Weddings are meant to unite families — but this one tore the Connell family apart. 

After getting divorced, family matriarch Mickie Keller gave her daughter Kelly Connell her former wedding ring, a gorgeous multi-diamond ring estimated to be  worth around $20,000. 

But when Keller’s son Joseph “Joey” Connell decided he wanted to propose to his Russian girlfriend, Olga, Keller wanted the ring back. 

Rather than tell Kelly, Keller came up with a fake story to get Kelly to let her borrow the ring and then gave it to Joey, who took out the diamonds to make his own engagement ring and replaced the diamonds in the original ring with cubic zirconia before returning it to Kelly.

When Kelly found out, she was furious, sparking a heated family feud that ruined Joey’s wedding day and caused a bitter divide in the family.

But was the animosity enough to drive someone to kill? Or did the real killer used the feud to try to get away with murder? 

Who were Joseph and Olga Connell? 

Joey hailed from the wild and boisterous Connell family.

As the middle of three children, Joey spent his childhood on the family’s five-acre Delaware home riding dirt bikes, fishing, playing pranks and fixing nearly everything he could get his hands on. 

“He was the life of the party, always kind of a loud, obnoxious type of person,” his older brother John recalled. “In a good way. He was really fun to be around.”

According to John and Kelly, Joey was always Keller’s favorite child, inspiring the title of the episode “The Favorite Son,” but his wild ways didn’t always endear him to everyone.

When Joey was 29 years old, after a night of drinking, he began to fight with some other guys at the bar who were hitting on his girlfriend. The fight spilled out into the parking lot and Joey was hit over the head with a beer bottle.

“He doesn’t remember after that,” John said. 

But what Joey did next would cost him years of his life. He went to his truck and got out an unloaded shotgun he had in the car from a recent hunting trip. He was walking back toward the bar with the weapon when police arrived and took him into custody. 

Joey was charged with gun charges and resisting arrest, but he felt he could beat the charges and opted to go to trial rather than accept a deal with prosecutors. It was a gamble he would lose and Joey was sentenced to seven years in prison.

When he got out, a much more fit and responsible Joey emerged from lockup, eager to set his life on the right path. 

Joey became a co-owner in a successful auto repair shop, C&S Auto, and met Olga, a native of Russia, online. Joey’s family agreed that Olga and Joey seemed to be the perfect match.

“I loved her,” Keller said. “She was so different. That girl was so kind and she was thoughtful.”

The couple tied the knot — after that bitter feud over the ring — in a beautiful private ceremony in the Virgin Islands.

What happened to Joey and Olga Connell?  

But just months after saying “I Do,” the couple was gunned down in front of their Wilmington, Delaware, condo around 2 a.m. on September 22, 2013 after returning from a night out to celebrate Olga’s birthday.

Olga had been unlocking the couple’s front door when they were ambushed. She was shot repeatedly, including once in the face, while Joey’s body was found riddled with bullets underneath some bushes near the front of the building.

Investigators estimated that there were more than 20 shots fired from two different types of guns, leading detectives to believe there had been at least two killers lying in wait for the couple.

New Castle County police detective Jamie Leonard said one of the witnesses who called 911 reported hearing “two male voices outside and a scuffle” before the gunfire erupted. 

A suspicious robbery

It didn’t take long for investigators to consider whether the battle over the ring had sparked a deadly final confrontation.

After Kelly found out that the diamonds in her ring had been subbed out for fakes, she sent a nasty text to Olga on her wedding day, darkening the mood of the event.

In return, Joey sent a blistering text of his own to his sister, only aggravating the dispute. 

The feud reached a fever pitch just a few weeks later when someone broke into Joey and Olga’s apartment and stole a lot of Olga’s jewelry, including some priceless family heirlooms from her late mother.

The obvious suspect was Kelly and a furious Joey went as far as to tell his brother John that “if anything ever happens to me, Kelly did it.” He even tried to take out a restraining order against his sister in the months leading up to his death.

After the double-homicide, detectives were quick to bring Kelly in for questioning. Although she admitted to the tension with her brother, she denied having anything to do with the robbery or the murders.

“I’m scared,” Kelly told detectives. “‘Cause I didn’t do that robbery, and — and I don’t want to be connected to my brother’s (death).” 

At the time of the murders, Kelly had been at home recovering from major surgery, but investigators still had to consider whether she’d hired someone else to carry out the dark deed on her behalf and continued to return to her as a potential suspect in the killings.

Keller says her daughter Kelly would not have killed  

Although there was still clear tension between Kelly and her unapologetic mother, Keller insisted she never pointed police toward her daughter and didn’t believe that Kelly had anything to do with the murders.

“She can stay angry at him forever, she can stay angry at me forever, but not killing somebody,” Keller said. “That is not in her or any of us. No.” 

Detectives ultimately reached the same conclusion and cleared Kelly. With her out of the picture, detectives began to look at other aspects of Joey’s life and learned that while in prison, he had befriended members of a biker gang known as the Pagans. They insisted, however, that Joey had no dealings with the group outside the prison walls. 

There were also rumors that Joey had been selling steroids out of the auto shop, a claim his business partner Christopher Rivers was all too eager to tell police about. 

“I wasn’t there one day, and the guy — the other guy that works with me comes up to me and goes, ‘Joe’s selling drugs out of the back of the shop.’ And I was like ‘what?’” Rivers told police after the killings. “So I searched the shop, found ‘em, and said to him, ‘Get ‘em out. I don’t want it here. I’m not losing the frickin’ place over this (expletive).’”

Rivers told police that just hours before the murders, he had been planning to meet Joey and Olga at a restaurant to celebrate her birthday, but when he got to the restaurant, he realized he didn’t have his ID, wasn’t allowed inside and had to go home.

Yet, when Rivers talked with news outlet Delaware Online about his slain coworker days later, insisting the two were “pretty much best friends,” he said he’d been at work that night and then went straight home.

The discrepancy in the timeline caught the attention of detectives, who dug deeper into Rivers’ background. They learned that Rivers was struggling from an opioid addiction and had been pilfering large amounts of money from the business to feed his addiction. Rivers had also wanted to cut Joey out of the business. 

They also learned that Joey and Rivers had each taken out nearly $1 million life insurance policies, listing the other as a beneficiary, when they went into business together. With Joey out of the way, Rivers now stood to collect.

Although cameras inside his home placed Rivers at his home at the time of the killings, the footage also showed that he’d been making calls and texting all night with a customer from the shop, Joshua Bey, who also served as his drug dealer.

Bey was spotted on surveillance cameras working a night shift at a retail store, but detectives pulled his cell phone records and learned he had also been communicating heavily that night with a man named Dominique Benson, who had, in turn, been in contact with his frequent accomplice Aaron Thompson.

Leonard said investigators developed a working theory that Rivers hired his drug dealer to kill Joey and his wife and, in turn, Bey hired Benson and Thompson to carry the act out.

But they didn’t have enough evidence initially to make arrests, until, Bey — furious that he’d never gotten paid by Rivers — decided to turn on his co-conspirators and laid out the plot to take the newlyweds out.

“So, he’s like, um, ‘Man, I’d pay anything, like, I’ll pay anything, um, to get them out of the way. Get them gone,’” Bey told detectives, adding that Rivers had agreed to a $60,000 price tag for the hit.

Rivers knew of Joey’s ongoing feud with his sister about the ring and hired Bey to carry out the robbery at Joey and Olga’s home to stoke the flames of the argument and point suspicion on Kelly before the murders were carried out.

“Chris took advantage of the fight and kept it going, made it worse,” Kelly said.

Arrests made in murders of Joey and Olga Connell

All four men were arrested. In exchange for his testimony, Bey pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge and was sentenced to five years behind bars. Benson also got five years after he was acquitted of the murder charges against him, but found guilty of criminal conspiracy.

Thompson was convicted of murder and sentenced to two life terms. Rivers was also found guilty of the murder charges against him and was sentenced to two life terms in prison.

Kelly, who was never able to mend the fight with her brother, said she learned a powerful lesson about forgiveness.

“Make up,” she said. “Don’t go to bed mad.” 

Tragically, Kelly died of a drug overdose in 2023. 

As for Keller, at the time she spoke with Dateline, she still didn’t regret the stunt with the engagement ring.

“I did it,” she said. “I’m not sorry for it. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. I just did it out of wanting to do something good for Joe.”