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He Allegedly Killed Two People To Be With His Mistress...And That Wasn't His First Time | Crime House 24/7
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Hi listeners, it's Vanessa Richardson. Real quick, before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show from Crime House that I know you'll love. America's Most Infamous Crimes. Hosted by Katie Ring. Each week, Katie takes on one of the most notorious criminal cases in American history. Serial killers who terrorized cities, unsolved mysteries that keep detectives up at night, and investigations that change the way we think about justice. Listen to and follow America's Most infamous crimes Tuesday through Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House. On this show, we dig deeper. We look closer because understanding comes from paying attention. And when you travel solo, you're doing the same thing, choosing to see the world for yourself. You're stepping outside your routine, following your curiosity and experiencing places on your own terms. But going solo doesn't mean doing everything alone. For travel that gets the details right, visit go colette.com podcast and use offer code SOLO26 to get a thousand dollars off sol Select Colette Explorations Tours. Colette's small group Explorations tours are designed for travelers who value independence and connection. With just 19 travelers on average, you'll explore alongside like minded adventurers while local experts bring each destination to life. Arrive solo, but you're never on your own. Every detail is handled from logistics to experiences so you can stay focused on being present and fully immersed. From African safaris to the northern lights in Finland to truffle hunting in Umbria, each journey is built around authentic moments and local insight. It's travel that lets you go deeper without the stress of planning for travel that gets the details right. Visit go colette.com podcast and use offer code SOLO26 to get a thousand dollars off Select Colette Explorations Tours. Good morning everyone. We have multiple breaking true crime cases this morning that you need to know about and we're starting with the biggest one. A Bay Area man already charged with kill his wife and mother in law is now accused of a third murder, one he allegedly had carried out by a hitman more than a year before he picked up the knife himself. This is crime house 24 7, your non stop source for the biggest crime cases developing right now. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Vanessa Richardson and we have quite a lineup for you today. Here's what you need to know. Foreign. 30th Contra Costa county prosecutors filed new murder charges that have taken an already disturbing Bay Area murder case and made it significantly darker, revealing that by the time 43 year old Howard Wang allegedly killed his wife and mother in law inside their home. He had already killed once before and up to that point gotten away with it. Wang has been in jail since September 2025 when he was arrested for killings of his wife and her mother. Those charges were serious enough on their own, but with the new filings from March 30, prosecutors are now alleging a third murder, one that predates the Walnut Creek killings by more than a year and one that allegedly involves a hired gunman. On September 18, 2025, police responded to a 911 call at a home in Kilobra Court in Walnut Creek. Inside they found two women dead. Wang's wife, 41 year old Linlin and her mother Bamen Chang, both had their throats slashed. After slashing their throats, sources say Wang fired two shots from a 9 millimeter handgun and then called 911 himself, telling officers he'd arrived home to find an intruder attacking his family and that he had fired at the fleeing suspect. But investigators didn't buy it and Wang was arrested the following day. His 8 year old twin daughters were home at the time of the killings and were not physically harmed. Now in protective custody, friends of GAO told KTVU she'd been miserable in the marriage and had been trying to get out. She had recently obtained a license to run a beauty services business from home as she wanted, her friend said, to be strong and independent. About two weeks after the killings, police arrested a second person, 45 year old Yan Wang, no relation to Howard Wang, despite sharing the same last name. Yen Wang of Oakland was charged as an accessory after the fact along with first degree residential burglary and misdemeanor destruction of evidence. Prosecutors allege she destroyed cell phones belonging to the victims on the same day as the killings to prevent investigators from obtaining evidence, then broke into the home the following day and stole additional items. Yan Wang is Howard Wang's mistress and according to prosecutors, the reason all of this happened. Investigators have filled in a piece of the story that pred the Walnut Creek killings by more than a year. On June 8, 2024, 41 year old Chung Le Lee was shot and killed outside his apartment building on Walnut Grove Avenue in San Gabriel at approximately 1:35am at the time, the connection to Wang wasn't publicly known. Now prosecutors allege that Chang Le Le was killed because he was in a romantic relationship with Yan Wang and Howard Wang wanted him out of the picture. And new murder charges were filed not only against Howard Wang for Lee's killing, but also against 33 year old Demarcus James Pearl of Los Angeles, described by prosecutors as an alleged Crip gang member hired by Wang to carry out the shooting. According to the Contra Costa District Attorney's office, Wang and Pearl planned the murder together, then traveled from the Bay Area to Southern California on June 7, 2024, the day before the killing. Prosecutors allege Wang paid Pearl, joined him at the crime scene and lay in wait for Li before Pearl carried out the shooting. And then 13 months later, Wang allegedly used a knife to kill Gao and Cheng inside their own home, this time carrying out the violence himself. Court records reveal Wang had actually filed for divorce in January 2024, the same year as Lee's killing, but then dropped the case in August of that year. The through line connecting all three death, prosecutors say is Yan Wang. Lee was killed because he was with her. Gao and Chang were killed because they were in the way of Howard Wang being with her openly. Every victim in this case paid with their life so that one man could be with the woman he wanted. Wang also faces additional charges of making criminal death threats against his wife and for allegedly preventing her from reporting a crime to police on January 7, suggesting investigators believe the threats and coercion began long before the killings. Contra Costa County DA Diana Beckton called it a stark reminder of the devastating toll domestic violence takes on families and communities. Defense attorneys requested the arraignments be rescheduled. Pearl is now set to be arraigned on April 1 and Wang on April 14 at 1:30pm in Martinez. Yan Wang remains in custody. The Los Angeles county case will be consolidated with the Walnut Creek murders and prosecuted in Contra Costa County. If convict convicted, Howard Wang faces up to life in prison without the possibility of parole. From a case that took nearly a year to unravel, we turn to one that took nearly four decades where a main man is finally standing trial for the 1986 kidnapping and murder of an 11 year old girl who never made it home from school. From the Bay Area we head to Stanford, Connecticut, where a trial nearly 40 years in the making got underway this week entering its second day of testimony on Tuesday. 60 year old Mark Karen, a resident of Stetson, Maine, is now standing trial for the 1986 kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of 11 year old Kathleen Flynn, a case that has left a shadow over this community for decades. Flynn was a sixth grader walking to meet her mom at their normal pickup spot from school the afternoon of September 23, 1986. She never showed up. The first witness to take the stand Monday In Superior Court in Stamford was Kathleen's mother, Esther Marie Flynn. She testified that her daughter, who went by Kathy, had just started sixth grade at Ponus Ridge Middle School in Norwalk, Connecticut, three weeks before she was killed. On the afternoon she disappeared, Kathy was wearing a whale T shirt and bright pink sneakers she had bought herself with money she'd earned working at her family's restaurant. She said she'd begun walking home from school with some friends along a paved pathway that led toward Hunter's Lane. Esther Flynn, a high school math teacher at the time, usually met Kathy at a nearby intersection, but that afternoon she was running a few minutes late for a meeting. Kathy never reached their meeting spot. When her daughter didn't arrive home at the usual time, Esther Flynn went looking for her at the school and the surrounding neighborh neighborhood. She couldn't find her and reported her missing to police. Search teams were formed. The next morning. Her body was found in the woods behind the middle school, more than 100ft off the pathway Kathy walked most days. She'd been sexually assaulted and strangled. Mark Karen was 21 at the time of the killing and lived nearby. He was reportedly looked at as a suspect early on, but then the case went cold. For decades, investigators began focusing on Mark Karan as a serious suspect in 2012. That is, according to an arrest warrant, after his DNA was linked to material found under Kathleen's fingernails. Later testing came back inconclusive, but Police obtained additional DNA from Karen in 2017, and advances in forensic technology at that point allowed for further analysis of evidence they had already examined. What they also had and what, in part, drove the arrest was a pattern. Between 1986 and 1988, Karen had been implicated in at least two other sexual assaults, an abduction, and an attempted kidnapping, cases that investigators said bore striking similarities to Kathleen's murder in terms of geography, method, and behavior. In 2019, Mark Karen was arrested at his home in Stetson, Maine, a small town outside of Bangor, where he'd lived since 2013. As he was leaving for the day, he was extradited to Connecticut and has been in custody ever since. He's facing charges of murder, murder with special circumstances, and first degree kidnapping. If convicted, Karen, now 60, faces life without the possibility of parole. The road to trial has been long. The case stalled for years, in part because Karen faced separate federal weapons charges after dozens of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition were seized from his main home. Those federal proceedings complicated the timeline before the murder case could move forward. Karen also appears on Maine's sex offender registry as a lifetime registrant stemming from a sexual assault conviction in Connecticut in 1989, three years after Kathleen Flynn's murder. If convicted, Karen faces life without the possibility of parole. The trial is expected to last up to three weeks. For the Flynn family, this week is one they've been waiting for since 1986. And now to Butte County, California, where a citizen's 911 call last month set off an investigation that ended with a man charged with murder and evidence suggesting the victim was shot before his body was set on fire. The family of 33 year old Chris Kidwell hadn't heard from him in about a week. He'd been living on a rural property in Butte County, California since late 2025 and when they finally called the Sheriff's office, human remains were discovered on that same property the very next day. Now a 52 year old Oroville man has been charged with murder after burned human remains were discovered on his property and investigators say the victim was shot before his body was set on the suspect. Joseph Dexter Taylor has pleaded not guilty to the charge and is expected back in court on Thursday, April 2 for a preliminary hearing. It started on the morning of March 21st when two men called 911 to report finding what appeared to be a human skull and other skeletal remains on a property on Rickey Road in the rural Hurlton area east of Oroville. The previous morning on March 20, those same two men told investigators that a man later identified as 52 year old Joseph Dexter Taylor had shown up at their home appearing agitated and talking about a cremation. They also noticed visible burn marks on Taylor's legs. When deputies responded to Ricky Road on March 21 and confirmed the presence of human remains, investigators obtained search warrants for two parcels of land on the property. They recovered the remains along with additional evidence. The Butte County District Attorney's Office later said the evidence indicates the victim was shot before Taylor burned the body. While formal DNA confirmation is still pending, investigators believe the remains belonged to 33 year old Chris Kidwell, a man who had reportedly been living on Taylor's property since late 2025. Kidwell's family had contacted the sheriff's office just one day before the remains were found, telling investigators they'd been unable to reach him for about a week. Taylor was already sitting in the Butte County Jail on an unrelated felony warrant involving a firearm when investigators made their connection to the case. At the conclusion of the investigation, he was formally booked on one count of murder. He additionally faces a pending arson charge which he's pleaded not guilty to and separate weapons offenses. He has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail. The investigation remains ongoing and the Butte County Sheriff's Office has said additional information will be released as it becomes available. At a pretrial hearing on March 31, Judge London Kight made clear she had concerns about how 65 year old Henry Tenton's withdrawal of his guilty plea could impact the broader case. Kite said, quote, I can't have someone who is not set for trial slowing down cases that are set for trial charged in the same indictment. The hearing involved 37 year old Mario Fernandez and his estranged wife, 36 year old Shawna Gardner, who waived her appearance, which is the latest development in a case we've been closely following. For anyone unfamiliar on the night of February 16, 2022, 33 year old Jared Bride Again, a Microsoft executive and father of four, was ambushed and shot to death in Jacksonville Beach. He just dropped off his twin children from his first marriage at Gardner's home and was driving back when he encountered a tire that had been deliberately placed in the road. When he stepped out of his SUV to move it, he was shot. His two year old daughter, Bexley, was strapped into her car seat in the back. A bullet missed her by mere inches. Investigators say the murder was orchestrated by Bride Again's ex wife Shanna Gardner, and her then husband Mario Fernandez, allegedly because Gardner wanted to end the custody arrangement she shared with Bride Again over their twins. The gunman, Henry Tenton, was a tenant at one of Fernandez's rental properties who pleaded guilty to second degree murder and agreed to testify against against the pair, but has since withdrawn that plea and now says he no longer intends to testify. Both Gardner and Fernandez have pleaded not guilty and are charged with first degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, solicitation to commit a capital felony, and child abuse. Prosecutors withdrew their intent to seek the death penalty in November 2025 and earlier this month Fernandez was denied bond yet again. As it stands, jury selection is set to begin August 3rd with separate juries, each defendant and potentially up to 500 prospective jurors called. Four years after Jared Brigan was shot and killed on a dark road, justice is still working its way through the courts and this summer the case will finally go to trial. Quick pause. This might help you getting into gardening. TikTok has simple tips that actually work. Work. Planting, pruning, fixing common problems. Real advice from real gardeners. Download TikTok now. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa Richardson. I wanted to take a brief moment to tell you about another show from Crime house that I know you'll love. America's Most Infamous Crimes, hosted by Katie Ring. Each week Katie takes on a notorious crime, whether unfolding now or etched into American history, revealing not just what happened, but how it forever changed our society. Serial killers who terrorized cities, unsolved mysteries that keep detectives up at night, and investigations that change the way we think about justice. Each case unfolds across multiple episodes, released every Tuesday through Thursday, from the first sign that something was wrong to the moment the truth came out or didn't. These are the stories behind the headlines. Listen to and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes Tuesday through Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Lastly, let me tell you about what else is happening at Crime House today. Clues is examining the case of Nanette Krental, a woman found dead inside her burning home in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, in 2017. Her death was initially ruled a suicide. Her family never accepted that determination, and the investigation that followed raised questions that extended well beyond one case. Questions about how the place where a crime happens shapes everything that comes after it. When most people picture a homicide investigation, they picture something metropolitan. A dense network of cameras, multiple agencies with specialized units, medical examiners with deep institutional resources, forensic labs running around the clock. That picture is real, but it describes a specific kind of place. And most of the United States isn't that place. The majority of American landmass is rural. Thousands of counties are policed by departments with small staffs, limited budgets, and investigators who handle everything from traffic incidents to violent crime. That doesn't make those departments less dedicated or less capable. It means they operate under a genuinely different set of conditions. Conditions that shape what's possible from the first hours of an investigation and all the way through to a courtroom. Before you head over to Clues for the full story, here are five ways geography shapes how a homicide investigation unfolds and what it means for the people at the center of it. Number one first response time and the preservation of a crime scene. In a major city, the interval between when a crime is reported and when investigators arrive on scene can be measured in minutes. In rural areas, that interval is often much longer, sometimes significantly so. A deputy may be covering a territory that spans hundreds of square miles. The nearest available investigator may be an hour away. In some regions, the nearest forensic specialist may not be reachable until the following day. That window matters more than it might seem. Crime scenes are not static. Weather moves evidence, animals disturb remains well meaning bystanders, family members, or first responders without forensic training can inadvertently compromise things that cannot be recovered. The longer a scene sits without proper preservation, the more the physical record of what happened begins to erode. This isn't a failure unique to any particular department. It's a function of distance and staffing that no amount of dedication can fully overcome. But it does mean that the evidentiary foundation of a rural homicide investigation is sometimes thinner from the very beginning, through no fault of anyone on the ground. Number two, access to forensic resources and how agencies request them. Large metropolitan police departments often have forensic resources in house crime labs, medical examiner offices, digital forensics units, and specialists in areas like fire investigation, ballistics and trace evidence. When a case requires expertise, it's frequently available within the same agency or a closely affiliated one. Rural and small town jurisdictions typically don't operate that way. Forensic work is often sent to a state lab that may be serving dozens or hundreds of agencies simultaneously. Turnaround times on evidence can stretch from weeks to months. A case requiring specialized analysis, digital forensics, independent pathology review, fire scene reconstruction may require formal coordination with outside agencies or federal assistance. That takes time to arrange. None of that makes the work less rigorous, but it adds time and logistical complexity to investigations that are already moving against the clock. In cases where evidence is fragile or time sensitive, those delays can have real consequences for what ultimately holds up in court. Number three, Jurisdictional complexity and multi agency coordination. Rural homicide investigations often don't belong cleanly to a single agency. A crime scene may fall at the boundary between a county sheriff's territory and a municipal police department, depending on where a victim lived, where they died, and where any suspects are located. Multiple agencies may have overlapping or competing jurisdictions from the very beginning. That complexity isn't unique to rural areas, but it tends to be more acute there. Agencies operating with small staffs don't always have established protocols for multi jurisdictional coordination. Communication systems may not be interoperable. And when federal involvement becomes necessary through the FBI or other agencies, the formal process of requesting and integrating that assistance adds another layer of time and procedure to a case that's already moving in a difficult environment. What can result is an investigation that is technically active across multiple agencies, but practically fragmented, where no single entity has full visibility into everything being done, and where critical information doesn't always flow as quickly as it should between the people who need it. Number four, the role of community in rural investigations and its complications. One of the genuine strengths of investigating crime in smaller, tighter knit communities is that people often know each other. Investigators may have existing relationships with witnesses. Local knowledge of roads Routines, histories, and relationships can move a case forward in ways that are simply not available to a detective parachuted into an unfamiliar environment. But that same closeness cuts the other way. In a small community, a victim and a suspect may share overlapping social networks, workplaces, churches, or families. Witnesses may be reluctant to come forward, not out of indifference, but because cooperation carries social costs that feel very real in a place where everyone knows everyone. Investigators themselves may have personal connections to people involved in a case, connections that, even when managed professionally, can complicate how evidence is gathered and how conclusions are reached. None of this is unusual or unique to any particular community. It's a tension that exists wherever people live in close proximity to one another. But in rural investigations, where the pool of witnesses and the pool of people with connections to the case are often the same group, that tension is harder to navigate around. Number five how cases are prosecuted when resources are stretched Getting to an arrest is one challenge. Getting to a conviction is another. And the resource gap doesn't disappear once a case moves from investigation to prosecution. Rural district attorney's offices frequently handle a broad range of cases with limited staff. A complex homicide one requiring expert witnesses, forensic testimony, and extended courtroom proceedings demands resources that smaller offices may not have in abundance. In some jurisdictions, prosecutors may need to rely on outside experts whose credibility and availability aren't guaranteed. Defense challenges to forensic evidence can be harder to counter when the original testing was done under constrained conditions. This doesn't mean rural prosecutions are less rigorous. Some of the most thorough and well prepared cases in American legal history have come out of small jurisdictions where a single attorney devoted years to a single case. But it does mean that the path from investigation to conviction in a resource limited environment requires a different kind of sustained commitment, one that doesn't always have institutional infrastructure behind it. If you're the kind of person who listens to true crime, with an investigator's mindset weighing the evidence, tracking the timeline, forming your own read on what happened. There's one category of evidence that's easy to underwrite way not the forensics, not the witness statements, not the suspect's alibi, the context, the year a crime happened, the county it happened in, the size of the department that caught it, the resources available to the people working it, the relationship between that community and its institutions. Those details can feel like background noise, set dressing around the real story. But they shape what was possible at every stage, what evidence could be collected, how quickly by whole what a prosecutor could reasonably take to trial, what a jury in that place at that moment was likely to believe when a case goes cold or a verdict surprises or an investigation takes a turn that seems hard to explain. Sometimes the answer is in those details, not as an excuse for any particular outcome, just as part of the full picture. The hard facts of a case tell you what happened. The context around them often tells you why the story ended the way it did. For the full story behind the Nanette Krental case and the investigation that followed, head over to our Crime House feed for the latest episode of clues. You've been listening to crime house 247 bringing you breaking crime news. I'm Vanessa Richardson. We'll be back tomorrow morning with more developing stories. Stay safe. Safe and thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Not sure what to listen to next? Check out America's Most Infamous Crimes, hosted by Katie Ring. From serial killers to unsolved mysteries and game changing investigations, each week Katie takes on a notorious criminal case in America, American history. Listen to and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes now. Wherever you listen to podcasts.