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This is The Interrogation Tapes, a special limited-run series produced by ABC News Studios in partnership with 2020. I'm Debra Roberts, co-anchor of 2020. We've arrived at episode five, Mystery on the Hudson. When a man dies in a kayaking accident, was it an accidental drowning or something more sinister? Take a listen. I was sitting in the barracks. I was working.
I was assigned to State Police Montgomery Barracks. I believe it was a 3 to 11 shift p.m. And we monitor all the fire rescue calls that come out. I heard a call come over for a missing kayaker. And I went out to the call just to see if I can get a hand with the search efforts.
and they said that there was two kayakers, a female and a male, and the male had gone missing after he had tipped over in his kayak. The female was transported to the local hospital in the area because she had herself fallen into the Hudson River. All right, so we'll talk about what we discussed up there. Let me just, obviously, tell Jeremy to get right to the knife. Get right to it, Sam. Anything you say.
The goals of an interrogation is very simple. We want to get to the truth. You can see Angelica Graswald doing yoga poses in the nearly 12-hour questioning. I've never seen...
somebody who just watched their fiancé drown, just doing yoga and just appearing so carefree. Once you go into that interview room, the important thing is that you, as an investigator, have all of the information readily available. He pushed you to do
The end goal of any interrogation is really to get admissions and confessions. But it's really to build the case using all the information that's been collected.
This is very much a life-altering moment. I've been honest with you about everything that happened. You are feeling that pressure. The only way that we can help you is if you are cooperating with us. If investigators are going to learn the truth, they're going to have to do it inside the interrogation room.
My name is Dr. Sujita Bhatt, and my PhD is in behavioral neuroscience. But I was funded by the intelligence community to study deception and neuroimaging. So we're looking at what parts of the brain are active when people lie to come up with a new lie detector. My name is Jose Granado, and I'm a retired division captain with the City of Miami Gardens, supervising several major investigations and interviews.
My name is Ryan Smith. In my work as a journalist for ABC News, I have looked at, analyzed, interviewed people from hundreds of cases. One gathers evidence in several ways. You have the physical evidence, which is on the crime scene. Then you have the electronic evidence that you gather through phones, computers, and things of that nature.
A key piece of evidence is definitely verbal because that is the most real. That's the one that someone is actually telling you what's going on, what they saw or what they heard. Describe your relationship. I don't know, it's good. A little difficult, but... Is there a trend? You're good. You're good. Yeah.
I grew up in Latvia. It's a very small country, size of Maryland. I was 20 when I came to the States and I came as a nanny just for an opportunity to learn the language, to make some money, to see something new. Angelika had some marriages before. She had been married twice and divorced twice. After Angelika's second divorce, she ended up meeting Vincent Viafort and five months after they met, they were engaged.
We had a lot in common. He was just like me, very open, friendly, risk-taker. He was adventurous. He liked living on the edge. He loved trying new things. He was great with people. He's the guy who was the life of the party. He had these dance moves that everybody would get around him and cheer him on. Eleven months after they met, Angelika was already taking Vincent to meet her family in Latvia.
I waited 15 years to bring somebody home, but I knew he was a good fit. And that's when everybody got it. He's the one. I talked to her mom and her family. They kind of feel him like their son. They loved him. They said he's one of ours. He just fit in. In the beginning, he was very happy. He proposed to her. We were going to go to my country and get married on the Baltic Sea. Angelica and Vince had this love for the outdoors.
Anything that got them outside kept them together. Boating, kayaking, canoeing. He loved it. He was out all the time whenever he could. It's nice to be out on the water and so low in a kayak without a motor. Overall, it's very peaceful. It depends on where you go. One of their favorite places to go was the Hudson River, which at many points is over a mile wide and snakes about 315 miles from the peaks of the Adirondacks all the way down to the New York Harbor.
Just before you reach the New York Harbor, there's an island called Bannerman's Island. And Angelica was drawn to it. April 19, 2015, Vince and Angelica decided to go kayaking. Vince packed up the top of the car, and off they went. The plan for the day was to drive to Plum Point Park and then take off on their kayaks from there and then head up to Bannerman's Island. We were talking about going Saturday or Sunday. We looked at the weather. Sunday looked better. It seemed nice for April.
That's why we wanted to go, because it was quiet, nobody else was there. The weather just made for a dramatic backdrop. Clouds will be increasing later this afternoon into tonight, and then showers develop before dawn. From my deck here, I noticed that the water conditions were not too bad, but as the evening progressed, maybe a half hour, 45 minutes later, the water seemed to be getting choppy. The water reaching temperatures as low as 40 degrees, and only Angelica brought a life vest.
We are kayaking. My fiance flips over. He's in the water right now. Can you see the kayak still? No, the kayak went underwater. Okay. Oh, my God. We've got a boat in the water already heading down to you, okay? Okay. The water is very cold. I'm afraid he... All right, stay on the phone with me, okay? I can't get to him. It's very windy and the waves are coming in.
My son-in-law called me and told me to come over the house that there'd been an accident. Then he went into the water and they haven't been able to find him. At this point, we were investigating a missing person essentially and that type of investigation would fall under my duties.
DeCordo was the first investigator on the scene. Angelica wasn't there, she was at the hospital. So he leaves the scene and goes to see her at the hospital. She had told me that they had went out kayaking from Plum Point. They made it out to Bannerman's Island fine. They spent some time there and then on the way back, as she said, is when the winds picked up and the water became rough. We spoke to Vincent's family members, friends, and just to answer any questions anyone may have had.
We checked local hospitals. We didn't know if he may have made it to shore and he was injured and somebody brought him to a hospital. We just ran down leads and just tried to tighten up some ends just to make sure that there wasn't any activity that we were missing. We did locate his kayak, which was washed up along shore near Plum Point. It changes your whole world. And of course you hope he made it to shore or he was unconscious somewhere and
I had amnesia, didn't know where he was. After several days of not locating him, we didn't have great hope that he was alive at that point. Woo! Yay! Good job! Angelica's behavior in the days after the incident was just strange. She had all these Facebook posts where she's sort of lighthearted, doing cartwheels. It is not the kind of behavior that you would expect from someone who just may have lost their fiancé.
I thought it was very strange. They said, "We're out here searching for him, and she's out partying. And it looks like she's having a great time, like not concerned at all." That was her way to keep her mind on something different, not on the thought that he's not going to come home. She was living life like he's going to come. He's somewhere. They're going to find him, and they will be together again.
Her behavior changed the way I was thinking because I wanted to find out about what she was thinking, why she just seemed so carefree. I had spoken to my boss at that time and I said, "I want to talk to her because this doesn't look right."
I told Angelica that the next day, myself and a crew were going to be going out to conduct a search of Bannerman's Island. And she said, "Okay." She goes, "Maybe I will see you out there." She says, "I'm going to be at Plum Point doing a release of flowers in memory of Vinny." I wanted to float a reef of flowers for him. She had met us at the dock. We asked her to retrace her steps with Vincent. She had brought us up here.
She had asked if she can speak to me in private, and we had walked back over to this concrete cylinder where we both had a seat. And I asked her, "How does his kayak fill up with water but yours doesn't?" And she got quiet. She put her head down, and then she lifts her head up, and she says, "The plug wasn't in its kayak."
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So I was speaking to Angelica on the island and she told me that the plug wasn't in his kayak. At that point, it started all making sense how one person's kayak could take on water while another person's doesn't. She asked if she could smoke a cigarette. I said, "Absolutely." I said, "But what we're gonna have to do is we're gonna have to go back to the barracks now and sit in the interview room. We're gonna have to discuss what we just talked about up here at length."
This case just went from a missing persons case to a possible homicide. The goals of an interrogation is very simple. We want to get to the truth. As an investigator, you want to be able to find out what happened. All right, so we'll talk about what we discussed up there. Let me just, obviously, go there and read you your rights.
And so one tries to extract that information by several means. My main goal at this point is to get her to admit and repeat what she had just told me on the island. I will. You're right, it was important.
They told me it was going to be like a therapy session. They wanted to finish writing their reports and close the case.
I thought that meant that they're trying to help me and I can open up. And I didn't need a lawyer. I think most people don't realize that 80, anywhere from 80 to 95 percent of people will waive their Miranda rights. Innocent people do it for one reason and guilty people do it for another reason. She moves her seat closer to the investigator.
I don't think I've ever seen that in an interrogation before. She seems to really be connected to him. I think it's probably starting from whatever conversation they had before. Yeah. You know, the fact that he alludes to this therapeutic outcome of their discussion of the conversation. And so I think in this case, he's built a good rapport with her. And that's what an investigator is supposed to do in these cases. Yeah. With any interrogation, there's ways that a room might be set up.
People will tend to stare at the door because they don't want to be in there. If they're facing away from the door, they're focused more on you. So that's how we had her sitting in there and I sat facing the door. To start off the interview, we began speaking about Vincent, their life, their relationship.
On the surface, Vince and Angelica seemed to have this fairytale relationship. But behind the scenes, it was a lot more complicated. How do you think you're going to go to school?
- - - - - -
And you let him know that? Your relationship over the past year and a half, is it safe to say that it took a toll on you? It was a lot of shots.
It sounds like she's already spoken to him a little bit in the car or, you know, earlier about some of the issues they were having. And so for, he uses that as an opportunity to say, "You know what? Let's just talk about it." It's amazing how she was very quick into divulging the threesomes and the porn. She's already divulged something that not everybody really wants to throw out there and say. So it's making him feel like he's gained her trust.
And that's good at that moment. During the course of that interview, he puts his hand on her knees. It's a tactic that can work, but you never want that to be played out and maybe made an issue when it really isn't. It's a better film that's entirely about the child movement.
The funny thing is that he was in a T-shirt, jeans, so he was kind of relaxed, kind of putting her relaxed, whether that was on purpose or not, but it worked its magic. He pushed me. He pushed you to do... I can't have been. What was... You would say this is extreme. He would not give me the perfect when I needed it, ever. He was constantly stuck in...
Now that DeCordo knows just how troubled the relationship was between Angelica and Vince, he now has something he didn't have when all this started. A possible motive. ♪♪
And maybe a few what not to do's from our favorite fictional moms.
from Good Morning America and ABC Audio. Pop Culture Moms. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Progressive. Are you driving your car or doing laundry right now? Podcasts go best when they're bundled with another activity, like Progressive Home and Auto Policies. They're best when bundled too. Having these two policies together makes insurance easier and could help you save. Customers who save by switching their home and car insurance to Progressive save over $775 on average.
Did you want him gone? I did. Paul wanted to be held. He shall die. He shall die. I tried to...
yeah it was just like you loving that i told him to change the way it helped they wanted to just run or they wanted to actually give her a person he pushed it to a point where you don't think that this was the only way to say apparently is that right so when you watched him in the war will the party you'll be saying my worries are going away now
At this point, DeCordo's built rapport with Angelica, and he's got a possible motive for murder. So now he's starting to zero in on what happened to Vince. So I said, we're going to start off from the very beginning, and we want to go through everything with you. Talk myths are really, really important in any investigation.
It gives you the idea of whether or not this was premeditated. If it was, you know, an accidental kind of thing. Tell me again everything that happened. Everything that you smelled, everything you touched, everything you felt, because we can code memories of all our senses. The belief is that if their story changes,
considerably that they're lying. The telling of the timeline once, you'll get some information. The second time they tell the timeline, you might actually get some deviations because they'll make corrections to their accounts. Yeah, I know.
So it's really important to kind of get that richness of memory by soliciting multiple free narratives. And she pulled forward and said, "Babe, I'm going to bring you a venture in the lifetime." It started really getting bad at that point. That's when I kind of started to think that this was serious. And I knew if you had no practice in reading, I had to do that. Maybe I had to do it.
Why would he hand it to you if he needed that?
As the interrogation moves forward, DeCordo keeps returning to the kayak plug. Did you intentionally take that plug out because it might have been an escape? Go for you, so you could set yourself free and not feel pleased anymore. Because...
I think the plug, as an investigator, you focus on certain elements of a case, pieces of evidence that suggest maybe it's here where it all started. Did you take these items out because you knew that it was... Did you? I guess, yeah. Well, I didn't want to hurt him, but I also wanted to keep his life.
For DeCordo, that kayak plug is the murder weapon. We discussed when we were talking on Bannerman's Island, you remember?
DeCordo reminds Angelica of what she supposedly said to him in that conversation earlier in the day. I asked you, what actions do you think contributed? And do you remember what you told me? You said, by taking the flog out of the kayak and taking the wall away. The paddle, if you know. Does that sound fresh? Yeah, but I didn't even panic. Some panic happened in my life. What was my condition? Came together. Yeah, that makes sense.
- Rasswald and her fiance were kayaking in the Hudson River when she claims both capsized in choppy water. She was wearing a life jacket. 46-year-old Vincent Viafori was not. - Police found the two kayaked, but still haven't found his body. - Every day, the state police went out to search. They told me I could call anytime I had any questions, wanted to know what was going on through all of this.
So we're several hours into the interrogation, and DeCordo starts to feel like he's hitting a wall.
I leave, take a break, and while we were outside, I could see on the live feed that she's doing yoga and stretches and, again, all things that in my career I've never seen happen before. I've never seen somebody who just watched their fiancé drown just doing yoga and just appearing so carefree. What is she doing?
You know, when it's taken out of context, this looks really bizarre. But when you actually think about what she's been going through, this interview has gone on for a very long time. She's been sitting in this chair for a very long time. Based on some of her body movements, it seems like perhaps she's a little cold. So when you're cold, you tense up. There's all of this muscle tension, plus the stress from the interview. For her family, it doesn't seem weird at all.
A couple years ago, her very, very good friend passed away. And she wasn't crying. She came home, she took a guitar and she sang. That's the way how they survived their pain. I was exhausted. I was hungry. I was just out of it, you know? I was just doing some yoga, trying to stay awake. How are you doing? How's Matt? I'm good, and you?
DeQuarto now brings in his partner, Matt Skarkis. You know, there's so many things that you have to do as an investigator that you just cognitively can't do it. Nobody can. There comes a time when an investigator may think that they don't have enough to go over the top and get the answer that they want. So they'll normally bring in someone else. No cheap ones? One of them. He's one of them.
You know, frankly, at this point, it almost seems as if, you know, they're getting frustrated as well about the fact that we've gone over this, we're not getting this information from you, so now I'm going to start hammering you and get you to nail down, you know, the answer I'm looking for, really. By the time that the second investigator came in, that's maybe when it started to be like, wait a minute, what's going on here?
The plug, for whatever reason, that's what they honed on.
They focused on the plug being the piece of evidence that was the start of this event that caused him to die. The length of the interrogation really does have an impact on what tactics interrogators use. And so frustration builds and you might end up with a suspect that becomes more resistant because they're frustrated.
But you also end up potentially with investigators who become frustrated and use some more accusatorial kinds of approaches. The reality is you took that plug out because you wanted to kill him. You wanted him to be dead. While you're supposed to keep the plug in during use, the plug itself is not meant to stop the kayak from taking on water. In fact, according to the kayak manual, its purpose is to drain the water that comes in through the hull after use.
After over five hours of interviewing Angelica, investigators still can't get what they consider to be a definitive confession. I wasn't thinking clearly. How can you?
after being questioned back and forth, same questions all that time, after not sleeping well, after being just tired. I don't know how to explain it. By taking that plug out, you killed Denny, correct? We're now almost six hours into the interrogation, and they continue to focus on the plug. You know that that plug's not in there. You know what's going to happen when he gets on that water. Is there a normal sense of...
a little bit of excitement and anticipation that in a couple hours, in a few hours, I'm gonna be free. I'm gonna be unburdened. Well, they kept asking me the same questions like a hundred times. And I knew that I was innocent. I just told them what they wanted to hear. Yeah, it was at my breaking point. I just, I had it. By taking that plug out, you killed Benny, correct? And you wanted that to happen, correct?
And you feel happy and relieved that it happened, that he's dead. See, that wasn't all that hard. What's hard about it? You killed Vinny, right? No, I'm asking you the question. I want you to tell me the truth. What is the answer to that question? I didn't want him.
Angelica, what is the true answer to that question? What is it? I wanted him dead, and now he's gone. It's a normal thing. Whenever news breaks... We are here in Israel, a nation at war. In Rolling Fork, this tornado tore through this town. From Lewiston, Maine... The scene of a horrific mass shooting. From the scene of that deadly missile strike. ABC News Live everywhere. In Iceland. Let's go. On the 2024 campaign...
Here at 10 Downing Street. Wherever the story is. We're going to take you there. You're streaming. ABC News Live. ABC News Live. You're streaming. ABC News Live. ABC News Live. Streaming free everywhere.
Hi all, Kate Gibson here of The Bookcase with Kate and Charlie Gibson. This week we talked to Whoopi Goldberg about lots of things. But one of the things we talked to her about is how as a science fiction and graphic novel fan, she never saw herself on those screens or on those pages growing up. I mean, I didn't realize that part of me until I watched Star Trek. And I saw it because I love sci-fi.
And for some reason, it never occurred to me that I was missing until I was present. You're not going to want to miss this episode of The Bookcase from ABC News. I did it. All right. It happened. All right. He's dead. You're happy now. Those kind of words, those are things that are just suggestive. It's not something that is affirmative. You know, she's been in this interrogation room for a very long time. She's been sitting for a very long time.
It's the easiest way out. Like, "Okay, fine. I'll just agree with what you're saying." I was done. I had it. Just let me go. "Here's your statement. Can I go now?" I don't know how to explain it. I just gave them what they wanted. New York State Police at Montgomery and the Orange County District Attorney's Office announce the arrest of Angelica Griswold. My daughter came to the house with her husband and told me that she did it. She confessed.
I was just devastated. 34 days after Vincent disappeared into the Hudson, state troopers finally find his body.
But first here, the brand new development this morning in the case of a young woman accused of killing her fiancé while on a kayaking trip. Police have located the body of 46-year-old Vincent Viafor, near where he allegedly went missing in New York's Hudson River. You always hold on to some kind of hope, whether it's that they're going to find him alive somewhere or just to find him to bring him home, so you have some kind of closure.
When the medical examiner's office releases its report, Vince's death is declared to be a homicide caused by the removal of that drain plug.
Prosecutors charge ahead with Orange County, New York District Attorney David Hoover announcing that Angelica has been officially indicted. There are many reasons why he died. My client removing that drain plug was not one of them. This morning at about 10:40 a.m., an indictment was made public here in Orange County Court. The first count of the indictment is murder in the second degree. The second count is manslaughter in the second degree. So you can almost look at it like on a scale. Second degree murder.
Angelica intended to kill Vince, but it wasn't premeditated. It's not like she planned it out from months on end. In that moment, she did something that intentionally led to his death. Second-degree manslaughter is like she did something, maybe took the pin out, not really thinking, but was so reckless in her conduct that it showed a disregard for Vince's life and ended up leading to his death. What is it? I wanted him dead, and now he's gone. And I want you to know it.
I didn't kill him. I didn't. I just said I wanted him dead. Now he's gone. You're getting my statement out of me. Now he's gone, and I'm okay with it. Now can I leave? This was never an intentional act, and never in her wildest dreams did she ever imagine that her conduct would lead to his death. How do you believe...
New information today about a woman charged with the murder of her fiancé. Prosecutors in Orange County say Angelica Groswald tampered with her fiancé Vincent Fiafort's kayak. After pleading not guilty to the original charges and spending two years in jail awaiting trial, Angelica is offered a plea deal. One day, lawyers come over and they say, "You would have to plead guilty, go to prison."
for a little while, but there's a guarantee that you're getting out. Here's the risk, chance to go away for life. Here's the chance to get out. What do you want to do? The DA reduces the murder and manslaughter charges, instead allowing Angelica to plead guilty to criminally negligent homicide.
She faced life in prison. But this guilty plea to criminal negligence is essentially a get-out-of-jail-free card. It's kind of amazing that they would come out and
set forth this theory that pulling the plug, you know, was the work of like this cold calculated killer. The plug alone, without other factors, wouldn't have caused his death. Although our actions undoubtedly put in motion a chain of events which caused the victim's death, merely removing the plug alone, absent all of the other attendant facts and circumstances, would not have been sufficient to cause his death. The plea eliminated any chance whatsoever the defendant could escape
conviction by a jury acquitting her. The plea deal mandated that Angelique could be sentenced to one and a half to four years in prison. For some people, the plea deal, it was a proof of her guilt. For other people, it was like utter shock. I think about it, what, four years for taking someone's life? No way. For them, it was like, how can someone who had something to do with Vince's death get off like this?
If you are in someone's shoes in jail for that amount of time, knowing that you didn't deserve to be there, only then you can understand. If we went to trial for murder, there's no doubt in my mind that with all the evidence, she would have been convicted. So the interrogation was important because you get a sense of how Angelica was acting, her demeanor. Interrogation tapes can really affect how juries then see the interrogation happening.
You can always create a story around whatever story you want to spin. So when the public sees something and they themselves are saying, "That just doesn't sound or seem right," that if they only get a snippet, they only may get a snippet of something that was much greater. So if they only show one portion of it, that's all that the public sees, then the opinions vary. To me, she knows exactly why this happened. So for them to take a play, it was a win for them.
Angelica is so grateful to be here today. She's grateful for this day. She's excited to be able to reconnect with her family. So after serving over two and a half years behind bars, she was actually released for time served. It's still unnerving to be able to talk about it because I can't talk about it without tears. This case is really problematic
for the family's injustice in general. This is a woman that was very close to him, and the idea that she could have had something to do with his death, I think is even more traumatic to their family than the idea that he died in an accident. I don't know if she's a killer. Maybe that would be the term, but I feel she was responsible. I don't know if she planned it or what she actually did.
I don't know if I will ever know, but I believe something did happen. I'm sorry for the pain that they have gone through and they're still going through. I wish I could change that, but it's not in my power to change that. I wish he was still alive. I wish it was different. The Interrogation Tapes was produced by ABC News Studios in partnership with 2020. You can find the series on Hulu.
Next week, we'll bring you our final episode, Stranger Than Fiction, about a false confession and a long quest to find the real killer.
Hi all, Kate Gibson here of The Bookcase with Kate and Charlie Gibson. This week we talked to Whoopi Goldberg about lots of things. But one of the things we talked to her about is how as a science fiction and graphic novel fan, she never saw herself on those screens or on those pages growing up. I mean, I didn't realize that part of me until I watched Star Trek. And I saw it because I love sci-fi.
And for some reason, it never occurred to me that I was missing until I was present. You're not going to want to miss this episode of The Bookcase from ABC News.
