A Florida man accused of killing his wife told detectives he thinks she slipped and fell in the bathtub, but responding officers found the woman completely dry just minutes later, police recordings show.
The recordings — released Wednesday by the Orange-Osceola State Attorney’s Office and obtained by the Orlando Sentinel — reveal investigators weren’t buying the version of events offered by David Tronnes, 50, in the April death of 39-year-old Shanti Cooper-Tronnes, whom he married a year earlier.
"Common sense would tell you if you pull a woman — soaking wet — out of a tub at 3 o'clock and call the police within six minutes, that everything will be soaking wet when police arrive within three minutes of that," Orlando police Detective Teresa Sprague told Tronnes. "That's common sense."
Tronnes, seemingly puzzled, said: "So how did everything dry out?"
"That's our question," Sprague replied.
Tronnes, who was arrested on a first-degree murder charge in August, told detectives he "didn't have the information" they were looking for after another investigator said nobody would believe his story. In the recordings, one detective also accused him of concocting his emotional reaction to his wife’s sudden death.
"You've fake cried for about seven or eight hours today," Sprague continued. "Not one tear came out of your eyes — not one. You have fake cried over this woman's death since we made contact with you … There is not a lick of remorse for what you did to this woman."
An autopsy ruled that Cooper-Tronnes died from blunt force trauma to the head and strangulation. Tronnes told police he found her unresponsive in a half-full bathtub inside their home in the upscale Delaney Park section of Orlando.
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