered When He Arrived WATCH: THE CLIP (LIVE FRI OCT 30, 2:40 PM ET) Dive Commander Tells Kessler's McKay Bay Jury a Cadaver Dog Led Divers to the Torso and the Arm

Remember the State's opening: a cut across the palm, a classic defensive wound. If an animal had that hand in the mangroves for days, the medical examiner is going to be asked on Monday what is a wound and what is not.

Then the State put three things on the record itself, because it knew the defense would. The pink tub found in the McKay Bay mangroves on November 17 had a piece of duct tape in it when the divers recovered it. On the ride back to the marina, the tape blew out of the tub. They stopped and looked for it and never found it. A piece of duct tape is exactly the kind of thing that carries fingerprints and DNA, and it is gone. When that tub was tested six days later under an alternate light source and with a presumptive blood test, both came back negative. And the commander's own chart had two labels swapped, the organs and the arm, and he corrected it on the stand before anyone else could. I give the State credit for bringing all of that out in its own case. I also think the lost tape belongs on the list of things this jury should have had and does not.

Then December 10, a month after the remains began to surface. Homicide sent the divers back under the same bridge, into the same channel they had cleared on the first night, this time working from the center span west. The bottom gave something back. A gray Hurley hoodie with a cut in it. A pair of gardening gloves, one with red on it ("we don't know what the red was"), the two within eight feet of each other. A black plastic tube. A rag with barnacles growing on it. And in the pocket of that hoodie, thirty-two cents and a Chime debit card with the name Stephanie Crone on it.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 8 Dive Sergeant Tells Kessler's McKay Bay Jury a Hoodie Under the Bridge Held the Victim's Card / Pt 8 WATCH: THE CLIP Dive Commander Tells McKay Bay Jury the Hoodie Divers Found Held a Card With Stephanie's Name

That card does real work for the State. It makes the 22nd Street Causeway the place, instead of a spot a fisherman pointed at. It is under the very span where Castro says he watched the bins go over. What it does not do is put a name on the man on the span: nobody has yet said whose hoodie it is. And the commander handed the defense a question it has not asked. The most thorough search his team could run, in that same channel, on November 11, found nothing. A month later a hoodie, two gloves and a tube were lying in it. Either the water moved them in, or the divers missed them in two feet of visibility, or they went in after the 11th. He told the jury why he searched again: "the maritime environment is constantly changing." Where something sits in that water a month later tells you very little about when it went in, and the State's own witness said so.

On Thursday the second crime scene technician, the one who met the boat at the marina that day, opened each of those packages in front of the jury. The gloves had been turned inside out since the photographs. None of them had been swabbed or tested for anything when she collected them. The hoodie carried a label from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab, the first word in three days that anything from the water went to the state lab at all. What the lab found is for a witness the jury has not heard yet.

WATCH: FULL TESTIMONY (LIVE SAT OCT 31, 11:00 AM ET) Vincent Leto: Full Testimony, Three McKay Bay Recoveries on His Body Camera

Her car on Bearss Avenue

Kessler told detectives on November 14 that Stephanie had simply left. Her car did not. The State's opening said it sat at his house that Friday and Saturday, and that on Sunday, November 7, he drove it a short way down Bearss Avenue and left it at the far end of a Save-A-Lot lot.

WATCH: THE CLIP Prosecutor Says Robert Kessler Told McKay Bay Detectives She Left but Her Blood Was in His Kitchen

Detective Chris Celaya pulled the video from a Pep Boys across the street. At about 3:27 that Sunday afternoon by the real clock, a car pulls into the lot. Somebody gets out, goes to the trunk, and two and a half minutes later walks off east, toward Livingston, which is the direction of Kessler's house as the State tells it. The video is so dark and so far away that the judge stopped the testimony because he could not tell which car the witness meant; the jurors' screen, it turned out, was darker than the lawyers'. Ms. Dunker asked one question: even after clearing that video up, it is very difficult to make out the features of the person getting out of the car, isn't it? "Correct." That is the State's own witness agreeing with what the State's opening conceded. You cannot see who left Stephanie's car.

On Thursday the jury saw the inside of that car, a silver Elantra with Pennsylvania tags, through the crime scene technician who processed it at the impound lot on November 16. It looked like a life packed up: a laundry basket on the front seat, a tub of clothes and shoes in the back, a purse, wipes in the console. Between the passenger seat and the door was a partly burned cigarette. That is the cigarette Stephanie's mother was asked about on Day 1.

Then the Bluestar, a chemical sprayed in low light that glows pale blue where there is blood, including blood that has been cleaned up. The jury watched the car glow, panel by panel: a few specks at the rear passenger door, more along the hood and above the headlights, reactions low on the trunk liner and the edge of the bumper. Nothing on the steering column, the dashboard, the console or the pedals.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 11 Crime Scene Tech Shows Kessler's McKay Bay Jury Where Bluestar Lit Up a Silver Elantra / Pt 11

The cross on this was the best work Ms. Dunker has done in three days, and it is worth understanding. When Bluestar lights up, does the technician know it is blood? No. Common cleaning agents react. Some metals react. The outside of a car, its hood and its headlights, is where road grime and bugs and metal live. She has a second test available at the scene, a presumptive test for mammal blood, and the two places on that car with a visible reddish mark, outside and inside the rear passenger door, she never ran it on. She swabbed them both for the lab. Why not test them there? She was not directed to. She works under the lead detective's direction, and he decides what she tests and what goes to the state lab. Always.

And then the tool. In the trunk of Stephanie's own car was a cordless circular saw with an oxidized blade and some writing on it. In a case about a body cut apart, the jury noticed. The State had the technician photograph its serial number and the writing, and then asked her only whether she saw anything red on it. She did not, and nothing came up from the Bluestar either. It was collected and kept, available for testing if anyone wanted it tested. Nobody has told this jury whether anybody did. A pair of bolt cutters from the back seat got a presumptive test at the detective's direction, and it came back negative, and the State made a point of that on redirect.

So here is the question I would ask about the car. The same detective who decides what is tested decided to test the bolt cutters and not to test the two visible reddish marks or the saw. Maybe there are good reasons; small samples get saved for the lab rather than used up in the field. But the jury has now seen a hundred and thirty-nine photographs of a car glowing in places that may or may not be blood, and has not been told what a single swab from it showed. If the lab comes back on those swabs, fine. If it does not, those glowing photographs are going to sit in the jury room doing work that the evidence has not done.

Behind a children's gym, and a phone in a drawer

The single most direct piece of evidence against Robert Kessler himself, so far, came on Wednesday afternoon from a plainclothes officer, Corporal Neal Pelletier.

On November 19, 2021, his squad had Kessler under surveillance from two in the afternoon. At about ten to seven Kessler drove out in an old blue Dodge minivan with the girl in the front seat, to Angels Gymnastics in a strip plaza on US 41. Pelletier parked behind the plaza. He drove past the dumpster behind the gym going south and again coming back. Nothing was on the ground beside it either time. Then the radio: Kessler moving. The van turned into the back lot and passed him slowly, Kessler driving, the dog in the passenger seat, nobody else. It stopped at the dumpster. Through binoculars Pelletier saw the brake lights, saw Kessler walk around the front of the van to the passenger side, take something out, come back around, and drive on. He could not see what it was. When Kessler was confirmed parked out front again, Pelletier drove down the same road, and in front of the dumpster was a rolled-up section of carpet that had not been there before. Beige, "soiled," with white staining and something pink. Inside it, two sandals. One looked like a child's.

WATCH: THE CLIP (LIVE FRI OCT 30, 10:40 AM ET) Officer Tailing Kessler Tells McKay Bay Jury He Unrolled a Carpet by the Dumpster and Found Sandals

The defense went at the one real gap: Pelletier did not see the carpet come out of the van, his view of the front was partly blocked, and he unrolled it himself before crime scene arrived. His answer was that he needed to know whether it was evidence or trash, that he wore gloves and changed them every time he touched it, and that he rolled it back along its own fold. That is an honest officer. The gap is real, and it is small. Under surveillance, alone, Kessler is the only person at that dumpster, and a carpet appears in the window he was there.

On Thursday the jury heard what happened at the house that night, from Sergeant Wendy Brevi, who was the corporal who walked up to the van when Kessler pulled into his driveway. And for the first time in this trial, the jury heard Robert Kessler's voice. On her body camera he hands over one phone, says a second one is the girl's, and then tells her where the phone in the warrant is: he switched phones about two weeks earlier, because the SIM card tray on the Samsung was broken, and the Samsung was inside, in the very back bedroom, on the nightstand, charging.

WATCH: THE CLIP Officer Tells Kessler's McKay Bay Jury He Handed Her an iPhone and Said He Switched Phones

Two weeks before November 19 is the first week of November. Nobody in court said that out loud. The State did not need to.

That answer got the police into the house, on a warrant to find one phone. Officers went in behind the crime scene technician, Kerrie Lyn Calderaro, who photographed every step. On the nightstand were a phone and a tablet, and neither was the Samsung. But on the floor, under a table by the corner of a cabinet, Brevi saw a shoe, and it looked to her like the mate of one of the sandals in the carpet, from the photographs Pelletier had texted the whole squad an hour or two earlier. And on the way back out, Calderaro put her flashlight on a spot low on the kitchen cabinet that she had noticed in her very first photograph from the doorway. In thirteen years she had seen dried blood on surfaces like that many times. Did she suspect it was blood? Yes. Did it look like anything else? "Not from what I can tell." Their sergeant had them stop, step out, and wait. A warrant for the whole house followed at about 2:20 in the morning, and in that search, the Samsung turned up in a drawer inside the same nightstand.

WATCH: THE CLIP Tampa Officer Tells McKay Bay Jury the Shoe Under Kessler's Table Matched the One by the Rug WATCH: THE CLIP McKay Bay Crime Scene Tech Says the Stain on Robert Kessler's Kitchen Cabinet Looked Like Blood WATCH: THE CLIP (LIVE SAT OCT 31, 4:40 PM ET) Kessler's McKay Bay Jury Watches Police Check a Nightstand Phone's Serial Number

That sequence is where the legal fight is, and the jury mostly will not know it. Before the jury came in Thursday morning, Ms. Dunker objected to the photographs from that first entry, to preserve the motion to suppress the court had already denied before trial. Her ground is scope: a warrant to find one phone on one nightstand lets officers go where a phone could be and stay as long as it takes to look, and she says they went into a separate bedroom and stayed long enough to look well past that. The State's answer is plain view. Officers lawfully inside may notice what is openly visible, and the sergeant pulling everyone out to get a broader warrant is what careful officers do. The State also has a strong second answer: the carpet came from the surveillance, not the house. Overruled. The photographs came in.

The defense built one more record through Brevi's cross: at least seven armed officers on the property, flashlights on him as he pulled in, homicide detectives on the way, his van sealed and towed, and Kessler kept out of his own house for hours. The State's position, through the same witness, was that he was not in custody and was "free to leave." Free to leave, but not to go home. That is the record for an argument that the driveway statements were made by a man who was not free in any sense a reasonable person would recognize. No objection was made when those statements came in. Whether it was fought before trial is not in our record. It is in front of this jury now.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 10 Tampa Police Tell Kessler's McKay Bay Jury the Phone Search Turned Up a Shoe and a Stain / Pt 10

Three layers of carpet and a hole in the floor

A week after that night, on November 26, the second crime scene technician went back to the house to process one room, the southeast bedroom that Kessler and the girl shared. When detectives carried the two nightstands out into the living room, there was a red substance on their sides and bottoms, and one spot on the side of the cabinet hidden behind the top drawer, a place you would only see with the drawer pulled out. Nothing like it on the white drawer fronts, the part of a nightstand anyone would wipe. That nightstand is the one Kessler sent the officers to.

Then they took the floor apart. Under the gray carpet was a second carpet, darker brown, with pieces cut out of it. Under that was a third, lighter tan. Under the carpets and some loose planks and particle board was a square hole in the floor that the planks had been covering. The technician could not say what it was for. Outside the bedroom door, a metal transition strip with what she believed was red on it. On a table between the living room and the kitchen, a stain that turned the presumptive test pink, the first positive blood test from inside that house the jury has heard. A bed rail, out of the room by then, with three spots of brownish-red. Everything swabbed was packaged for the lab. None of the swabs from that bedroom was tested at the scene.

Here is the promise-against-delivery ledger on the house, as it stands Thursday night. In opening, the State told the jury about Stephanie's blood and DNA at the base of the kitchen counter, in the hallway, on a mattress topper with a section cut out of it, on shoes by the back door, and as spatter on a nightstand. Three days in, the jury has heard a technician say a stain looked like blood, one presumptive test turn pink on a table, and a long list of swabs that went to a lab. It has not heard a single result. The State says its DNA analyst testifies Monday, after the medical examiner. Until then, every stain in that house is a promise.

The girl from the trailer

On Thursday afternoon, the jury met the child.

She is twelve now and in the seventh grade. In 2021 she was seven, living with Kessler, going by his last name. She is not his daughter. He has had her since birth without ever formally adopting her; the judge himself said he had believed she was Kessler's daughter until days before, because that is what the officers called her. Her face was not shown and her name was muted, and we will never print it. Her mother was flying out with her that afternoon, which is why she went before the medical examiner.

She described the house the way a child remembers a home, by its colors. The kitchen walls were blue. Her room was pink. The room Stephanie slept in was purple. Robert's room was the back bedroom, the one with the nightstand, and she sometimes slept there "because I was scared to sleep a lot." Stephanie stayed with them a couple of weeks because she had nowhere else to go. Blonde, a skinny face, blue eyes, eyeliner. They met her at a McDonald's.

The last time she saw Stephanie was a Friday night, she said, free gym at the gymnastics place. Robert took her, and they left early. He told her why: he had talked to Stephanie, and Stephanie "was demanding for something," and if they did not give it to her she was going to burn their stuff down. So they went straight home. He would not let her go in the house. She stayed in the car, and from the car she heard yelling inside, she thought from the purple room. A man or a woman? "I think it was both." After a while he came out alone and took her in, straight to his room, and told her Stephanie was sleeping. She watched TV and did not leave the room. She never saw Stephanie again.

The next morning, she said, "It just smelled different." Robert told her Stephanie had left with her boyfriend. She did not know Stephanie to have a boyfriend. When they walked out that morning, Stephanie's car was still in the yard. After that she was not allowed in the purple room, and he took everything out of it: the bedding, the sheets, the bed, the frame, all the furniture. About two weeks later, the last time she saw him, he told her he loved her and that he had to turn himself in. He gave her her phone, her AirPods and her blanket, and left her with a friend.

The defense cross was kind and short, as it had to be. When Robert came out of the house, did she see anything on him that looked like blood? "I don't know." Anything out of place inside? She went straight to his room; she did not notice. The defense asked whether the cats might have peed on the mattress in that room, which would be an innocent reason to throw a mattress out. "I don't think so," she said.

Now, what the jury did not hear, and why. Before she testified, the judge asked the question every judge asks before a child takes the stand: is there anything she might say that this jury cannot hear? There was. Before trial, the court granted a defense motion to keep out any evidence about Kessler and drugs, and the State told the judge the girl may have seen or overheard Stephanie asking for drugs, or seen Kessler with them. Both sides had already talked to her so she could answer truthfully without going there. So when the jury heard that Stephanie "was demanding for something," the something was deliberately left blank, by agreement, under a ruling the defense itself asked for.

I want to be careful here, because the ruling may well have been right. Evidence about a defendant and drugs can do a lot of damage that has nothing to do with the charge. But look at what it leaves this jury with. On the most important night in this case, the only witness to what happened in that house before the yelling started tells them Stephanie was demanding something and threatening to burn their belongings, and they are not allowed to know what she wanted. Whatever the full story is, twelve people are going to weigh a threat with its reason taken out.

And here is why I think this testimony is the most important of the three days, for both sides at once. For the State, it is the strongest evidence yet on the identity of the person who killed her: it puts Kessler and Stephanie alone in that house that night, yelling, after which nobody ever saw her alive. It catches him in two false explanations: that Stephanie was sleeping, that night, and that she had left with her boyfriend, the next morning, while her car sat in the yard. It has him stripping her room. And it has a man telling a child he had to turn himself in. The jury is going to hear that last sentence as a confession, whatever it was.

For the defense, the same testimony is the best evidence it has on Count 1. The State's own witness has described an argument: a threat, a demand, a man and a woman yelling. That is the picture of a fight, which is the road to second-degree murder or manslaughter, not a plan formed in advance. The State will say that leaving gymnastics early and keeping the child in the car shows he had decided what he was going to do before he walked in. The defense will say a man kept a seven-year-old away from a screaming match. Both are inferences. The child cannot tell you which, because she was in the car.

Where the counts stand after three days

So let me take a position, as my opinion, measured against the record and only the record.

On Count 2, abuse of a dead body, I think the State has built a case this jury can find beyond a reasonable doubt, and the defense has barely contested it. Her remains came out of that bay in pieces over six days. Her debit card was on the bottom of the channel under the span where a man in a canoe watched bins go over the rail beside a Dodge Caravan. A Dodge Caravan was in Kessler's yard three days after the first leg surfaced. Her car was still at his house the morning after, by the child's account, and the next afternoon a figure walked away from it in a parking lot, toward his street. A stained carpet appeared at a dumpster where only he had stopped, with a sandal whose mate was on his floor. The girl says he emptied the room Stephanie slept in. The single-photograph identifications are weak, and I have said why, but the State does not need them to stand alone, and the defense is not asking them to.

On Count 1, first-degree premeditated murder, the State has proved one of three elements so far. Stephanie Crone-Overholts is dead; nobody disputes it. Whether her death was caused by Robert Kessler's criminal act, the child's account of that night is now the State's strongest evidence, and it is strong. Whether it was premeditated, the jury has heard, after three days, almost nothing at all. It has heard a prosecutor describe four stab wounds and a cut palm in an opening, which is not evidence. Everything else the State has presented is what somebody did after a death: the bay, the car, the carpet, the stripped room, the story about a boyfriend. Florida lets a jury consider that conduct as evidence of a guilty mind. It does not let a jury treat it as proof that the decision to kill came first. The only eyewitness to that night has described a fight.

That means Count 1 rests almost entirely on one witness, Dr. Ashley Perkins, on Monday morning. If she can put those stab wounds on the parts that were recovered, and say what they mean about how long and how deliberate the attack was, the State has an argument for premeditation and the jury will hear it. If she cannot, because the head, the upper neck and the left arm were never found, then the State is asking twelve people to find the decision to kill from what was done to her body afterward. And that is the inference the law says they cannot make by itself.

The State told this jury in its very first minutes that "you will not know the full extent of her injuries." I believe that is the most important sentence spoken in this trial so far. It was meant as an accusation against the man who hid her. It is also an admission of exactly what the State cannot show.

And the jury that will decide it is the same jury that, on the first morning, before any evidence, was talking about whether the man in the empty chair was faking.

What Friday and Monday have to answer

Court is back Friday at nine, with Kessler asked again by video from the jail. The State says Friday is for its remaining officers and technicians, and the man the State's opening named as its cell phone expert, who is supposed to put Kessler's phone on the causeway on that Sunday morning. Listen for whether that testimony stays as careful as the opening was, a phone "utilizing a tower right next to that residence," or grows into something more precise than cell records can be. Listen for whether the lead detective comes back with the recording of Kessler's November 14 interview, the one the State says shows his story sliding from seeing her that Friday to not seeing her that day at all. And listen for whether anyone ever tells this jury what was written on that saw.

Monday, the medical examiner, then the State's DNA analyst. The judge has told the jurors the goal is closing arguments Tuesday, which is Election Day, and he has promised them time to vote.

Whoever did this took a woman who had come down from Pennsylvania with almost nothing, and took her apart, and put her in the bay in bins and bags. Her mother sat through all of it. Her son was in the courtroom on the first day. None of that excuses a trial that is anything less than fair to the man accused of it, and none of it relieves the State of a single element. The State has proved a great deal about what happened after Stephanie died. On Monday it has to start proving what happened before.

WATCH: NO BREAKS, DAY 1 McKay Bay Trial Day 1, No Breaks Edition: Juror Removed, Mistrial Denied WATCH: NO BREAKS, DAY 2 McKay Bay Trial Day 2, No Breaks Edition: The Bridge Eyewitness Testifies WATCH: TOP MOMENTS, DAY 1 McKay Bay: Kessler Trial Day 1 Top Moments / Absent Defendant, Eyewitness, Juror Removed WATCH: TOP MOMENTS, DAY 2 McKay Bay: Kessler Trial Day 2 Top Moments / A Barge, a Bridge and a Rolled-Up Carpet

If you want the whole of it in order, every Case Story Part from this trial is in the McKay Bay Case Story playlist, and the No Breaks editions above are the full days with nothing cut but the breaks. Watch the process. Tell me in the comments where you think the State stands on Count 1.