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Two people were arrested after the Cold Justice team investigated the 2003 murder of a newlywed, shot execution-style in his Wisconsin lakeside home as he was fixing dinner.
Navy veteran David Vanderzee’s wife and best friend were arrested in the final moments of the Season 8 premiere of ‘s Cold Justice, titled “Newlywed Nightmare,” after series star and former prosecutor Kelly Siegler, homicide investigator Steve Spignola, and detectives from the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office took a new look at the decades-old case.
“I feel relieved,” David’s brother Tim Vanderzee told the team after getting news of the arrests of Roxanna Vanderzee-Collins and John Viskocil.
When was David Vanderzee killed?
On the evening of September 23, 2003, David was found by his wife of two months, shot to death in his Town of Randall, Wisconsin, home.
“Shortly after 8 o’clock p.m., David’s new wife Roxanna arrived home and found David face-down on the living room floor,” Spingnola said in the episode. “He was shot five times in the back of the head. There was no forced entry, suggesting that the killer was somebody that he welcomed into the home.”
The shrimp David had been cooking for dinner still sat at on the stove, next to a freshly cooked steak, suggesting that the 47-year-old was putting the finishing touches on the meal when the killer arrived.
David’s death devastated his mother, who spent years bringing the detectives of the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office baked goods in the hopes that her son’s case would never be forgotten.
One of the biggest challenges to the initial investigation was that David — a former truck driver on disability after a back injury — had not been well-liked by those in the quiet, lakeside community where he lived.
“From all accounts, he was known as kind of a jerk. He was kind of hot-headed, so he was not well-liked in the neighborhood,” Sgt. Lt. Neil Paulsen told Siegler and Spignola while laying out the cold case. “He had a lot of money issues.”
The main suspects in David Vanderzee’s murder
Given that there was no forced entry into the home and no apparent robbery, the Cold Justice team honed in on two “prime suspects” in the murder: Vanderzee-Collins and Vaskocil, known in the community as “Limo John.”
As Siegler explained on Cold Justice, Vanderzee-Collins had an airtight alibi for the murder. She’d been out shopping and running errands at the time of the murder and had the receipts to prove it. But there were also signs that her new marriage to David was already beginning to crumble.
Paulsen said that David was “very controlling” and kept a tight rein on the couple’s finances. There were also rumors that Vanderzee-Collins was having an affair with Vaskocil, David’s best friend. The two moved in together shortly after David’s death, only furthering the speculation.
After reconstructing the crime scene, the team concluded that David must have been killed by someone he trusted, given the fact that he was shot at close range to the back of the head.
“David did not have very many friends, so only a few people were ever welcome in his house,” Siegler explained.
They believed that Vanderzee-Collins had likely been involved in plotting the murder after she was heard on a recording of the 911 call that night saying David had been shot, even though it wasn’t immediately obvious how he died.
Phone records provide telling clues
The team suspected that Vanderzee-Collins and Vaskocil may have worked together to carry out the killing. To support that theory, they turned to phone records, which showed that Roxanna and Vaskocil had talked on the phone throughout the day of the killing, beginning at 7:46 a.m.
Investigators knew that Roxanna had also placed a call to David at home that day at 6:43 p.m., putting his time of death some time after that call and the 911 call placed at 8:20 p.m.
She talked to Vaskocil just three minutes later at 6:46 p.m., called his home again at 7:36 p.m. and spoke with his girlfriend Janie Dunham, and then received one final call from Vaskocil at 8:11 p.m. that night.
“This is the it’s done call,” Det. Jason Sielski said on Cold Justice.
On the night of the murder, Vaskocil told Dunham he was going fishing on his boat, but that seemed unusual to her at the time because it was already getting dark. In a recent interview, years after the couple broke up, she said Vaskocil came home that night and immediately took his clothes off and threw them into the washer, claiming he’d fallen in the lake as he’d gotten out of the boat.
She also remembered that Vanderzee-Collins had spent the night at their house in the wake of the killing, and that she woke up to discover her boyfriend holding hands with the new widow on the couch.
The Cold Justice team’s theory was that Vaskocil had really taken the boat across the lake to get to David’s house, then allegedly shot him before returning home.
Investigators split up to interview Vanderzee-Collins and Vaskocil, who were no longer together, at the same time, hoping one might flip on the other. But both denied any involvement in the murder and insisted they had no idea who killed David.
Still, investigators believed they had the right suspects and Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office detectives took their case to the district attorney’s office. They were able to secure arrest warrants for both suspects in the final moments of the Cold Justice episode.
“It was a long time coming,” David’s brother Tim said on the show. “I wish my mother was around to see it. She’d be resting in peace.”
