A beloved grandfather went missing out of the blue.
- There was a caretaker that came in to help my dad,
and he would call her his angel.
- But there was something unusual about it.
He left everything he had behind,
and then he disappeared.
- I tried to call the caretaker,
and nobody answered.
- And his financial records revealed foul play.
- When this caregiver told us
that my grandpa moved to Mexico,
that was wrong.
My grandfather would never go to Mexico.
- There was a pattern of his money
moving into a joint account.
- Six months later,
the first sign of contact was suspicious...
- A daughter knows her dad's voice,
and I just went...
I couldn't breathe.
- Which led detectives on an epic manhunt...
- I sent agents and financial detectives into Mexico.
We had helicopter, ground-penetrating radar.
There was just no stone unturned.
- Where a web of lies was exposed.
- "What the ---- did I get into?"
is what was going through my mind.
"What the hell is going on?"
- Was the elderly man
fleeing an overprotective family?
- Or was he in grave danger?
- If he's still alive, I'm gonna find him.
- As a doctor and certified expert
for the California Medical Board,
I know firsthand that most medical professionals
will go to any length to help their patients,
but in some cases,
there are those with a deranged mind
and a license to kill.
With modern medicine,
people are living longer than ever,
so caring for an aging parent
is a reality for millions of Americans.
This often means trusting a professional
home health care worker
to look after loved ones in their twilight years.
But for the Rabourn family,
that decision to hand over care to someone else
was one they came to regret.
- My grandfather was an intelligent man.
He had a lot of opinions about finance,
about automobiles, about the Dodgers.
He loved the Dodgers. He was a jovial person.
So people enjoyed being around my grandfather.
- My father was very sweet,
but I don't think we had a normal conversation.
He always talked about money and investments,
and for a man 89, you know, he still had his mind.
I mean, he knew what he wanted to do
and what he didn't want to do.
He would call me about two things:
vitamins I should sell and stocks I should buy.
But...
- My grandma died when I was very young,
and within a month's time, my grandfather met somebody,
and she became my grandpa's second wife, Carolyn.
My grandfather and Carolyn moved to San Diego
because they wanted to be active year-round.
They moved into a really nice
country club type of atmosphere.
You know, had a life that was very centered
around their social activities.
Carolyn was a great wife for my grandfather.
She was a very strong woman. She took care of him.
My grandpa spent almost 30 years with Carolyn,
but then Carolyn became sick,
and that was a sad time for my grandfather.
So Carolyn's son, Ralph, came out to visit San Diego.
- My mother was diagnosed with lung cancer
'cause she was a lifetime smoker.
And when it got to that point,
they put her in home hospice care
to check on her, like, once a week,
once every two weeks.
- There was a caretaker, Denise Goodwin,
that came in to help my dad,
and he would call her his angel,
and he would tell me, "She's helping me."
She was doing things like getting groceries,
cooking, you know, taking care of things for him.
- I know that my grandfather
was really afraid of being alone,
and he would get weepy and sad
at the prospect of losing Carolyn.
My dad would say, "Now, you know when Carolyn dies,
I'm coming to live with you."
I mean, he didn't ask. He just said.
And I said, "That's good."
- Very shortly after I was out there,
she went into a coma, and she died of cancer.
Well, she was cremated, and she was buried at sea.
- It was very hard to have her pass,
but personally I was excited for my grandfather
to come to move to Kansas City
to be in close proximity to us.
But then one day, my mom gets a call from my grandpa,
and the story seemed to have shifted.
- I asked him, "Okay, do you want me to come out now?"
"No, I don't want you to come."
I said, "Well, don't we need to get ready
to have you move here?"
"No, I'm gonna be fine."
- My grandfather started talking about how
he was gonna stay in San Diego throughout the winter.
That kind of made sense because my grandfather
loved San Diego and loved the weather.
- My dad told me that he was gonna go ahead
and keep the caregiver, Denise,
because she was taking care of things for him.
She also had a fiduciary degree
and that she would be able to help
with all the financial things that he had to do.
It was sad, because I was under the impression
that he was gonna come live with me
and I was gonna have my father back.
- He was grieving, so my mom made this plan
that she was gonna call him
and keep in communication with him.
- I called my dad, and we had the best conversation
we'd ever had together.
You know, it was a lot of "I love you."
He was telling me that he would come soon.
And we left it like,
we're gonna call each other, like, every three to four days
and keep in touch.
And he said, "That's what we're gonna do."
- Within a month, I come home from work,
turn on the answering machine,
and I hear this lady's voice.
- That was unexpected, to say the least.
We were shocked.
My dad called the caretaker, Denise,
to try to find out who this Carmen was.
And she told my dad that my grandpa met Carmen
at the grocery store.
I thought that was kind of weird,
but once again, my grandfather was of sound mind.
He had a car. He went out to Vegas a lot.
He had time-shares out there.
- It was hard to believe that Gerry would go to Vegas
so soon after Carolyn's death.
However, it wasn't the first time
he made a rash decision to tie the knot.
- My mom was dead two weeks when he takes off,
you know, with his second wife, Carolyn,
but when my son told me, "Your dad got married,"
it was a real shock to me
because the day my dad and I
had that wonderful conversation,
I think he would have told me,
and he didn't say anything.
But everybody's thinking the best
and not wanting me to think the worst.
So...
I thought, "Well, you know,
maybe I'm just overreacting."
The Carmen lady said on the recorder
that they were gonna travel
and they would get in touch with us.
And so I was kind of trying to hold on to that
because I knew that no matter where he was
and what he was doing,
he would send me the birthday card.
He would always go out himself and buy me the card
and put $30 in it no matter how old I was.
I would get $30.
It meant so much to him.
My birthday came and went,
and there was no birthday card.
And in my heart, I thought, "Something is wrong."
So I tried to call my dad, and nobody answered.
We tried to call the caretaker,
and she wasn't answering her phone either.
- Thoughts and doubts started to creep in.
That's when she decided, "That's it."
And she filed a missing persons report.
- Coming up...
- The voice on the phone said,
"We don't want you bugging us anymore,"
and then he hung up.
- He's supposed to be in Mexico,
but his debit card was being used in California.
We looked through the house
to see if there's any sign of Rabourn.
We didn't find anything.
- I think that something terrible has happened to him.
- Gerald Rabourn's missing persons report
said that Gerald had a girlfriend
and that he didn't want to see his family anymore.
So I called Mary right away, his daughter,
and she was pretty adamant there's something wrong.
When I called the caretaker, Denise Goodwin,
she told me that Gerald was getting married
to his new girlfriend, Carmen, in Vegas,
and then they were going to Mexico.
Denise sounded believable.
She sounded like she was trying to be truthful with me.
At one point, she said Gerald didn't want his kids
to know where he's at.
- Denise told her that she had made a promise to my dad
that she would not tell me where he was
because I was too religious and he wanted to have fun.
And I went, "He's 89. He wants to have fun?"
At that point, Mo said, "Maybe he's not missing
and you just don't know where he is."
I thought, "What am I gonna do if nobody believes me?"
- There is an immediate skepticism from the police
towards the idea of my grandpa missing,
and it is true than an adult
that doesn't want their kids to know where they are,
that's not a crime.
- Up to this point, Mary's son, Chris,
had not been alarmed
until he heard what Goodwin told police.
- When this caregiver told the detectives
that my grandpa moved to Mexico,
that was wrong.
My grandfather would never go to Mexico.
- He hated Mexico--
the drug wars.
- When the family told me
that there's no way he's going to Mexico,
I said, "I'm gonna check in
and find out what happened to his financials down in Mexico."
And I figured if we could just trace
where this money has gone, we could find Rabourn.
I noticed that Gerald had used his debit card
in Valley Center, California.
So I said, "How could he be in Mexico
and his debit card's being used in Valley Center?"
- And that was a red flag
because Denise Goodwin, the caretaker,
was a resident of Valley Center.
- That's when I said,
"I think maybe he's at her house."
- The area of Valley Center where Denise Goodwin lived
is very rural.
The house was on a couple acres of horse property.
- When we got to Denise's,
I knocked on the door, and I introduced myself,
and I said, "I need to find Gerald.
"You're the only one that's seen him.
"You're the last one who's seen him.
"You need to tell us where he's at
'cause nobody knows where he's at but you."
She goes, "I swear he went to Mexico."
So I said, "Okay, what about these?"
I had copies of the debit purchases
there in Valley Center.
And I said, "What about all these
purchases on his debit card?"
And then she started to turn kind of red,
she got kind of flustered, and she goes,
"Um, well, well,
"he said I could have $5,000
"to use on his debit card
"for helping him around the house,
but I felt bad about that, so I only spent $3,000."
I said, "Really?
What about this check for $5,000?"
And she goes, "Um,
I mailed a check to him down in Mexico."
And I said, "Well, what's the address?"
And she goes, "Well, he didn't want you
or his kids to know the address."
And I said, "Well, you're gonna give me the address
"because his kids are worried about where he's at
and now I'm worried about him."
You know, and I'm thinking, "This does not seem right."
It just gives me a bad feeling about this,
but I didn't want to spook her.
I needed her to keep talking to me,
so we looked through the house to see
if there's any sign of Rabourn.
We didn't find anything.
Then she comes out. She gives us an address
down in San Felipe, Mexico.
That was pivotal in the case.
- For the first time, investigators had a solid lead
regarding Gerald's whereabouts,
but was Denise telling them the truth?
For Detective Parga, there was only one way to find out.
- I sent agents into Mexico to that whole area
down in San Felipe.
- I told Mo, "If you find out where he is in Mexico,
"tell him if he only call me once,
"I will never bother him again.
I just want to hear from him once."
- So I said, "Okay, I gotta straighten all this out."
I'm gonna find him.
While detectives were down in Mexico,
I kept researching Gerald's bank info.
- There was a pattern that began to appear
of some of Gerald's money and Carolyn's money
moving out of their accounts
and moving into a joint account
between Gerald and the caretaker, Denise.
We know that Denise Goodwin came into this home
to take care of Gerald Rabourn,
and she also started helping with Gerald's finances,
and now she had access to his bank accounts.
The first thing that I saw when looking
at the joint account between Gerald and Denise
was two rather large checks made out
to Carolyn Rabourn's son, Ralph Scobey.
One check was for $13,000.
The other was for $15,000.
And that was kind of a red flag.
Why did Ralph get these checks
from Denise Goodwin, the caretaker?
What was going on there?
We made Ralph a person of interest in the case.
There was just too much that was wrong with this.
- Investigators were looking
for 89-year-old Gerald Rabourn
down in Mexico after his home health care worker,
Denise Goodwin, gave them his address down in San Felipe,
but they were alarmed to discover
that while he was away,
Goodwin had been using Rabourn's debit card
and writing checks to Gerald's stepson, Ralph Scobey.
- So I went out to talk to Ralph Scobey.
Felt he had some involvement.
We really weren't sure what it was.
- I told investigators that my mother had investments
and I went out to San Diego to collect the money
and the girl at the bank said, "You know,
"the money from this particular CD account
"was phone transferred on the 29th of September
from your mother's account to Gerry, her husband's account."
My mother was in a coma on the 29th.
There's no way she could have made this phone call.
And she said, "Well, maybe it was Gerry that did it."
Well, I tried to get in touch with Gerry,
but he wouldn't answer his phone.
And then I'm going to the house,
and the locks have all been changed.
This caretaker, Denise, opens the door
and lets me in.
And I said, "If you're having anything to do
"with this money disappearing into somebody else's account,
I'm gonna get to the bottom of this."
The next day, I get a call.
She says, "I spoke with Gerry,
"and I can get that money for you
"and it'll be in two different checks,
two different payments."
I said, "Okay, now, look, Denise,
I'd like to talk to Gerry myself."
She said, "He's down in Mexico."
And I said, "What are you talking about?
"This makes absolutely no sense.
"There's absolutely no way that he would go
to Mexico on a vacation."
- Initially talking to Ralph,
seemed like he was holding something back,
but as the conversation went on and he explained what happened,
it made a lot more sense why he got paid the money he got paid.
So after we talked to him,
he was no longer a person of interest in this case.
We had eliminated him as being involved.
- While investigators scoured
San Felipe for Gerald Rabourn,
Detective Mo Parga did some more digging
into the financial relationship
between Denise and Gerald.
What she found was disturbing.
- The house where Mr. Rabourn lived,
it had been changed to Denise's name.
The house was claimed to her,
and then she sold it right away.
And that was huge red flag,
but I'm not in real estate to understand it.
So I did call her realtor
that she used to sell Rabourn's house.
Completely uncooperative, would not answer my calls.
Turns out she is a friend of Denise Goodwin's.
- Gerald left everything he had behind.
He transferred everything he owned over to a stranger,
and then he disappeared.
- I didn't understand how
she can sell the house out from underneath him
and without his signature,
so I headed straight out to Valley Center
to the notary to see
if this real estate document was actually legit.
And we looked in the notary's books,
and it had the notary's name misspelled.
And she goes, "That is not my writing."
- Could Denise Goodwin
have forged the signature in the book?
According to the notary,
it wasn't out of the realm of possibility.
- She said that the caretaker, Denise Goodwin,
comes in all the time, has a bunch of paperwork,
and she leaves her stuff out,
and Denise will take over the table,
so it would have been quite easy for Denise
to do the fraud signature in the book.
So we took the notary's books as evidence.
- But what happened next gave detectives
the answer they were looking for.
- We showed the notary pictures of Gerald and Denise.
"Never seen that man before."
At that point, I knew we have something serious.
- Investigators believed they had
a clear-cut case of financial fraud
against home health care worker Denise Goodwin,
but they quickly realized
that there was much more to the story
when they received a report
from the search team in Mexico.
- We went to an address in Mexico
where Gerald is supposed to be,
and it looked more and more like
Gerald had never been there.
We were able to locate a groundskeeper
who had been there for over 20 years.
We showed him Gerald Rabourn's photo
and Denise Goodwin's photo,
and he said he'd never seen either one of them.
- His car hadn't crossed the border.
He hasn't been heard from.
We haven't found him.
- He was last seen in September or October of 2010,
so, you know, almost six months had passed
since this 89-year-old man
just kind of disappearing off the face of the Earth.
- All of his money and all of his wife's money
had gone over to Goodwin,
and his signs of life basically ceased.
That didn't make sense.
It's right about then that this looked like
it was more than just a missing persons case
and it was more likely a homicide.
- Amidst mounting evidence of Gerald Rabourn's demise,
his family received a glimmer of hope.
- I got a call.
When I picked up the phone, the voice on the phone said,
"Mary, sweetie pie and I are traveling around the country."
And I just went...
A daughter knows her dad's voice,
and it wasn't my dad.
I couldn't breathe.
- It had been six months since
Gerald Rabourn disappeared,
and the only trace of him detectives could find
was a string of suspicious financial transactions
between Gerald and his home health care worker,
Denise Goodwin.
But then in April of 2011, his desperate family received
a mysterious phone call that sent them reeling.
- I got a call.
When I picked up the phone, the voice on the phone said,
"Mary, sweetie pie and I are traveling around the country
having a good time and we don't want you bugging us anymore."
And then he hung up.
A daughter knows her dad's voice,
and it wasn't my dad.
So I called the number back, and it was dead.
It was a kill phone to be used only once
and not ever be used again.
Now, nobody uses a kill phone but a criminal.
When I got the call, it was a turning point.
You know, it was the turning point
that needed to happen.
- My mom called me and was just--
she's just a wreck.
And that was the first time
that she started to really vocalize,
"I know that something terrible has happened to him."
- I called the missing persons,
and I was able to get ahold of Mo Parga.
And she said, "I have to tell you something.
"Mary, I am so sorry.
We all think your dad is dead."
At that point, I felt like something left me.
So I just had to hang up,
and I cried because he deserved much better.
- That was a sad moment.
You always hold that hope, but at that point,
we had nothing to prove he's still alive.
I talked to the supervising district attorney
and said, "The Gerald Rabourn missing persons case
is now a no-body homicide.
"The caretaker, Denise Goodwin,
is our only person of interest."
We needed a specific DA to handle a no-body.
Bill Mitchell was the man.
He was the only one
that we felt could really prosecute this case.
- Whenever you're dealing with a no-body case,
it's a lot of time and preparation
because when a perpetrator can successfully
conceal and dispose of a body,
their odds of getting away with murder
increase astronomically.
So we had a lot of work to do to see if we can,
you know, put together more evidence
and to actually get the job done and get it done right.
- There was no stone unturned with Bill Mitchell.
You follow up with everything.
I mean, we had to interview everybody
that had anything to do with Denise and Gerald Rabourn.
- The evidence that we collected in the investigation
showed that Denise Goodwin, she had been looking
for somebody exactly like Gerald Rabourn.
She actually created online personas or personalities
on websites like dating for seniors.
- She went under the name of daddymeup,
and she said that she was 74 years old
looking for an older man to take care of her.
- She actually communicated with over a dozen of these men
but never actually got past
the point of online communications with them
because in September of 2010, she applied for the position
with that home health care agency
asking specifically for hospice cases.
That's how she found her perfect victim.
Gerald Rabourn, that's basically
just the first layer of the onion,
and things, you know, start getting discovered.
Her mother had had a good reputation
with this caregiver agency, and she cashed in on that
and used her mother as a reference
without disclosing her relationship.
- And the mother made fake certificates for Denise
saying she's a caretaker and that she's a fiduciary.
- She did not have credentials to do what she was doing.
She was not bonded.
She was not trained in caregiving.
- I think, in this case, as in a lot of other
elder abuse cases I've investigated,
the elderly people are very trusting.
And when that happens, they're ripe targets for fraud.
- Bill Mitchell also is a fraud attorney,
so he was-- he knows all the banking and the paper trails,
so he was able to direct our financial detective
into areas that they hadn't thought about.
- When you follow the money when you do financial crimes,
financial documents, paper doesn't lie.
And we needed to prove that she killed him for his money.
When Gerald's house was sold in 2011,
there's $350,000 in proceeds from that.
That went into a trust account
which Denise Goodwin had set up in her own name.
- She bought a house,
and she bought two condominiums
and some vacant land.
When I spoke to one of the realtors,
they said that she told him that her plan was to
buy real estate, rent it out, and then live in Costa Rica.
- During the investigation of the condo properties
that Denise had purchased with Mr. Rabourn's money,
we found Tony and Jennifer Gonsalves
that was renting one of the condos in Escondido.
We found out Tony was working for Denise
and Denise offered this condo and a car for super cheap
and he would help her with these properties.
So how much was he helping her?
So he became a person of interest
as in helping her or being a part of it somehow.
- We felt he had some involvement.
We really weren't sure what it was.
And then we finally got the phone records
that made it clear.
- There was a call by a person
who identified themselves as Carmen
saying that she had married Gerald
and they were moving to Mexico.
We knew that Carmen was a made-up person,
so we started looking for clues or evidence
to identify who Carmen was.
I noticed in the cell phone records
that this call was made from Escondido
near where Tony and Jennifer Gonsalves lived.
- So as soon as they got that information,
they went and hit Tony's house with a search warrant.
- "What the ---- did I get into?"
is what was going through my mind.
"What the hell is going on?"
- Investigators identified
Tony and Jennifer Gonsalves
as possible accomplices to murder suspect Denise Goodwin.
Police had evidence that tied them to fraudulent phone calls
made to Gerald Rabourn's family.
- We went and hit Tony's house with a search warrant.
It was in April of 2011.
Then Tony Gonsalves started laying out everything
that he had been doing with Denise Goodwin.
- When I met Denise, we were actually homeless.
We were going through a really rough time.
Denise was just really nice, genuine-seeming lady.
When she found out that I was without work,
my wife is disabled, she wanted to do stuff to help.
According to Denise, she had bought some properties.
She needed help,
somebody who could help her pick renters
and deal with all of that stuff so she didn't have to.
And of course, with a wife and two kids,
I'm like, "Okay, the rent's perfect,
"and all I need to do is help you here?
Sure. No problem."
And now I'm actually angry at Denise
because now I'm being looked at as a suspect
for some involvement in a murder.
I think I'd gotten a ticket in my life at that point.
- Anxious to clear his name, Gonsalves gave detectives
what would become a key piece of evidence
in the case against Goodwin.
According to Tony,
Gerry did not run off and get married.
The woman named Carmen was a fabrication
voiced by his own wife.
- What Denise told me and my wife, Jennifer,
was, Mr. Rabourn and his lady friend
wanted to get the daughter to leave them alone.
He was trying establish a new life.
So he asked Denise to make the phone call,
but Denise felt that the daughter knew her voice,
so she asked Jennifer,
"Would you call and act like you're this lady
just to get the daughter to leave us the ---- alone?"
And Jennifer's like, "Yeah, I can do that."
At the time, I did not know his age.
If I would have known that, that would have been
a definite red flag.
What Jennifer remembers now is,
Denise would never touch the phone.
She had an envelope prepared,
and she had Jennifer put the phone in.
She never touched the phone.
Jennifer didn't think anything of it at that time,
but looking back, big warning sign.
She didn't want her fingerprints
on pieces of evidence
that could possibly be used against her.
- We determined that Tony Gonsalves
wasn't involved in Gerald Rabourn's murder
and that he was getting used by Denise Goodwin.
She saw Tony to be very gullible,
and she took advantage of that.
- Tony told detectives that Goodwin was also behind
the call made to Mary by the Gerald imposter,
and what they uncovered next
proved Goodwin had a motive for murder.
- Because we knew Denise called the banks,
we wanted to get copies of those recordings,
so I wrote a warrant to get those recordings.
- Ultimately, Goodwin was able
to get around security roadblocks
because she had more than just Gerald Rabourn's passwords.
She had his cooperation.
- By December, she's calling up on recorded lines
as Denise Goodwin because now she's gotten power of attorney.
- In a very telling December 21st phone call,
there's approximately $200,000 in the accounts
and she's calling up beginning of December
wanting to cash it all out, saying something
along the lines, "You know how it is
when there's a death in the family."
- And then she cackles and laughs.
I knew right off, we didn't have enough to go forward
with any criminal charges at that point,
so the end of May of 2011, early June,
we were actually executing another search warrant
in Valley Center at Denise Goodwin's property
to see if we can, you know, put together more evidence.
- When we went to the Goodwin compound,
we had a full crew of financial detectives.
We had a helicopter taking photos,
'cause we had no idea what all was in that compound.
- San Diego PD served a search warrant
on Denise Goodwin's residence.
The warrant was read by a detective,
and I watched Denise's face as they mentioned
one of the things they were looking for was a dead body.
Denise did not looked shocked.
Matter of fact, she kind of looked at the ground,
totally deadpan.
- We split up and searched.
We did interviews.
We actually had ground-penetrating radar
brought in, and we did ground penetration in that horse area,
in the corral area.
I noticed a depression in the dirt,
and I just kind of was kicking the dirt around,
and Denise goes, "Well,
that's where I buried my horse."
And she volunteers this information.
I'm like, "This does not seem right."
- We went to that exact same portion of the property
with a backhoe, and the first thing that you could see
when the backhoe got there was that part of the ground
was much softer than the ground around it.
That indicated to us, or at least to me,
that something was there once,
but whatever had been there was no longer there.
- It was suspicious that police never found
the horse Denise claimed to have buried on her property,
but what they found hidden
in Goodwin's computer search history was incriminating.
A forensic analysis revealed she had researched
overdosing with Darvocet, a pain-relieving opiate
similar to morphine.
A Darvocet overdose would cause seizures, liver failure,
coma, and ultimately death.
- During the investigation of the property,
our financial detective gives us a call
and says, "Hey, she is flying out tomorrow morning
out of the country with her son."
- They had already purchased tickets,
and we knew all the plans had been made.
I'm thinking, "We got to do everything we can
to stop this."
- Investigators were closing in
on Denise Goodwin,
but they needed more evidence
to prove she killed Gerald Rabourn.
So when they discovered
she was about to flee the country with her son,
they had to act quickly.
- We just didn't have what we needed
to put the murder case together yet,
but we knew we had enough evidence
to charge her with the crime of stealing the victim's car.
- Gerald Rabourn's white Honda that he owned went missing.
Ultimately we found the car
at her son's high school.
- So when we found out
that she was going to leave the country,
the decision was made to arrest her at the airport
as she tried to board the flight.
- The team traveled to San Diego Airport
at 5:00 in the morning with the homicide detail
and waited for her and her son to get dropped off
with all their luggage to go on their trip.
They didn't get to go too far.
Denise and Michael Goodwin were arrested.
- As soon as she was arrested, the police called me.
I just fell on my knees and went,
"Thank you, God."
- They were taken into custody, searched, handcuffed,
taken to jail, and within a little over a month,
she was placed into a maximum security unit
and she wasn't informed of the charges, actually,
till a phone call that she had with her husband
after she had been moved.
And on the phone call-- it's recorded--
she is heard to be crying,
saying that she didn't know what was going on,
and her husband saying, "You haven't heard?"
- When she said, "Did they find him?"
it really affirmed my belief at that time
that she'd killed him, that he was gone.
We had determined that Gerald Rabourn died
on or very close to October 21st of 2010.
He's very much alive up through the 21st,
and then shortly after that Carmen phone call,
all signs of life cease for Gerald Rabourn.
We surmise that he perhaps had discovered already
in one of his bank statements
that money was missing from where it should be.
- I don't think she had any clue
how smart my dad was about money.
I'm sure that my dad told her,
"Give me my money back, or I'm calling the police."
- We believe there was a confrontation on the 21st
that led to him being done away with on that day.
- Looking at the cell phone data that we had
to see where Denise's phone had been,
we were able to put together
a map of where she could have gone
with Gerald Rabourn's remains,
looking for areas that she could not be seen
dumping a body.
These included canyons, some very large open spaces,
and some lakes and reservoirs.
- We went out and did a lot of searches out in that area,
brought many cadaver dogs out,
but we never did find Gerald Rabourn's body.
- I started having panic attacks about it.
I started having dreams about it.
I started seeing animals eating his bones
because nobody found his body.
- We have no cause of death. We have no crime scene.
We have no confession, no blood and guts,
no coroner or medical examiner coming in
to talk about how he died.
It's somewhat nerve-racking, the first day of trial,
the opening statement.
A case of a no-body murder case like this,
the stakes are very high.
- Bill Mitchell took all of the circumstantial evidence
with the audiotapes.
We used all those recordings to prove she's lying,
her own admission of, "Did they find him?"
- And all the lies just compiled
and all the witnesses just saying what they knew.
It was all laid out perfectly.
There was just no hiding the truth.
- Ultimately, the verdict came back,
"We, the jury in the above entitled action,
"find the defendant, Denise Michelle Goodwin,
guilty of murder in the first degree."
When that's read, it's just a huge, enormous relief.
You feel like you can breathe again.
And she was sentenced to life without parole.
- Before all this started, if you would have asked me,
"Is this person capable of committing a murder?"
I would have said, "No."
But knowing what I know now,
people are capable of anything.
- Is it possible that she had something to do
with Carolyn Rabourn's death?
It's possible,
'cause things happen pretty quickly afterwards,
including the transfer of property.
- It's just hard for me to fathom what kind of person
takes advantage of someone like this
or would murder for money.
- These cases, they don't leave you.
They stay with you. You never forget them.
If I'm out on my horse on a trail, I'm looking.
So I will always look for Gerald Rabourn's body.
- I miss my grandfather,
and I feel like as parents age,
we don't spend enough time as a society of honoring them
by protecting them.
And to me, my grandpa Gerry's life felt taken away.
- I've never had a funeral for my own father.
It's hard to find closure
when there's no body, you know?
I still cry over him.
- Denise Goodwin was a medical imposter.
She never had the certifications or permits
to provide hospice care or fiduciary counseling.
While she was only convicted of killing Gerald Rabourn,
police also suspected her in the death of his wife, Carolyn,
but she never admitted to either one.
For more on "License To Kill,"
go to oxygen.com.