The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [102]
Then he told me how Phyllis killed Seth. His version, that is. “That Monday, they went to the bar at the Breakers and Seth was doing coke and drinking, but Phyllis wasn’t. Seth called me [later], and I told him he needed to go home to his wife and make nice. He was pissed because she had spent $16,000 on drapes, and I told him, ‘You can’t take them back, they’re custom made. But take them down and put them in the office so she knows no means no.’ But she thought he’d taken them back, so she was extra-pissed. In their new bedroom they both have these big walk-in closets, and she had put a Baggie filled with crushed Ambien in the safe in her closet. Seth needed the Ambien to balance off the coke. So she tells him that she wants to start new, and she’s going to cook him dinner and make him pasta à la vodka. She mashed the pills into the sauce, but the problem was it turned the sauce purple and Seth said, ‘This tastes like shit, I’m not gonna eat it.’”
Ash paused, and glared at one of the movers. “Hey, the lights are part of the tree, it’s the tree that comes apart.
“Now, where was I? Then Phyllis said, ‘Eat it, you’ll feel better, and then I’ll call Tiger over, and I’ll watch you two have sex in the pool.’ But first she took these pictures of him looking all fucked up. Then Seth walked into the pool, and the Ambien started having its effect. She went back inside, did the dishes, took the dog for a walk, came back, and went out to the pool. The only problem was, he was still alive; he was passed out but floating on his back. She rolled him over, and that’s how he died.”
Um, how did he know all of this? “Phyllis told me,” he said. “I was coming back from Penn State with a friend that day, and I had turned off my phone because I just could not deal with them anymore. When I turned my phone back on, I had a message from Phyllis saying, ‘Seth’s dead.’”
Ash says at that point he called the lawyer Gloria Allred, of Laci Peterson fame. “I knew her because of the Peterson case, and I lived around where Laci did. She told me I had to go to the police.”
Ash stopped to direct the movers again, then delivered this doozy. This past September, he said, he was sitting at home speaking to the Jupiter detectives when he got a FedEx box from Phyllis. “A while back, she had me track down two cases of Krug Champagne that went for $2,000 a bottle. So I get this box before Seth’s funeral, and I was like, ‘Oh my God. Is Seth’s head in that box?” But it was a bottle of Krug with a note that said, ‘The scumbag is dead.’”
At one point, Ash had said that Phyllis had explicitly fessed up and that he had her confession on tape. But now he retreated a bit. Now he told me she had only implied on the tape that she’d poisoned her husband. Still, he insisted that she had, in fact, confessed to him—just not when the tape was running.
I asked Ash if he could provide a snapshot or any other evidence to back up his claim that he and Seth Tobias had ever met. I asked him if I could see the photos of Tobias taken the day he died. He tugged at his cap and shifted his weight. “You really need to call Debra and make a proposal.” He wanted money before speaking to me further. “I’m only telling you one percent of it. Make a good proposal, and I’ll tell you more.”
THE NEXT DAY, I started checking out Ash’s story. Phone records confirm that he talked to Phyllis more than a dozen times in the days after Tobias’s death. At one point, Ash had told me that he had been “deputized” by the San Diego Police Department to tape Phyllis, but the department says it didn’t happen. The Jupiter detectives won’t say if Ash received a FedEx package from Phyllis while they were interviewing him at his home, but really, how likely is that? Under oath, Lucille Schiavone, Tobias’s secretary, maintained that she had heard of Ash only in relation to his attempted shakedown of Seth. And Schiavone said she was the one