THE DAY SAMIRA DIED ~ February 22, 2014

When Dr. Frasch left his wife that morning, she was still in bed. He kissed her before leaving and they agreed that she would contact him later that day about joining him and the kids at their beach home in Panama City Beach. 

From there, it is easy to track what happened. Dr. Frasch first stopped by a Pep Boys to pick up a gas cap for his wife’s Hummer. This was recorded on the store’s security cameras. From there, cell phone records show that he drove straight from Tallahassee to Panama City Beach, a 3-hour drive. In Panama City Beach, he was seen on Bank of America security cameras with their two daughters. 

At the same time, back in Tallahassee, a neighbour and his daughter were passing by the Frasch home. Mr. Matthew Christiansen and Lauren Christiansen were out for a walk. Samira came out of the front door that morning, remote key in hand. She was heading for her Hummer SUT H2. Mr. Christiansen glanced at the scene and saw a tall, model-looking black woman put something into her vehicle and return to the house.

This straightforward testimony got reenacted by one particular salacious documentary as being a supposed mistress of the doctor’s who was lingering outside of the house. But the police investigation three years earlier had ruled out any such scenario. The gated community with its security footage allowed them to know who had entered and exited that day.

Just minutes before passing the Frasch home, the Christiansens had stopped to talk to another neighbour, Trip Frazee, who confirmed their story with the police. He said they had talked at 10:22 which fit with what Mr. Christiansen said, that they had passed by the Frasch home sometime between 10:25 and 10:45. 

Half an hour later, a 911 call came in from handyman, Gerald Gardner, saying that he had “found” a lady at the bottom of a pool. This vague phraseology belied the close relationship he had had with Samira Frasch. He had worked for her both inside and outside the house, doing all of her odd jobs. He had seen the inner workings of the family. He knew the ages of the children. 

And, over the years, he had been stealing from the garage, Dr. Frasch’s things. But recently, he had started stealing from inside the house, Samira’s things. 

At first Samira hadn’t wanted to believe it. But the evidence had said otherwise. And the day before she died she had noticed a particularly valuable item missing: a designer purse made especially for her by Roberto Cavalli who she had known and been close to since her modelling days. 

The first words out of Gardner’s mouth when Deputy Richard Womble arrived were, “he killed her, he did it” referring to her husband. But nothing about the scene suggested murder. It looked like an accidental drowning. There was no blood, no external injuries. The head wounds wouldn’t be discovered until the medical examiner did her autopsy the next day. 

Womble wanted to try to get Samira out of water but didn’t want to go into the pool himself because of all his gear. Why didn’t Gardner draw Womble’s attention to the lifesaving equipment around the pool, particularly the long extendable pole with a hook? He regularly cleaned the deck area and would have known about it.

And just as Womble finally located the pole which he was going to use to get the body out of the water, Gardner started telling him about how she had two small children. He drew Womble’s attention to an open door that he said was normally closed. At that point, Womble made the decision to go look inside for the children. 

No one seemed to consider that the most reasonable explanation for the normally locked door being open was that Samira had come through it to confront Gardner when he had suddenly appeared on her pool deck. 

And if he were innocent and genuinely concerned, why hadn’t Gardner just gone inside himself to look for the children? He regularly worked inside and the children were familiar with him. But he chose that moment to tell Womble about the children because he didn’t want Samira’s body pulled out of the water in case she was still alive and could identify him as the one who had struck her and put her in there. Being a large house, there were many rooms for Womble to go through in search of the children who weren’t there. 

When he came back out, Gardner then lied again and told him that Samira had called him at 9:30 pm the night before telling him she needed some work done around the house. But in the trial, a phone expert from the Leon County Sheriff’s office testified that Samira’s phone had been turned off shortly after 6 pm and had made no more phone calls. (Ironically, the last call she made was an accidental one to Gardner’s number at 6:11 but it only lasted 34 seconds and Gardner initially told an official he had only heard noise in the background, the sound of children. Later he would change his story and say that was the phone call from Samira asking him to come over and work the next day.) 

Samira had been in the water for less than half an hour. Mr. Christiansen and his daughter had seen her alive and in her driveway sometime between 10:25 am and 10:45 am. And the 911 call that she was in the pool had come in at 11. Her fingers and toes showed no signs of pruning.

Everything points to Gardner being the last person who saw her alive that day.

He assured the 911 operator that Samira was definitely dead. How could he have known? From where he was standing there would have been no way of knowing how long she had been in the water. She was at the bottom of the deep end when the operator asked him if he could jump in and try to get her out and he had refused, not because he couldn’t swim but because he wanted the police to come and photograph the scene, as if the whole thing needed to be investigated. It was an outrageous suggestion because he later told police that Samira couldn’t swim and was terrified of water. And yet he left her in there despite that everything about the scene looked like an accident and for all he knew, she could have just fallen in 20 seconds earlier.

When firefighters arrived, they immediately jumped in and got Samira out of the water and for the next 45 minutes, EMTs tried to revive her. Everything about Samira’s body suggested she had not been in the water for long. Her body was still limp and able to receive all the life-saving measures applied to it. There were no early stages of rigor mortis. They did a blood glucose accu-chek and did what they could to warm her and get her blood flowing again. It wasn’t until she arrived in the ER that she was pronounced dead. In the ER, her death was assumed to be an accidental drowning since the head wounds were not noticeable.

Even when the head wounds were discovered, the secondary head injuries could have initially appeared to be caused by slipping and falling on the pool deck, trying to get up and falling again.

Gardner’s immediate pronouncement to Womble that she had been murdered should have immediately alerted police that he was either psychic or lying. 

Gerald Gardner hadn’t come to the Frasch home that day to pressure wash the house like he told the jury. He was an odd jobs man, not the man who pressure-washed the home. He had come to steal. He had presumed that Samira would be off with the rest of the family at the beach house, not having a sleep in. 

He and his son told police in separate interviews they arrived at the home at 10:45. (In court, video footage shows them arriving at the security gate a little later which suggests the clock on it hadn’t been set properly.)

They had tailgated into the gated-community that day. The security footage played in the trial showed them arriving at the gate and Gardner punching in some numbers. If he had typed in an authentic code, if would have gone to Dr. Frasch’s phone. The code was linked to his phone and had never been linked to another number. Whenever Samira passed through the security gate in her own vehicle, she used a clicker that residents could purchase from the homeowner’s association, not the keypad. When a car pulled up behind the Gardners, the driver had used his clicker to let them all pass through the gate. Three years later, Gardner would tell the jury a security guard at the gate had let him through but the security footage shows otherwise. 

Arriving at the home a minute later, Gardner rang the doorbell just to be sure no one was home. With his son as a lookout and also to potentially boost him over the 7-foot fence, they went around to the side of the house, out of sight of neighbours. 

Most likely, Gardner Jr. remained at this point to keep watch while Gardner carried on to the 10,000 square foot pool enclosure. He could have accessed the pool area through any one of the 3 screen doors. 

The door of the pool enclosure had not been left open three hours earlier by a panicked Dr. Frasch as was suggested in some of the documentaries where the prosecutor had been able to tell her version of what happened that day. If it had been, Bella, the Bichon Frisé who was running around on the patio at the time that Womble arrived, would have probably wandered beyond the enclosure by then. 

At this point, Samira would have been getting dressed for the day because when Gardner broke through the screen door to the pool enclosure, she confronted him wearing nothing but a robe. And Bella would have come out onto the patio with Samira.

With Samira dead, Gardner could reinvent everything and he did so in an attempt to misdirect police to think it had been Samira’s husband, not him, who had struck her and put her in the pool. He and his son were interviewed the next day and by this time, they had coordinated their stories, telling police that they had been together when they had spotted Samira’s body in the pool. Their stories were identical to the point of being scripted. Only one detail differed. Each said that the other one had noticed the body first. 

Gardner told police the Frasches were going through a divorce, a tumultuous one, and that he knew Adam but had not spent a lot of time around him. He had heard from Samira that it was an abusive relationship. In fact, while working in the home, Gardner had witnessed Samira physically assaulting her husband and had even tried to calm her down and tell her that she didn’t need to be doing that. 

When police arrived that day, the gate and screen door had been opened from the inside. They had not considered how odd it was that the handyman had been able to pass so easily through a locked gate and a locked screen door to just happen to find a woman in the bottom of the pool. Certainly Gardner wasn’t going to tell them that in his five years of working for Dr. Frasch as an odd jobs man, he had never just shown up and started working unsupervised. He was casual help who never worked more than one day a week. But three years later in the trial, he reinvented his whole job description by telling the jury that he had been pressure-washing the house the day before and had returned to finish the job.  

With seemingly no motive for killing Samira, despite the number of contradictions in his testimony, he was allowed to walk out of the witness box and away from the whole case with no repercussions.