the Home Depot Creepo E153

0:00This is Belie, one network, every topic, everywhere. We've all heard the phrase, that kind of thing doesn't happen in our town. But here on Midwest Murder, we will shatter that false reality. In fact, it happens more often than we know. Sometimes the details of the most horrific crimes that happen in our neighborhoods are lost in the back pages of newspapers, forgotten on our news channels, and eventually erased over time. We're here to talk about murder, diving into some of the most controversial cases in Midwest history. This show will not shy away from the morbid details of these horrific events and the often ugly truths behind them. What you will hear is a detailed timeline of events, perspectives from those closely involved, and analysis by experts. What you will feel is the darkness that surrounds each story.

1:03The innocence lost by the victims, and hopefully the justice that was ultimately delivered. John Alanto. Don Palumbo. Hello. Hello to you. Hello to all of our friends here at Fat Fish Brewing. We absolutely love to be here in Dickinson. These guys are one of our earliest partners as we ventured outside of the city of Minot our hometown and we really do appreciate it. This is one of our preeminent destinations to record Midwest, Murder Live, and Dickinsonly really appreciate you showing up. As long as you guys keep coming back, so will we? Big thanks to all of you, huge thanks to Fat Fish, and a big thanks to everybody who takes a little bit of time out of their busy life to rate and review Midwest, Murder on iTunes and drop us comments on spotifying all those good places. If you do that, we might actually read your review here on the live show. We like to read those good or bad chances are high actually. Yeah, so Don Palumbo, I'm curious, what are people saying about Midwest Murder in the review column these days?

2:05Vern 1966, Best in the Midwest. Been listening since almost the very beginning. The only podcast I can listen to actually. The others get in my nerves. I'm a North Dakota native and I love your banter. I recommend you guys to everyone. I've been going back and listening to some older episodes and I do have to say I'm glad you were not advertising for ball wash anymore. Keep up the great work. You know what Vern me to, I am as well. I don't want to, I don't need to know about Jonas Balls. And he, in the earlier episodes, he did talk about that a lot. Well, just I mean within reason. But yeah, that makes that makes three of us. We've certainly come a long way since the man scaped ads and it just goes to show how much we've grown. Right. And if this is a very appropriate. Yeah, thank you Vern. And if this is the, if this is the first time that you are listening to Midwest Murder Trust, we do read the bad ones as well. Absolutely. Yeah, there's been a few. There have been. This episode is sponsored in part by Recovery Centers of Montana, which offers both inpatient and outpatient treatment for substance use disorder and co-occurring mental health issues like trauma, anxiety and depression.

3:13RCM provides separate residential treatment programs for men and women, along with outpatient services for those who need structured support while continuing to live at home. When someone enters treatment, their team builds an individualized plan based on that person's strengths, needs and goals because recovery is not one size fits all. Their staff includes licensed addiction accounts, their licensed clinical social workers, mental health professionals, peer support specialists, case managers and rehab aids, which means clients receive full wrap around support throughout their recovery. RCM supports multiple recovery pathways, including evidence based treatment, smart recovery and well-briety. Recovery is not one size fits all. RCM understands that. If you or someone you love is struggling, you can learn more about Recovery Centers of Montana at Recovery Centers of Montana.com or follow the link in the show notes. You can also catch Midwest Murder Sunday nights on Beck TV.

4:16If you have cable TV in the North Dakota region or you can download that Beck TV app, BeK TV every Sunday night at 9pm Central. If you get a new episode most of the time, there's probably 8 to 10 repeats a year and no new episodes during the holidays. If even that. So anyways, catch us on Beck, you'll see graphics and all kinds of different things on there. We'd love to see you join us over on Beck. Now, look, we all know that ads can interrupt the flow of a show. Here's the deal. You can join the Midwest Murder Patreon and skip all the ads entirely. You get ad-free episodes, bonus content that doesn't always make it into the feed, early access so you're never waiting and a whole lot more. I like to think of it as like the VIP section at a true crime bar except you're in your car at 2am listening to Midwest Darkness. Support the show, support storytelling and never miss a beat. Come hang with us on Patreon. You can click the link in the show notes. So our story today takes place in 2008.

5:17So what was happening back then? It's always weird and I can remember the year. Like when I remember what happened and remember what I was doing. Oh. I'm not that's weird from here. You remember what you were doing in 2008? I could piece it together. Yeah, absolutely. Well, breaking bad premiered. No country for old men to comb the Oscar for Best Picture, The Dark Knight and Twilight hit theaters with a bang and Iron Man kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Lady Gaga released her debut album The Fame. Magician David Blaine held his breath for a world record of 17 minutes and 4.5 seconds on Oprah. He's still doing weird shit in 2026. Very impressive weird shit too, I will say. Michael Phelps wins eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics and Usain Bolt breaks the world records in the 100 and 200 meter dash. He broke the record again the following year. He still holds those records.

6:18SpaceX launched the first privately developed spacecraft into orbit Falcon 1. In 2008, OJ Simpson has found guilty for armed robbery and kidnapping. The Detroit Alliance, right? The Detroit Lions became the first team in NFL history to go winless in a 16 game season. Ouch Lions fans. It's gotten better for you guys in recent years though. That was brutal though. It was tough. And in 2008, Barack Obama became the first black man elected as president of the United States. In 2008, for so many people, was the year the check came due. The housing market had spent a decade being a party nobody thought would end. Anybody could get a mortgage. The house was always going to be worth more next year and if it wasn't, you just borrow it against it again. Then in the winter and spring of 2008, the whole thing folded like a basket of towels. Bear Stearns, a bank that had been around since before the Great Depression evaporated in March.

7:23Later that fall, it's layman brothers and then it's everybody. For closure signs were going up on streets that had never seen one. It turned out that underneath a truly staggering amount of American money, there was nothing there at all. December of that same year, a guy named Bernie made off, sits his sons down and admits that the $65 billion investment empire with his name on it had always been a Ponzi scheme. The single largest fraud in human history and it comes apart in 2008 because when the check came due, his scheme got exposed at the same time. And it like that crippled people. Like they're their entire financial lifestyle, like Kevin Bacon and Kira Sedgwick were part of it too. They weren't completely taken out. It's not a history lesson. I saw it on a documentary. Sorry. Yeah. Worth it though. It's good points. But it happened even for the small timers. Over in England that year, there's a guy named John Darwin.

8:23You might remember him as the canoe man. He paddled out into the North Sea, vanished. He had been declared dead so his wife could collect the life insurance. A few years later, the canoe man got photographed very much alive. In 2008, he's finally standing in a courtroom because it turns out, faking your own death is easy. Staying fake is the hard part. So that same winter in 2008, in a nice Northwest suburb of Chicago, there was a local businessman, a contractor, who was drowning in exactly the kind of debt that was sinking the whole country. But he had a plan to get out from under it. Let me tell you, his plan didn't involve bankruptcy or some magnificent bailout funded by your tax dollars. But like a lot of bad to great plans, it did involve several trips to the Home Depot. Although I guarantee you've never shopped with the same list as this guy, and if you have, I'm calling the cops.

9:30Lake Barrington, Illinois. Northwest suburbs about 45 minutes out of the city. Big lots, big garages. It's the kind of place where a successful person goes to sprawl out. 8.24 a.m. Saturday morning, February 23rd, 2008, a woman named Denise Squire calls 911 to report a fire in her house. When emergency responders arrive, there's heavy, dark plumes of smoke pouring out of the attached garage of her home. Firefighters roll out. And what they find in that garage looks like a scene from final destination. There's a white Chevy Silverado. Underneath it, pinned beneath the front end is a horrifically burned body. The fire's still burning, concentrated in the engine compartment, and on the floor under the truck. Once the fire's out, it looks like a mechanics worst nightmare. A man was working underneath his truck. The truck was up on a jack.

10:30The jack slipped and multiple tons of Chevrolet came down on his chest. In the collapse, a light broke, and the spark off that light found fuel leaking from the truck's diesel filter and the whole thing burned with him under it. He likely died instantly of the crushing injuries to the chest, and then he burned in a fire that got over 1500 degrees. That's not actually what happened. Don Palumbo, that's what it looks like right now. Interesting. Okay, okay. The upper torso and face are scorched, well beyond recognition, but lower half is mostly intact. Firemen search the victim's body. There's a wallet on the body. There's an ID, keys, credit cards. The man is dressed in work clothes. The ID is that of 39-year-old Ari Squire, the homeowner and proud owner of the truck that now seems to have killed him.

11:31Some might say that truck was Ari Squire's entire personality. We all know that guy. Ari was a diesel guy. Not a has a truck guy, a diesel guy. And I had to learn about this myself because they are in fact quite different. He raced and he pulled sleds, which if you're not familiar, it's a sport where you hook your truck to a weighted sled and drag it down a track to see whose rig is strongest. And it's enormous at fairgrounds and race tracks all over the Midwest. I'm sure many other places as well. Well, Ari had a name in that world. He ran a performance parts out fit. He was a guy other truck guys knew by sight because his rig had more lights on it than anybody else's. That white silvorato that crushed him was a Duramax that he'd taken from a dual rear wheels down to single rear wheels himself for polling. He built it totally custom. And he put up a garage on the property the size of a small warehouse, 2,300 square feet for the sole purpose of having room to work on that big rig.

12:36So the story kind of assembles itself rather instantly. Diesel guy dies in his own garage under his own truck doing the hobby he loved. His wife Denise Squire, now widow is outside, distraught. Neighbors are gathering, they're distraught. One of them later put it to a reporter as a one and a million thing that a truck could fall on you and a fire could start at the same moment. What are the odds? Don't pull them both. I'm not a truck guy though, so I don't, to me it sounds preposterous, but you know, lots of things do and aren't. So again, this isn't my world. Lots of things do and aren't so true. I love it. The late county coroner, a man named Dr. Richard Keller, takes custody of the remains. The body is so badly burned that he can't do a normal identification of it. There's no fingerprints, there's no face.

13:38But if you look at the circumstances, it's Ari Squire's house, Ari Squire's garage, Ari Squire's truck, his ID, his distraught wife. So the coroner does what most reasonable people might do with that pile of circumstantial evidence. He tentatively identifies the dead man as Ari Squire and releases the awful, simple story of what happened. Freak accident, local contractor. The Associated Press ran a short item a couple of days later, that item got picked up and passed around the diesel truck forums because that's a very small subculture and Ari was a known guy in it. Those guys posted the kind of thing you see posted out there in the social media world when this happens. Here's the exact post from their forum in diesel bombers. Quote. One of our fellow diesel heads passed away. For those of you that didn't know Ari Squire, he was an avid racer and sled polar that was a friend to myself and many others.

14:39If you ever got a chance to meet him, you knew that he was a good man and was loved by everyone. He was the brains behind health fast products. Ari, you will be sorely missed brother. So that's the story that everybody in Lake County believes for about a week. But almost immediately, quietly, the whole story starts to come apart in two different places at once, pulled by two different people who have no idea yet that they are working the same thread. The first is Lake County detective Sergeant John Lucas. Lucas is looking at the garage and the garage, it's bothering him, starting with the jack. That truck had been up on a three-ton hydraulic jack. That's a big, stable piece of equipment. That's not the little scissor jack rattling around in the trunk of most people's cars.

15:39These things don't just tip over. Also, when a multi-ton truck does come off its axle, it leaves gouges, scratches, maybe some dents in the metal, some sort of damage. Well, Lucas goes over that axle, inch by inch, and finds nothing, no damage. A truck supposedly fell off a jack hard enough to kill a man and it didn't leave a single mark on itself. Then there's the job Ari Squire was supposedly doing on his diesel truck. The story is he was changing the fuel filter, very routine stuff. So why are the front tires off the truck? You don't pull the front tires to change a fuel filter. And why? For a man who was so well known for being meticulous and safety obsessed, why are there no jack stands under it? Every one of these guys uses jack stands. It's the first rule of the hobby. It's the one thing that stops a truck from doing exactly what this truck allegedly did.

16:45Then there was the fire. Everybody assumed electrical. The drop light hanging off the open hood got crushed, sparked, and started a fire. So Detective Lucas traces the wiring back to the fuse box. Turns out every circuit in that garage is switched to the off position. There was no power running to that light or to anything in the garage. Don Palombo, correct me if I'm wrong here, but wouldn't you say an electrical fire needs electricity? To that I would say it's not a trick question. No, actually, no, I went, I went really, I went really deep in my thinking here because would electricity still be flowing to that light switch even though it wasn't on. I'm not an electrician. I have no idea if my brother lost us into this. I'm going to be in trouble. I don't know. That's my answer. Well, for the sake of the story, we're going to say that an electrical fire requires electricity. Okay. Okay. That's the physics we're going with this time.

17:48So when they look closer at the body, there's a heavy fuel soaked into the clothes and it's not diesel. It's a likely accelerant. They can't identify exactly which, but it's highly flammable. And it's not just like a splash that got on this guy. It's essentially been poured on the jeans down through the underwear, and it's been on the socks and the boots. Now, the boots were sticking out from underneath, from under the truck. They're like way away. No where near anything that the engine could have leaked down upon. Fuel doesn't drip onto a man's socks and boots while he's lying under a truck. Somebody doused this guy. There's also a piece of cardboard laid on top of the body in between the truck and his body. And finally, we can't forget Detective Lucas also found a propane torch turned to the on position that just so happened to be lying nearby. I would say that seems more likely than the turned off light switch. Again, no electrician. However, no pyro either I take it.

18:51I mean, I've no news of torch before. I've used a torch. Yeah. The coroner, meanwhile, well, he's got his own problems. He can't actually confirm who the body is. Dr. Keller had only ever signed off on that identification tentatively because a body burned at 1500 degrees doesn't give you a face. And the fire had destroyed the fingerprints. He'd inferred the ID, the right house, the right truck, the wallet, the whole thing. Good enough to notify a family. Not good enough for a death certificate. So Keller keeps working and the body is off. The build is wrong. R.A. Squire was 39 years old. This body is slimmer than R.A. and he reads younger a lot younger. When the forensic dentist looks at the teeth, he says they belong to someone likely in their 20s or 30s. R.A. Squire was nearly 40. Now all the bones are intact, mostly.

19:54And Keller knows that R.A. broke his arm years back. So it's the kind of healed fracture that would show up on the on an X-ray. He orders the X-ray and wouldn't you know it? No healed break where there should be one. Dr. Keller goes looking for tattoos and it gets a little more strange. He asks Denise the widow, air quotes. How many tattoos her husband had? Denise says one. R.A. sister standing right there says two. The man's own wife and his own sister can't agree on how many tattoos he had. Now when that question landed on Denise, detectives thought they noticed that she was thrown off by it. One tattoo or two, it doesn't end up mattering because neither mark is where it's supposed to be on this body anyway. Now then there's the dental records. It took some doing to track them down because Ari hadn't been to the dentist in like a decade.

20:54But when Dr. Keller finally got down to it, the records didn't match. It came down to one old molar filling that they found that filling was not in this body. So that's a pretty major red flag. I get damn near giddy when people in cases do their jobs. And that's not digging anybody. Old-fashioned police work. Just tell me more. It's all on a hunch. And so he started researching. This isn't right from what he knew and all of that stuff. And then it leads to this. And then because in so many cases, yeah, you would just take it. And it's word. It's guaranteed. It's happened before. It's certainly happened before. And him being thorough like this, going step by step. I'm going to confirm this body one way or another. And he was trying all the other ways because the dental records weren't immediately available.

21:54You know, you try to go for that first. The dental guy comes in and he's like, well, those teeth don't look like they belong to a 40-year-old. Well, let's find Ari's records. Well, I'm going to go do that. Meanwhile, they're trying to identify tattoos. Anything they can. Well, the red flags that the corners getting are not the only one because investigators are also getting red flags from the widow Denise Squire. First red flag came when officers initially informed Denise her husband was dead. She didn't cry or read as being upset to them. In fact, she said something to the effect of, okay, what do I do next? I'm going to stop you on that one because I think for those of us after the fact we get into this habit of expecting people to act a certain way. Right? So maybe that was just shock. Like, okay, what do I do now? They did shock it up to shock in that. So yeah, it's great that you mentioned that. They did say, well, maybe she was just in shock.

22:58And we've gone over this before too. There's some sort of expectation that of what grief is supposed to look like when someone you love has been murdered. And it's sometimes these hunches are wrong. They are. Yeah. But there's more red flags coming from Denise once inside the home officers learn the couple sleeps in separate beds. There are no photos of them together anywhere in the house. They really appear to be living compartmentalized lives. The next red flag was the cremation the day after the fire. Denise Squire sat down with a funeral director and was adamant about one thing. She wanted Ari's body cremated immediately. Like, right away, call them and get the body, which they did. It nearly happened, but Dr. Keller refused to release the body because he had not yet I did it. That part that that she's always weird. Like, just a raster there then. Like, what you do, right? Like, if you're if you're urging someone like release that body, like, I can't move on until that happens.

24:04Okay. So how did you kill them then is what I would is what I would say. Like, I don't know if I could be a consultant on these things and just say the things that people want. That man that man burned at 1500 degrees. It's the next day and she's like, get him in here. Let's finish the cremation. Yeah. Right now. Yeah. Like that that body ain't even cooled off yet. She's a kid. Over here. We're finishing this bonfire. Yeah. Yeah. And funeral directors like, well, okay, you're the boss. You're paying me to do my job. I'm going to tell them I'm going to call them for the body. Dr. Keller was like, oh no. Some's some's a. And I was up here. I'd like to add that that. Ari, if you will, in air quotes, was damn near already cremated because cremation temperatures operate between 1400 and 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. Well, they just finished a little more. Little more. Finally, the other thing that really stood out to police and law enforcement was that same week upon Ari's death.

25:08Denise held the memorial for Ari more than a hundred of his relatives and closest friends at an Italian restaurant. Now, there were a few guests she hadn't invited detectives from the late county sheriff's office quietly in the room hanging out watching things because for them, it already wasn't adding up. And the more they looked at it, the marriage itself didn't add up. Denise looked anything but grief stricken at that event. So while detectives in the corner are finding more questions than answers relating to the death of Ari's squire, 20 miles away in Arlington Heights, a mother named Donna Fiorito is coming apart. Her 20 year old son has stopped coming home. Oh, man. I mean, I obviously knew if it wasn't Ari, it was somebody, but dang it. Yeah. Donna's son, Justin Newman, was a carefree, happy, go lucky guy. Justin worked the 4 a.m. shift at Home Depot and told his mother with total confidence that someday he was going to be rich and by a Lamborghini.

26:15His mom would kind of just laugh at him, but Justin told her something will come my way someday, mom. Don't worry. Something's going to come my way. Now, there was one thing this carefree kid was absolutely dialed in on and it was his mom. He drove her to work and picked her up at the target where she worked every single day, every single time without fail. It's a task that he wouldn't even allow his older, more responsible brother to handle. Of all the things that Justin Newman was irresponsible or careless about, his mother was not one of them. That Saturday, Justin had a new job starting, a construction gig for a customer he'd met at Home Depot, a guy who'd walked up and asked him how he'd like to make some real money. The guy was promising $15 an hour, a chance to learn a trade, maybe even a paid trip to a job site down in Missouri where the company covered the hotel and the food.

27:15To a 20 something making $10 an hour dreaming about a Lamborghini, this was the break. He was supposed to be at his boss's house, his new boss at his house a little after seven that Saturday morning and then home by three to take his mom to work at 330. Her last last thing she said to him was, if you're not back, just call me. His answer was either way mom, I'll let you know. Three o'clock came, no Justin, no call. Justin always called. So Donna phoned his old boss at Home Depot to get the new boss's number and that's when she found out the man Justin had gone to work for that morning, a man named Ari Squire had died in a fire at his own house. About 36 hours after Justin vanished, a text finally came from his phone saying that he'd gone to Missouri, he'd call next week, don't worry.

28:19Donna wasn't just immediately worried. Her blood ran cold when she got that text because she knew Justin never would have sent that text because he never would have abbreviated Missouri. She didn't think he even knew the abbreviation for Missouri and all the spelling and grammar of that text message was clean and precise, just not the way her kid texted and she'd already reported him missing right away over the weekend. So as these threads start overlapping, investigators are considering a multitude of possibilities. Now they've got a missing 20 year old that was the last person scheduled to be at that garage the morning of the accident. What if Justin's the suspect? Maybe he caused the accident that killed Ari, panicked and ram. Maybe there was something sinister going on. Maybe there was a drug deal happening. They asked Donna if her son was involved in drug running, if it was related to drug running.

29:24This poor woman had to sit through a weekend of that, a weekend of questions of new accusations and she's just worried sick about her kid or stomachs turning and not. She knows that something's happened to Justin and no matter what detectives wanted to believe Donna told him the same thing. That's not Justin. If a truck fell on his boss, Justin would have called 911. She said, my son has a heart. So detectives eventually collected a few of Justin's things, a sweatshirt, a pair of his shoes, a toothbrush, just in case they told Donna just in case this is for the future. Donna looked at him and said, flat out, I'm not stupid. I've got a feeling. I think you already found my son. She was right. Because when investigators ran the DNA off Justin's belongings and Justin Newman's dental records against the body from Ari Squires Garage, they matched.

30:27The dead man in Ari Squires Garage under his truck wearing his clothes was 20 year old Justin Newman, which means the body, a corner had tentatively released that a community had mourned that a widow had tried to cremate wasn't Ari Squire at all, which also means Ari Squire didn't die in that garage. At that point, it looks like a murder done with purpose because nobody kills a stranger and dresses them in their own clothes for the fun of it. Somebody did this so the world would believe Ari was dead. Unfortunately, I don't know what split hairs here, but I think there is probably somebody out there that would. I wouldn't use absolute saying nobody. Most, most. The late county sheriff at the time was a man named Mark Kirin and once his people understood what they were dealing with, what they were looking at, he didn't mince words at all.

31:34He called Ari Squire, quote, an evil sadistic human being without a conscience. For anyone keeping track, that's a lot different from the super nice well-liked diesel guy everyone was mourning a week ago. So investigators start digging into who Ari Squire actually was. This guy had been somebody once, president of an in-home healthcare company called AcuCare. That's where he made the money for the big house, the warehouse garage, the racetracks, all of it, but it fell apart because Ari Squire kept committing fraud and kept getting caught. The government accused him of more than $2 million in Medicare fraud. There had been an earlier case on similar charges that ended in a judgment against him for $126,000. Then in December of 2007, two months before the fire, he pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud again and owed the government somewhere close to another 200,000 as a result.

32:43On top of all of it, his legal fees, fighting the case, had run about 200 grand more. By his wife's account, he was so convinced he'd done nothing wrong that he only pleaded out because they'd run out of money to keep fighting. At the time of the fire, he was in the middle of a six-month stretch of house arrest. Somewhere around half a million dollars are more in debt. I think all of the uninsured people right now are ready to fight Ari Squire by ourselves, right? Right now. So what's that old saying, Don Palimbo? The fraud doesn't fall far from the tree. Is that how it goes? Something like that? Sure. Get this. Ari's father, Morris Squire, owned a psychiatric facility in Deplains called Forest Hospital, sold it for $10 million in 1999 so that he could settle a $4 million Medicare fraud suit involving billing for care on Alzheimer's patients, which they never received, including, and this is real, unlicensed people reading horoscopes from the newspaper.

33:55Okay. Oh yeah. The construction company Ari had reinvented himself with, total failure. You know, in 2008, the one year that nobody was building anything, so they'd refinanced the house to keep that afloat. He was underwater on a condo complex. He owned down in Florida. According to Denise, he wasn't bringing money home to cover the day-to-day bills at all. That job had fallen on her. So this is a man literally drowning in debt from every direction. Then investigators find life insurance. And the whole thing starts to click into focus. Ari Squire had a life insurance policy worth $5 million. He'd had it for nine years. The premium on that policy was about to explode skyrocket from just under $2,500 a year to almost $12,000 a year.

35:01For a man somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million dollars in the whole who couldn't make his bills, that policy was about to become one more thing he could no longer afford. It's also a $5 million prize about to slip out of his hands because he couldn't cover the ticket. If he was ever going to cash that, he had to cash it now. He had to die now. The primary beneficiary was Denise to the tune of $4 million. Another million was set aside for a long time friend. So the detective that the theory that detectives builds pretty simple. Somebody collects and then quietly funnels the money to Ari who by then is living somewhere else being somebody else. Die on paper, collect the $5 million, come back as a new man. But to do that, Ari Squire needed a ringer.

36:01When detectives started retracing Ari's last few weeks, they were led to the Home Depot in Lake Zurich. Apparently, Ari had been spending a lot of time there not buying much, mostly loitering, talking to the staff specifically, the younger guys working the floor. He'd get to chatting, feel a guy out, and being a construction company owner, start floating a job, good money, come work for me, except the impromptu interviews were really bizarre. Ari Squire didn't seem very interested in whether these guys can actually build anything. His questions focused elsewhere. Questions like, how tall are you? What's your build? Do you have any tattoos or scars, maybe distinguishing birthmarks, piercings? What color are your eyes really?

37:03And then there's the job application. It went so far as to ask for their ATM pin numbers and requiring direct deposit banking info to be filled out. And just wait, Don Palumbo, there's more on this job application. It asked for your mother's maiden name and your father's full name. Paper application he was handing out. It's probably not a good one. Yeah. Well, nobody who talked to this guy thought they were talking to a killer. They thought they were just talking to a local contractor who was kind of strange. Or to a fraudster, even like. Yeah, well, and that's not exactly super public info, you know, well, if you're asking for my direct deposit banking information, which, okay, I'll give you that one, you know, because I want direct deposit. Yeah, you want my ATM pin number? I don't know my ATM pin number. Why do you want it? Right? Like, you know, my dad's full name, even his middle name. Wow, that's kind of weird. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. What else can I provide for you?

38:04And, but I think that's why he was going for the younger, the younger kids, the younger, the younger, the younger. Little more, little more naive. Little naive because, you know, if he approaches you at Home Depot at your big age, like, I mean, you're going to be like pound sand, buddy. Right. Yeah. So. But at 20 years old, 2008, you're making 10 bucks an hour working the 4 AM shift at Home Depot, 15 bucks. You're learning from a learning from an experienced contractor. Yeah. Yeah. Dreamy. Yeah. Right. It's like, oh, this is this is killer. And I'm not saying that, you know, that the victim walked into it by any means. No. I think it's I think I think he was targeting specifically. That's my assumption anyway. Respectulation. Well, that's the thing about being strange in America. It's not illegal. You know, you catch a weird vibe off a guy at the hardware store. You go home, you tell your family about the weird job application that asked if you had tattoos. Everybody laughs and you forget it.

39:05But those weren't job interviews. They were auditions. And Ari Squire was casting his own corpse. He needed a body that could pass for him if the fire didn't finish the job. The right height, the right build, the right coloring. No distinguishing marks that would blow it. And he wanted a pin number because the plan didn't stop at dying. He wanted to become whoever he killed. Then Ari's own business partner came forward and shared an old conversation. The two men had years earlier while riding together to a job site. Ari told him, wouldn't it be great to find the dead body somewhere burn it up and start your life over with that identity? These dumb shits are always telling on themselves. Seriously, they always tell on themselves. You ever just think about finding a burned out body somewhere and then like becoming that guy? Nope, that sounds horrific.

40:05Like, like, oh my god, they are always telling on themselves. So after the fire, the days following, that partner called the detectives and he was shaking when he told them, I think Ari killed somebody for the money. He knew it. Well, one of the other men Ari had been interviewing at that home depot was a married father and carpenter named Sandy Lively. And the resemblance between them was unmistakable. Sandy was built like Ari and looked almost just like him. Same height, same hair, same kind of face. They even by coincidence had both grown their beards out around the same time. Ari worked on Sandy hard. He came into the store looking for him like four times a week. He found repeatedly, sometimes several times a day. He offered Sandy Lively 60 grand a year guaranteed salary, even if there wasn't enough work. Sandy would still get his check.

41:05He mentioned working down in Missouri to Sandy. The whole thing felt almost too good to be true. Once Sandy was working at the home depot, he caught Ari across the store just standing there staring at him like Michael Myers. Ari kept trying to get Sandy over to his house. Sandy actually agreed a few times but never followed through. He was really flaky and it saved his life for sure. Sandy the flake lived because of his flakiness. One time he was minutes away, just minutes from the corner. And his mom called to say she made cornbread and beans. Sandy turned around, say no more, mom. I'd turn around for that too. Say no more, mom. 60 grand a year salary. Don't mean shit next to your cornbread and beans. With this weird guy that asked me about my tattoos. So when Sandy flaked, I'd blow up at him on the phone, swear at him, and then come back the next day, all apologetic.

42:06And just say I was having a bad day. Let's try again tomorrow. You can come start working for me tomorrow. Sandy, I think you're in an abusive relationship. Like what? This is not a, this is not a boss. Right. The last time Ari asked Sandy to come by on the morning of February 23rd and Sandy was supposed to be there. He said he would be there. Said he was going to call at 6am to get directions. But Sandy lively over slept, never made the call, and never went to the house. A few hours later his phone rang. It was a buddy from work calling to say that Ari Squire had died in a fire. Lively found out later that his alarm clock is the only reason he's alive. And when Sandy finally understood what those conversations had actually been, he assumed that he was the only guy that Ari had been talking to. He wasn't. There was a whole list. So when Lively didn't show up that Saturday morning, Ari Squire didn't call the whole thing off. He just went to the next name on it,

43:07which takes us back to the garage. What? Sure. Before you go there, like this guy is stalking him and likely others at Home Depot. At the Home Depot. Remember when I said, you guys have never had this on your shopping list when you went the Home Depot unless you're a real weirdo and I'm calling the cops on you. I know. That was our nope. But like nobody thought that was weird that this guy is calling his place of employment. Multiple times a week. He's showing up multiple times a week. I mean, I get it. Contractor Home Depot weird, right? But no, like I understand that, but specifically asking for him and then, and staring at this guy and who knows who else. Well, Dawn Plumbo, I'm just going to say, things were different back in 2008. It was just different back then. I mean, you're not wrong. It was dare I say I'm going to clutch my pearls when I say those, but it is almost 20 years ago. Right. Because now you just would have been calling him on his cell phone, right?

44:09Sure. You know, and maybe they were then, I guess, you know, cell phones were a little more readily handy. Yeah, they had them in 08. I had an iPhone. People were still rocking landlines. No, I didn't. They were calling the Home Depot. Yeah. So getting back to what happened to Justin and how he landed in the crosshairs of Ari Squire. Justin was 20. He worked at that same Home Depot for 10 bucks an hour, the 4 AM shift. He was similar height to Ari, but had darker hair, brown hair, blue eyes, where Ari was pure dark hair. His hair was a little lighter. Excuse me. Justin's hair is lighter. Ari's hair is really dark with dark eyes. Justin has brown hair, blue eyes. Ari dark hair, dark eyes. We offered him a construction job at 15 bucks an hour with mentorship, chance to advance, chance to learn the trade. You got a future in this, and that's again to a 20-year-old making 10 bucks an hour. And he putting part of that money to help his mom. It's not just a raise.

45:09That was a door opening for Justin Newman. Justin told his mom he'd pick her up from work that afternoon and went to the house. Authorities believe Ari drugged Justin, and the working theory is chloroform. Then he switched their clothes, dressing Justin in his own work clothes, took his wallet, ID, keys, credit cards, everything that said Ari Squire and put it all on Justin Newman's body. He positioned the body under the front end of the truck and then dropped it on him. He used his most prized possession to crush a 20-year-old kid to death, and then he set it on fire because the truck being wrecked and burned was part of the story. That rig at the die so Ari could. He poured fuel all over Justin's body right down to the boots. He lit it with the propane torch over cardboard in a garage where he'd cut the power. Then he walked away and he let his wife call 911 to report the accident that had befallen her husband.

46:13Ari Squire murdered a stranger to play the corpse in a home movie about his own death. Then he just drove off to start a new life as somebody else. That somebody else was Justin Newman. So obviously his wife was in on it, right? I would guess. I shouldn't say obviously. But we well done, Palumbo. We just don't know. It seems obvious because somebody had to get that money to Ari. But we'll get there. So Ari had Justin's wallet, Justin's credit and debit cards, his cell phone, his car. And Ari had done his homework on becoming Justin. In order to match the description on Justin Newman's driver's license, Ari Squire died his hair and put in blue contact lenses. So that means in the hours following Justin's murder, this guy was in a bathroom somewhere,

47:14dying his hair and putting in contacts to match the newly stolen identity. He could match a dead man's looks, but he couldn't match his voice when texting Dona Fiarito, Justin's mother. He murdered a man to disappear and then he blew it by doing a bad impression of him over text. It didn't take long after that. March 2, 2008, a little over a week after the fire. An officer on patrol in Eureka, Southwest of St. Louis, Missouri spotted a parked car matching that of Justin Newman's. The officer goes into the days in and confirms with the clerk that a guest named Justin Newman has checked into room 133, although that same clerk identifies by picture Ari Squire as the man who checked in. The officer calls it in right away, but doesn't wait for backup. Oh, yeah, right. I was surprised at that.

48:14He walks to the door and knocks. For a moment, there's no answer. And then from inside the room, a single gunshot. When police finally go in, there's a body on the floor, one gunshot to the head and a wallet with Justin Newman's license and credit card in it. But this man looks nowhere near 20. That is, of course, because that man is Ari Squire, confirmed later that day by his fingerprints. The man who faked his own death and murdered someone to do it had actually died alone on the floor of a daisy in under a stranger's name with nowhere left to go. I did not see it ending that way. I did not see that coming. He wanted more than anything to stop being Ari Squire.

49:16Oh, I don't know. Here's the thing. Stop breaking the law, asshole. Right. Well, he got his wish. It just cost a completely innocent person their life. And it bought him a week, a week. Buy you a week. God would have an asshole. So that leaves us with Denise, the quote unquote widow. Really is a widow now. So we don't need Sherlock Holmes here to tell us none of this works if Ari Squire can't collect the money. A dead man can't file an insurance claim. Somebody who's alive and cooperative has to do that part. Naturally, they look pretty hard at the primary beneficiary of that $5 million policy. Denise, Ari's wife. Investigators had been uneasy about Denise from the very first morning. On that day, when Detective Scott Morrison had to take a reside to his squad car away from the chaos that tell her Ari was dead, she was cold and emotionless. And her first question to him was, what do I do now? What's my next step?

50:20Morrison gave her the benefit of the doubt, chalked it up to shock. I wonder what her reaction was the second time. Are you gonna tell us? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, no. We're really excited. I know nothing about this case. In the house, no pictures of them. There was a painting of her and there was one small wedding photo in the foyer of just Ari by himself. That was the only wedding photo was of just him. So she either hates him or it's a sham. Or maybe a little bit of both. I'm gonna quit guessing. No, I think it's both. When detectives asked Denise about her husband's life, she couldn't tell them any of the things a wife would normally know. Where's tattoos? Where how many he had to them? It just seemed like these people were running separate businesses from the same address. Her words were more or less well. Ari just isn't much of one for conversation. That's why I don't know anything about him after a decade of marriage.

51:23Denise was also the one who laid out all the money troubles for detectives in the first place. All the legal fees, the failed company, the refinanced house, the condo. She knew in detail exactly how much financial pressure this marriage was under. So that makes the next part a little hard to swallow. When detectives asked her straight out whether Ari had any life insurance, she told them she didn't know of any. Well, they had already checked. $5 million, nine years old. Your name's sitting atop of it. That's not all. After Ari was supposedly dead in that garage, there were emails between Ari and Denise. A back and forth dated the day after the fire and running for several days thereafter, these two exchanged emails and one of them, Ari, the dead man, asks his wife, hey, did an accident happen?

52:24She writes back why yes, it did. He asks, when will my ashes be returned to you? When will my ashes be returned to you? She answers, quite matter of factly, that the body hasn't been released yet. Then he asks if there's anything she needs. Denise has three words, a new life. I know burner phones were a thing. You could buy some minutes on track phone in 2008. Yeah. Like what? Just emailing a dead man. Emailing back and forth. I probably won't shock you, Don Palumbo, to learn that Denise did not volunteer any of these emails to the police. Not even a little bit. She sat through several interviews and never mentioned them right up until the day they told her they were seizing the family's computers. Then she was like, oh, I had some really weird emails you guys should know about. My husband, who's dead, by the way, emailed me and I responded.

53:25It's going to look really weird. I was emailing my dead husband, but it's not like that. It's not what you think. It's not what it looks like. No, no, it looks like. Don, her explanation was in her words, I thought I would get into trouble. Well, yeah. Kind of seems like you're collaborating on a fraud. I guess I would like to ask Denise, for what? What do you think you'd be in trouble for? What do you think you do? You tell me. Yes, I'm the mother of teenagers. I like to, you tell me why you should be in trouble. And then I get more truth. So that's. Well. Her explanation for the emails that she received was that they must have been automatically generated messages that Ari had queued up before he died. I was just replying to the email I got. I didn't know if he was alive or not. I thought Ari's so smart, super genius, diesel guy. He just sent these automated emails from the grave. I was talking to my husband. It was nice.

54:25You know, I'm sure she panted. As one does. As one does. I'm sure she, you know, maybe was panicking in the moment. But you couldn't come up with something else. Like your husband is, you know, air-coated dead. Blame it on him. What have you got to lose? Money, the money's coming to you anyway. Yeah. What have you got to lose? And here's a piece of unsolicited advice. Don't reply to emails from a dead person. Yeah. Anyone out there, I don't know who needs to hear that, but keep that one in your pocket. I will say, after my dad passed, I, you know, I texted his number a couple of times. I would have shit my pants if somebody would have replied. Like, I was pretty sure, you know, nobody had his phone number yet at that point. That would have been terrifying. So I would have led with that. Like, can you imagine my surprise? But, no, no, she's also maybe not great at this.

55:29Yeah. To detectives, it looked like a conversation that she was answering and replying to very casually. Like, she was writing to somebody she felt like was going to write back to them. These creative fake ones. She was. Yeah, creative fake one. It's not, it's like, come on. Not that we want them to get away. It's fun to point out their mistakes when they're kind of dumb. And there's one more thing worth pointing out, Don Palumbo. You asked about this one. Well, when investigators came to tell Denise the second time that she was a widow, that Ari had shot himself in Missouri, her reaction was completely different from the first. The cold, emotionless woman from the squad car was gone. This time Denise was stunned. He killed himself? What do you mean he killed himself? This time she cried. She unleashed raw emotion more than they'd seen from her since any of this began. Which, to me, of course, the unspoken message there is, she knew damn well, Ari,

56:30wasn't dead the first time. That's certainly what it looked like to Sheriff Kirin and the rest of the detectives. Nevertheless, Denise's squire maintained she knew absolutely nothing. She's the one who called 911. Her lawyer pointed out that she cooperated with police every step of the way that she took and passed a polygraph on her knowledge of the killing. Investigators' answer on the polygraph was basically that it hadn't asked enough of the right questions. Which, I don't know, it's kind of like the thing you say when a polygraph gives you an answer you don't like. So it's kind of a grain of salt in both directions. I can't really trust the damn polygraph. Which is why it's an interview tactic not, you know, a missive link court. Bottom line, the state of Illinois never charged Denise squire with anything because they could not prove what she did or did not know. She was talking to a dead guy.

57:33Yeah, dead guy. Automated dead guy maybe. Okay. According to her allegedly. So on the criminal side, she walks. But that's not quite the end of the story. Because there's another kind of courtroom with a different standard of proof. In May of 2008, just months after Justin was murdered, his mother, Donna, and his brother Frank filed the civil suit. Their attorney, a well-known Chicago civil rights lawyer named John Lovie, laid out the theory that I didn't dream this up and execute it alone. Denise was part of the plan and that under Illinois law, if you're part of the conspiracy, you're on the hook for what it does. They sued Ari's estate and they sued Denise and they went looking for at least $10 million. During questioning under oath in that civil case, when Denise was asked about Justin Newman's death, she repeatedly pleaded the fifth. Her lawyer said that's just standard procedure when there's still an open criminal investigation.

58:36It eventually went to trial in 2010, four days of civil trial. Denise's lawyer worked hard to paint her as a victim in her own right, pointing out, and this is true, that Ari had set that fire with Denise inside the house. And that whatever else she was, she was also a woman whose husband had used her home as a crime scene and left her holding all of it. But the jury didn't buy the victim version. They found Denise's squire libel in Justin Newman's death that she was, indeed, part of what got him killed or at least knew enough that she could have prevented it, and they awarded his mother and brother $6 million. As for the $5 million life insurance, the whole point of this entire nightmare, because that policy was nine years old, its two-year suicide clause had expired, which means that when Ari put a gun to his own head in that days in, it didn't void the payout.

59:40The timing actually let Denise file the claim, which was then handed over to the new minister. This is maybe a topic for a different discussion, but I think it obviously ties to this case. I can't decide if that is an asset, like with our criminal system versus our civil system, that while criminally you cannot be, you know, you're not held responsible, but civilly you can be. That's how we have to get justice for our loved ones, which it sucks. I can't decide what part of it is broken, but something is broken, but I can't decide what. Yeah, it strikes you as odd. What do you mean? So on the criminal side, she's scoff-free, but all these people say that she had a hand in it. How the way it differentiates, it's difficult. Yeah, because it happened with Hojay Simpson, right?

1:00:42Ron Goldman's family sued Hojay Simpson, all that stuff. And he was held responsible civilly, right? It's like at least you got something. You got something, but yeah, but is it justice? I guess I'm glad it's there as a way to fill that hole that the criminal justice system has not. It was my inside thought. I could have just kept that, but yeah. Ari Squire spent the last weeks of his life treating human beings like a shopping list. Justin Newman was not a target of Ari's rage or Ari's grievance or anything that even pretended to be personal. Justin Newman was chosen because he was roughly the right height and had the right coloring to be believable as somebody else's corpse. The entire monstrous production got Ari Squire nine days of dyed hair, colored contacts, drugstore disguises, and texting a dead kid's mother before it finally came to an end with a gunshot in a days in off the interstate.

1:01:49He was dead under a name that wasn't his. For a debt he could have handled the boring way that millions of Americans handled that exact year by going broke like everybody else and starting over. He murdered someone to avoid bankruptcy. He is the perfect awful piece of shit mascot of 2008. A man so unwilling to admit his scheme had failed that he'd rather burn down an innocent life than file the paperwork. Justin Newman was 20 years old from Arlington Heights. As a kid, he wanted to be a pro baseball player and then a fisherman and by 20 he landed simply on hopefully being rich someday. A kid who was so reliable about driving his mom to work that he lectured his own more responsible big brother about being on time for it.

1:02:53He told his mom he'd pick her up that afternoon. Then he went to talk to a man about a better job, a new opportunity, a door to a brighter future swinging open and he never came home. Because that man decided Justin's body was worth more to him than Justin's life. That bugs me a lot. Like just absolutely no no regard for human life whatsoever. The impersonal murders like this are really troubling and you've got this guy that is a respected figure in his own community. Neighbors liked Ari. His diesel guys thought he was great. He helped many of them get his their start in that world. Sources for this episode of Midwest murder, the US District Court of Illinois, the Newman family, wrongful death, civil suit and verdict, date line NBC and NBC news, NBC Chicago, ABC seven of Chicago, the daily Harold forensic files, the diesel bombers forum and the

1:04:00Associated Press. Midwest murder is co-hosted by Don Palumbo and myself, Jonah Lanto. This was recorded with a very wonderful crowd here in Dickinson at Fatt fish brewing. Dan Glad to have you guys. Thanks for our listeners on Patreon. Thank you again to our crowd here in Dickinson. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

1:05:00Thank you. If you liked the show, please take a moment to rate, review and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening.