“When he turned on the light, I’m not sure what words were used,” Captain Gary Nelson muttered on the witness stand, his brow rising as his voice went mute. “It was ….”

The Captain’s sentence trailed off.

“Sh—shock.”

Shortly before, Nelson and some other firefighters from the North Tahoe Fire Protection District were driving through a summer night as they approached a lavish home surrounded by the pines not far from the shoreline. Someone had called 911. When the dispatcher picked up, all that was intelligible was a woman’s faint gasps and garbled choking.

Then the call disconnected.    

Dispatchers tried to pin-point its origin. Despite their best efforts, Nelson and his partners were initially sent to the wrong address. They soon moved on to arrive the stately home of multi-millionaire Gary Spohr and his wife, Wendy Wood. There were no signs of movement beyond the windowpanes. Firefighters circled the dwelling’s shadows with their flashlights, calling out to anyone in earshot. There was no response. Nelson could only make out two agitated dogs barking somewhere above. The responders decided to make entry.

Venturing up a staircase, Nelson caught sight of Spohr lying motionless on his sofa. His head was leaning against a cushion. The Captain got closer. Clad in a white t-shirt and pair of board shirts, Spohr showed no signs of a heartbeat. The firefighters pulled him onto the floor to start CPR; but when they began pushing down for chest compressions, they saw blood coursing from a hole in the back of head.

Meanwhile, firefighter Mike Brazeal noticed vomit and blood drops that were bread-crumbing all over the place before trailing towards the master bedroom. He and Nelson decided to follow them.

That’s when Brazeal turned on the bathroom light.

The plush facilities were covered in blood and body fluids. They saw Wendy Wood slumped against the bath tub. Her shirt and hair were caked in red, but she was murmuring.

“There was blood all around the bathroom vanity,” recalled Jacob Tarabetz, one of the first Placer County Sheriff’s deputies to arrive.

Tarabetz and another deputy also saw three shell casings scattered around a dog bed not far from where Spohr was being pronounced dead.  

It was June 5, 2021.

Just a few hours before, Spohr, 70, and Wood, 68, had been boating on Lake Tahoe with their daughter Erin and her young children. Everyone had come back to the comfortable abode for some family time. Eventually, Erin and the kids headed home for Reno at 7:45 p.m.

According to Placer County Deputy District Attorney Rick Miller, the entire time the group was enjoying white caps and blue waves on “the Lake of the Sky,” Erin’s husband, former Major League Baseball player Dan Serafini, was hiding inside the house. Miller says that once Serafini’s wife left with their kids, the fit, retired pitcher emerged from his stake-out position to execute his in-laws.

A security camera detected the gunfire at 8:51 p.m.

Despite being shot twice, including at the base of her skull, Wendy Wood somehow survived.

At least for a while.

After two years of grueling physical therapy, and reported bouts of depression, Wood ultimately took her life in 2023.

Law enforcement says Spohr’s murder and Wood’s maiming and descent into suicide were set into motion by a conspiracy that Serafini had with his secret girlfriend – a woman who was also close with his wife. Detectives stress that the former athlete was living a double-life, while saying and texting malevolent things about his mother and father-in-law.

“Marrying into that family wealth brought tension,” Miller told the jury, “and it brought discord; and the evidence will show it brought fights.”

But Serafini played in the big leagues for 15 years, including for the Minnesota Twins, the Chicago Cubs, the San Diego Padres, the Cincinnati Reds, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Colorado Rockies: why would he need his in-laws’ fortune?

The answer may involve another pop culture wrinkle in the saga. After retiring from the sports world, Serafini opened a bar in Sparks, Nevada, called the Bullpen. He ultimately found himself being one of the tavern owners featured on Spike TV and Paramount’s reality show, Bar Rescue.

“Desperate for a new career after losing his $14 million fortune through a series of bad investments and a bitter divorce settlement, Dan convinced his parents to take out a $240,000 loan against their house,” the show’s narrator tells viewers, “to buy a bar.”

The episode’s opening sequence goes on to tease that when Serafini “stepped away” from the bar’s day-to-day operations to spend time with his new spouse, Erin, the watering hole’s employees allowed it to morph into a booze-soaked, Caligula-like party that was hemorrhaging revenue. The show’s narrator also claims that Serafini found himself $300,000 in debt and on the verge of losing his home and his parents’ home over the Bullpen debacle.

After Deputy Tarabetz and his partner found several 22.caliber shell casings around Spohr’s body that night, crime scene technicians were called up to North Tahoe. A number of detectives started getting involved. One of them, eventually, was Placer County DA investigator Lieutenant Vince Dutto.

During his testimony, Lt. Dutto walked the jury through videos and 3D scans he had made of the crime scene on West Lake Boulevard. Among the things that Dutto captured was a trap door in a closet leading into a crawl space. 

Miller is determined to prove that Serafini was concealed somewhere in the house while the family was recreating.

Another witness was John Riella, a Placer Sheriff’s detective who’s been assigned to the Tahoe City station for more than 20 years. It was Riella who ultimately discovered surveillance footage indicating that, the day before the killings, Serafini and his side-girl, Samantha Scott, quietly rendezvoused at the Red Lion Hotel in Elko, Nevada.

In Miller’s opening statement, he suggested that a series of photographs and video clips across different locations – along with forensic cell phone data – would prove that Serafini had Scott covertly drive him 340 miles from Elko to Tahoe City under the guise of picking up a score of cocaine. Scott waited for hours near the West Shore Market as her man was supposedly searching for nose-candy to trade in Nevada. However, according to the prosecution, what Serafini was really doing during that time was walking a bike trail along the lake that took him to his victims’ home.

Miller says that Scott only figured this out after she started the five-hour drive back to Elko, with Serafini in tow, where the latter had left his cell phone and hoped to establish an alibi through the vast expanses of the desert.   

“You’ll hear how he threatened [Scott] once it became clear that she knew what he’d done,” Miller told the jury.       

But defense attorney David Dratman has made it clear that he’s gearing up for a fight.

A significant part of the peoples’ case centers on video footage of a man in grey sweat pants and a black hoodie, who’s wearing a mask, entering Spohr and Wood’s home through their driveway while they were boating. That individual is seen again, leaving, five minutes after the pistol shots erupt. During cross-examination, Dratman pointed out that if a killer was highly familiar with the house, as the victims’ son-in-law was, he would have known there was a security camera staring right at him when he came up the driveway. Dratman went on to observe that someone well-acquainted with the house would probably also know where the DVR containing the security footage was, an item that could have easily been grabbed and fit into the backpack the killer is seen wearing.

In his opening statement, Dratman had already telegraphed how he planned to use the video footage.

“We think that is a much younger man in the video, with a different build and body type than Danny,” he said. “What you see in that video, that doesn’t look like some former athlete who’s an aging 47-year-old.”

Serafini’s trial is expected to continue into July.

Scott Thomas Anderson is also the writer and producer of true crime documentary podcast series ‘Trace of the Devastation’