TV series to feature county double murder
Colin Abbott, convicted in the 2011 grisly killings of his wealthy father and stepmother at their opulent Butler County estate, will be profiled next week on the CNBC weekly true-crime series “American Greed: Deadly Rich.”
Abbott, 48, a former New Jersey landscaper, will be featured on Monday's episode at 10 p.m.
Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger, prosecutor Ben Simon and state police Capt. Steve Ignatz and Cpl. Chris Birckbichler — who teamed up to investigate and prosecute Abbott — also will have starring roles.
A CNBC producer interviewed and filmed the local officials in May at a makeshift studio that was set up at a hotel in Cranberry Township, and at the Butler County Courthouse.
“They reached out to us,” said Simon, the lead prosecutor, “and said this case just struck a nerve with them.”
“It's pretty much made for TV,” said Birckbichler, the lead investigator.
The episode is entitled: “A Crash or a Kill Mystery.”
A promotional summary on the show's website says: “Wealthy retired executive Ken Abbott and his wife, Celeste, are said to have died in a fiery car crash in New Jersey, but when the family can't get answers to simple questions about their deaths, police discover a gruesome crime motivated by greed.”
“American Greed: Deadly Rich,” narrated by Stacy Keach, is an hour-long program that looks at the dark side of the American dream and what some people will do for money.
The real-life cases involve white-collar crime, scams, sex and murder.
Abbott in 2013 pleaded no contest to two counts of third-degree murder in the deaths of his father, Kenneth Abbott, 65, and stepmother, Celeste Abbott, 55, at their home on 25 sprawling acres in Brady Township.
In exchange for the plea, prosecutors took the death penalty off the table.
But within days of being sentenced, he began a pursuit to back out of the deal and have a trial. His subsequent appeals have all failed but continue.
He is being held at the medium-security State Correctional Institution in Somerset.
Investigators believe that for years before the slaying, Abbott had been scamming his father, who made his fortune — estimated at more than $4 million — from selling a pharmaceutical business.
Abbott apparently had taken a series of bogus mortgages from his father beginning in 2005. He covered the scheme by using the proceeds from one mortgage to pay interest on a previous one.
It was a ruse, Simon said, similar to a Ponzi scheme.
But making the interest payments eventually began to overwhelm Abbott. And a balloon payment on the interest was due to his father when he made his fateful visit to his dad's home in June 2011.
Authorities say he fatally shot his father and stepmother and burned their bodies. He tried to cover up his crime by saying they were killed in a fiery car crash in New Jersey.
At some point, he even apparently attempted to make fake death certificates for the couple.But the plan unraveled when investigators found the couple's remains scattered on their homestead the following month.The evidence, authorities said, suggested a dual motive for murder: Abbott needed to make the bad mortgage debt disappear, and he sought to inherit the rest of his father's millions in real estate, cash and a classic car collection.The many layers of the double killing, Simon said, made the case challenging to prosecute.“There were all these moving pieces and all the evidence to deal with: DNA, ballistics, dental records, bankruptcy records,” he said. “We had to put it all together to put a motive on this.”Investigators eventually fit the puzzle pieces into place, Birckbichler recalled, much to Abbott's surprise.“I think he basically thought he was smarter than police,” Birckbichler said. “He didn't think we'd put all those pieces together.”
