When four mothers in Southern California finally had their kids in school full-time, they didn’t look to fill their hours with Pilates or pickleball.
They decided to investigate a murder.
In the new book, “The Carpool Detectives: A True Story of Four Moms, Two Bodies and One Mysterious Cold Case” (Random House), writer Chuck Hogan details how a group of moms solved a fifteen-year-old gruesome double-homicide that had long eluded veteran law enforcement Sherlocks.
Kwaku Alston
“Their ability as women to get people to trust and confide in them — was their superpower in investigating and breaking this case,” writes Hogan. “Motherhood no longer defined them — it was one of many hats they wore.”
The case involved the 2005 discovery of the bodies of a 60-something suburban businessman and his wife. The couple had vanished without a trace and was found near their wrecked SUV in a canyon in Los Angeles County. The family business had been shuttered and millions of dollars had gone unaccounted for. But, there were no real leads and the story disappeared from the news.
The leader of the moms, Marissa Pianko, learned about the case while taking a broadcast journalism class at UCLA in 2020. The professor showed some footage of the scene where the dead couple had been found, and that piqued Marissa’s interest: Was it simply a tragic accident, she wondered, or something more like murder?
Pianko, a former forensic accountant, mentioned her obsession with the unsolved cold case to her three friends — Nicole Landset Blank, a political opposition researcher; Samira Poulos, a digital advertising project manager, and Jeannie Wilson, a freelance writer and entertainment research executive — and they came on board. Authorities were offering a $5,000 reward to help solve the fatal mystery.
The female sleuths began cold-calling the victims’ family members, requesting police case records, as well as conducting interviews with detectives who had been on the case.
They also spoke with neighbors who revealed that they’d heard a blood-curdling scream one night. Days before the couple disappeared, the husband was also overheard pleading with a man to buy his company.
Pianko’s suspicions that the deaths weren’t accidental were buttressed by a series of red flags: Within a week of the couple’s disappearance, the son shut down his father’s multimillion-dollar company, and the couple’s bank filed a lawsuit claiming fraudulent activity.
She also learned from bank documents that vendors had falsified invoices, which the bank paid to the dead man’s account. And the couple’s death voided all company debt, leaving the estate and properties to their son and a son-in-law.
Marissa and her cohorts reached a consensus: The son was “a s–t…an accountant who did very little accounting, an entitled jerkoff mooching off his father, who got drunk at every lunch – and frosted the tips of his hair. Clearly, he was a bad character…” writes Hogan.
The victim’s daughter was the only family member concerned about the disappearance and death of her parents and suspected her brother or brother-in-law had been involved, notes the author. She cooperated with Marissa and her team, giving them her parents’ cell phones to search for leads.
Wile Hogan’s book is a work of non-fiction, his account is largely reconstructed and the murder victims are referred to pseudonymously, with identifying details about the case changed.
“One of the things that we were super-focused on was to protect the identity of the victims’ family. We changed the location of the case in the book, and we asked the author to protect them,” Planko told The Post. “They wanted privacy, and they were so kind to us to let us write the story.”
The women ultimately found out that couple’s deaths weren’t a car accident but rather part of a well-planned mob hit. Organized crime had gained control of the firm, resulting in the brutal murders.
With all the evidence in hand, Marissa contacted the now-retired district attorney on the case, resulting in its reopening with a warning. “Remember, you’re dealing with murderers,” they were told.
The team then reviewed all the raw case data that revealed the identity of two mobsters who had been implicated in the company’s financial fraud.
The four women are now investigating another unsolved case. It involves about 20 women who were killed in the 70s and 80s, possibly by a serial killer. No matter what they find, Pianko is glad to be looking into a crime that is further back in history.
Their first case was sometimes too close for comfort.
“Our main suspect called my cell phone when I was making a PB&J sandwich for my kid and [the caller] asked me why I was digging into him. I felt the blood drain out of my body,” Pianko said. “At that moment, I felt that we had gotten into something too dangerous for us.”
