Become an Apple Subscriber or Patron to listen!
On April 24, 2018 at approximately 3:51 pm, a 911 call came through & Dave Tronnes told the dispatcher that he came home & found his wife, 39-year-old Shanti Cooper, in the bathtub & she wasn’t breathing. Sadly, Shanti was later declared dead. When police began their investigation, they soon realized that something was not adding up.
Shanti Cooper had been a hardworking, dedicated mom who devoted herself & her life to her 8-year-old son Jackson. She had divorced her first husband, Jim Cooper, in 2013. Shanti launched a highly successful financial software business & worked out of her Orlando home.
In March 2013 Shanti took to the internet where she met a new man, Dave Tronnes, on Match.com. They started by exchanging messages & profiles & then emails. Investigators later found a document on Shanti’s computer that proved just how excited she was about their relationship: Dave, I will have to say, I think this will be a delicious, amazing, magnificent, life-changing detour.. I have had a pep in my step since we started this little email affair.
Dave had recently come out of a long marriage & was living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but within only months of meeting Shanti online, he made the big decision to relocate to Orlando to be closer to her.
Shanti’s relatives, Cindy & Dan Dow weren’t initially fond of Dave, but eventually grew to like him. Cindy eventually saw Dave as a charming guy & since she loved Shanti & realized that Shanti loved Dave, she knew it was important that they give him a chance.
In April 2015, Dave fell in love with a home in Delaney Park at 218 East Copeland Drive. The unique house that was built in 1920 was over 4,000 square feet & came with gargoyles which sat perched on the roof. There was a pool in the backyard & a garage apartment. Dave closed on the house on April 16, 2015 for a steal at $607,500 & he paid for it in cash & put it in a trust for himself & his mother. The area was well-established, within a fantastic school system & in a great neighborhood. There was access to a lot of outdoor activities & sat only a couple of miles from downtown Orlando. The house is currently off the market & has a Redfin Estimate of $1,247,092
Dave decided that he didn’t like the house as it was & wanted to remodel it with Shanti paying the renovation bills. Despite the fact that Dave took ownership of the house renovations, hiring contractors & overseeing plans, it was Shanti who continued to write the checks & cover the costs. In the meantime, the couple got married in February 2017 & at that time, based on what Dave allegedly told her, it was Shanti’s belief that he had inherited $4-$6 million from his father. However, based on the fact that she was the one who continued to pay the bills, it was clear that this had not been true. Even before the purchase of the house, Dave argued that he should only pay one-third of the rent since it was he, Shanti & her son living there. He also complained when he had to pay for groceries.
The house renovations were never-ending & as time went by, it all seemed like one expensive failure. By 2018, the main portion of the house was completely gutted & unlivable & Shanti was forced to work & sleep above the garage in a small apartment while most of the time, Dave slept downstairs in the garage with the dogs.
It was clear that the renovations had completely consumed Dave & it was no longer just a project to him; it had become an obsession.
Constantly living amongst chaos was taking a toll so Dave turned to a man named Keith Ori who was a local house renovator who also appeared on a reality TV show called “Zombie House Flipping.” The show features homes that are in a terrible state & viewers watch as the homes are brought back to life.
When Keith first looked at the house on East Copeland Drive, he was not confident with the structure & soon, an engineer discovered that the only thing keeping the house upright was two inches of stucco. Keith was astonished with what he saw; the entire interior had been stripped away & there was nothing there but a two-story shell. This was a bold challenge he wasn’t often exposed to. Keith decided he was up for the challenge & got the green light to use the house on the following season of “Zombie House Flipping.”
It was mid-April 2018 & filming was scheduled to start in early May. As Keith worked with Dave, he came to find that the biggest challenge was getting Dave & Shanti together so they could iron out plans & Keith could be sure that they were both on board. When they finally sat down together, Keith got the feeling that Shanti was angry with Dave & what he didn’t know was that Shanti had been trying for years to get her name on the trust that owned the house, but Dave never followed through.
Things were coming to a head in the days before Shanti was found deceased in the bathtub. She desperately craved stability in her life after living through years of never-ending upheaval. Despite the money she continued to hand out, her name wasn’t on the house that was essentially Dave’s. Thus far, she had shelled out upwards of a half-million dollars in renovations & the house was still in utter shambles. All that she seemed to be paying for was headaches & heartaches.
A friend of Shanti’s recalls a conversation when Shanti said, “I’m paying for everything. If all of a sudden something happens, he owns the house & I have nothing to it.”
After Dave made the 911 call on the afternoon of April 24, 2018 & police began their investigation, it was clear that the story did not make sense. First responders had found the presence of blood on Shanti’s face & body as well as in the bathtub that sat within the garage apartment; her body lay on a mattress pad. They found that Shanti’s $15,000 diamond engagement room was missing from her hand which gave the initial appearance of a robbery, but further inspection proved that nothing else was missing. Diamond earrings remained in Shanti’s ears & cash sat within plain view. There was no sign of forced entry, no evidence of a struggle. 8-year-old Jackson was at school at the time the 911 call was placed.
Dave claimed to have last seen his wife that morning at home when he left to go for a jog with his dogs. When he came home, he said he found the bath tube half-full with Shanti partially submerged. He said he turned the water off & tried to pick her up & said that she was stiff which made it hard to pick her up & compared it to a sack of potatoes. He said he eventually pulled her from the bathtub & moved her into another room, saying, “I didn’t know what to do.” He speculated that she had slipped & fallen & that it was the fall that must have killed her. However, when first responders arrived at the home they found that Shanti was mostly dry & it appeared that the tub hadn’t been used in hours.
Shortly after Shanti was pronounced dead, Dave voluntarily went into Orlando Police Headquarters where he remained for fourteen hours, all the while, never requesting a lawyer. He was fully cooperative & gave law enforcement access to anything & everything they requested.
As Dave sat inside the interrogation room, he was fully examined for any injuries that may have been consistent with a fight or struggle. Initially, the detectives were sympathetic to him as he wept. He explained that he had taken the dogs to the park that afternoon & when he got home he found Shanti, still wearing her pajamas & floating in the bathtub. The water was still running & one of her legs was partially sticking out of the tub. He said that he tried to perform CPR on his wife, but he couldn’t get Shanti to breathe. As he continued to speak with detectives, he speculated that Shanti may have slipped & fell, perhaps she had blacked out.
Detectives Barb Sharp & Teresa Sprague were well versed in interrogation techniques & tried to commiserate with Dave & told him that because Shanti was bringing in the household money, she likely only treated him like a pool boy which must have been very frustrating. They did everything they could to try to get Dave to confess, but nothing was working. After fourteen hours, police released Dave without charging him.
As time went on, detectives began to pick apart & question Dave’s story. They wondered how Shanti got a bloody cheek & a bruised eye from a slip in the tub & Dave said he had no explanation, that’s just how he found her. Detectives pressed the fact that the trauma seen on Shanti’s body could not be explained by the fall Dave spoke of. He told them that they might find blood on the sheets, but explained that it was from a recent sexual encounter that they’d had. Officers who collected evidence never found sheets, only the mattress pad which her body had been placed on.
The medical examiner later determined that Shanti had been strangled & died from blunt-force trauma to the head & her death was ruled a homicide.
Soon, detectives weren’t quite so sympathetic toward Dave & began to flat out tell him that they weren’t buying what he was selling, “The evidence & her body speak for itself & your story is BS.” Dave denied having anything to do with Shanti’s death or the fact that they were having any marital issues. They also questioned his timeline since he claimed to have called 911 only 5 minutes after he found Shanti. This was when they told him that there was no water splashed around the room & the bathtub had been found mostly dry. He had no explanation for that. As detectives combed the bedroom for evidence, they found blood on Shanti’s bed & suspected that she had been killed in this location. Dave explained this away by saying it was likely from her period. They accused him of fake crying for seven to eight hours of the interrogation, never having seen a tear emerge from his eye.
In the meantime, they continued to dig into Dave’s life & found that there was more to the story in terms of his relationship with Shanti & things had not been as harmonious as he claimed. Detectives learned that he had been transferring money out of their joint bank account as well as the fact that Dave was the sole beneficiary of Shanti’s life insurance which totaled over $350,000. If Shanti’s death was ruled accidental, he stood to gain close to $1 million.
However, when he spoke with investigators, he was firm on the fact that there was absolutely no animosity between he & Shanti & that she was not upset about the fact that her name wasn’t on the trust. He elaborated that they’d spoken about it & that it didn’t matter & they were moving forward.
Detectives continued to dig into Dave’s life & found that he had a membership to Club Orlando which was a same sex bathhouse. According to their website, Club Orlando is located only minutes from Downtown Orlando & it’s the perfect spot to lose yourself & find a friend in the dark & a place to explore fantasies away from “the mouse.” Detectives headed to the club & spoke with an employee that said that he personally witnessed Dave having sex with another man at the club. Some speculate that Shanti had found out about this & she was not the type of person to put up with or endorse infidelity. It’s possible that she confronted Dave & threatened to leave him which would mean that the cash flow would also end & in April of 2018, the house on East Copeland Drive was the center of Dave’s world.
The defense hired a private investigator who spoke with neighbors in Delaney Park where Shanti & Dave lived & they mentioned a transient man who they’d seen around that resembled actor Woody Harrelson.
When Detective Teresa Sprague tracked the man down, she recorded their interview & the man denied having ever been to the home & no evidence could place the man inside the house. Investigators also spoke with Shanti’s ex-husband Jim Cooper who was eliminated as a suspect early on after having a solid alibi.
Four months after Shanti’s murder, on August 29, 2018, Dave Tronnes was arrested for first-degree murder & held without bail. Dave continued to argue his innocence & referred to the idea of a burglar & referred to Shanti’s missing engagement ring. However, this came crashing down on Dave when police found the ring among his possessions after searching the room at his mother’s house where he was living & found it inside a suitcase in his bedroom. It was obvious to investigators that Dave had removed the ring from Shanti’s lifeless body after he attacked her in order to stage the scene as a robbery. However, Dave’s attorneys argued that investigators had simply missed the ring when they searched the house.
As investigators looked deeper into Dave’s past, they traveled to Minnesota & spoke to a close friend of Dave’s ex-wife Carole who told them that she believed that Dave may have been poisoning Carole. She indicated that shortly after their marriage, Carole suddenly began suffering from various mysterious ailments. This made prosecutor Ryan Vesico wonder if Dave may have also been poisoning Shanti & learned that Shanti had to have an emergency appendectomy eight weeks before her death. Both appendicitis & poisoning have very similar symptoms & Shanti had been suffering from digestive issues up until the day of her death.
Detective Sprague & Ryan Vesico traveled to Minnesota to meet with Dave’s ex-wife Carole, who also struggled with digestive issues. Carole indicated that she did not believe that Dave had been poisoning her & said that her health issues continued even after their divorce. Detectives felt it was still possible that he had poisoned both women but had no proof.
They also speculated that Carole could have been protecting Dave due to financial reasons since they still shared a joint bank account that at times contained hundreds of thousands of dollars. Carole claimed that it was an account that she had simply forgotten to take her name off of. It’s unclear where all of the money in the account came from & Carole was never charged with any crime, but Vesico felt that she could be managing his finances & maintaining some level of control while he was behind bars.
In June 2018, investigators placed the home Shanti & Dave shared under surveillance & ended up capturing images of private investigators who had been hired by Dave’s initial law firm, coming & going from the property. It’s the detective’s belief that one of Dave’s lawyers at the time, Robert Mandell, realized that he was on camera & because he had been caught, he contacted Vesico nearly a year after Shanti’s murder.
When Mandell spoke with Vescio, he said that he had a piece of evidence which he’d been holding onto since Shanti was murdered. Mandell dropped a bombshell when he told Vescio that he had a set of bloody sheets in his possession from the garage apartment where Shari was found dead. He said that the sheets had been collected after the police missed them & they were packaged as evidence & secured at his office where he planned to have them tested for DNA & blood at some point. He had been in possession of these sheets for 11 months & failed to disclose it. When Detective Sprague met with the private investigator, Billy Lane, he showed her that the sheets were stored in a locker in a common room that other business owners had access to.
Lane assured her that the evidence was secure & pulled out a brown evidence bag with top sheets, a fitted sheet, pillow covers & a pair of black socks.
Vesico told him that if he was holding onto any additional evidence, now was the time to hand it over. 10-12 hours went by & Mandell yet again contacted Mandell, indicating he had one more item which ended up being a green cord. Apparently a private investigator had removed it from the home because Dave was threatening to kill himself. The cord had been found wrapped around a wood stud by a ladder. He told Vesico that the cord was placed into an evidence bag which made absolutely no sense that it would have been treated as evidence. The fact that Shanti had been strangled was not lost on Vescio & the green cord could very well have been the murder weapon. An unusual linear mark had been found on the right side of Shanti’s neck with possible ligature markings on either side.
The prosecution now had the green cord in their possession & had it tested to see if it could have been used in Shanti’s murder & no DNA was found on it. However, the cord hadn’t been picked up for weeks after Shanti died which would have allowed Dave plenty of time to wipe it of any evidence.
There was discussion of charging both Mandell & another attorney in his office, Greg Greenberg, with tampering with evidence & accessory after the fact, but court records indicate that no charges were filed.
DNA test results from the blood stained sheets showed that the top sheet contained DNA from Dave & an unknown male. DNA from the fitted sheet matched both Shanti & Dave.
As investigators compiled all the evidence in this case, Vescio came up with a theory as to how he believed Shanti had been killed. One of Shanti’s earrings was found in her ear while the other was found on the nightstand. She was likely sitting at that side of the bed, getting ready to go to sleep when she placed her cell phone on the nightstand & began to remove her jewelry. She managed to take out one of her two earrings when Dave made his attack. She never used her phone after 11:30 pm & both the sheets & the bed frame had her blood on them.
Based on the fact that there were no defensive wounds found on Shanti’s body, she was likely rendered unconscious by the first blow. It’s likely that the attack happened somewhere between midnight & 3 am. Dave ultimately strangled Shanti to death & likely watched her suffer & die for many minutes. He then moved her body to the bathtub & began to clean the crime scene, later, moving her body back to the bedroom. He told detectives that after finding Shanti in the bathtub, he moved her onto a mattress pad on the floor. The amount of blood found on the bedroom floor indicated that she had been there for a while. He then went for a walk, took his dogs to the park & did some chores around the house & ultimately made the emotional 911 call saying that he found Shanti floating in the tub.
While Dave was safely behind bars, detectives continued to build their case & listen to anyone who might have information about Shanti’s murder. Edward Gismondi, a fellow inmate of Dave’s at the Orlando jail, shared a cell with Dave. During their time chatting, they discussed their shared interest in obscure hallucinogens, including sapo, which is a poison from a South American frog. According to Gismondi, Dave told him that he used to put sapo into people’s salsa with a goal of slowly killing them.
Investigators found this bit of information intriguing since it supported their theory that Dave may have been poisoning both Shanti as well as his ex-wife. Dave had also told Gismondi that he & Shanti had argued before her death. Shanti had allegedly discovered an app on Dave’s phone with messages that suggested that he was having sex with men. Shanti threatened to tell everyone about what she’d found & this caused Dave to snap. He didn’t tell Gismondi exactly what he’d done, only that he’d killed his wife. Investigators were not able to confirm the information about an app on Dave’s phone; there were no purchase records & they had never seen it on Dave’s phone.
Investigators weren’t sure that Gismondi was a reliable witness since he was in prison for lewd or lascivious behavior & is now a registered sex offender.
In 2021 Dave’s defense lawyers argued that he wasn’t competent to stand trial after he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Shanti’s son Jackson spoke out & accused Dave of faking his mental illness, “He’s just trying to get out of it because he thinks he’s going to a mental hospital & play around.” In January of 2023, an Orange County judge ruled that he was competent to move forward with the trial which was set to begin in June. However, in early June, Dave wrote a letter indicating that he was in the process of firing his attorney due to a “serious conflict of interest” which caused the trial to be rescheduled to a later date.
Dave’s trial began on October 12, 2023 & lasted six days. The defense called no witnesses but argued that investigators excluded other scenarios as to what may have happened to Shanti. After nearly five hours of deliberations, 55-year-old Dave Tronnes was found guilty & received a sentence of life imprisonment. During his sentencing, Shanti’s son from her first marriage, Jackson Cooper, spoke in court & said that his mother’s murder left “a hole in my heart that I can’t fill or fix.” Jackson later spoke to reporters & said how relieved he was that Dave was where he should be & they could now start to move on. He wanted people to know how good of a person his mother was , how she deserved the world & she had not deserved what happened to her.
References:
- CBS News: Timeline: Shanti Cooper murder case
- CBS News: Was a Florida man’s obsession with a home renovation a motive for murder?
- State Attorney Andrew A. Bain: Press Release – Man found guilty of murdering wife after dispute over house renovations
- The Guardian: US man found guilty of wife’s murder in row over Zombie House Flipping show
- Click Orlando: Murder trial begins for David Tronnes, man accused of strangling his wife in Orlando
- People: Fla. man allegedly beat wife in bathtub – and left to run errands while she lay dying
- Court TV: Dave Tronnes’ former attorneys accused of taking evidence from crime scene
- WFTV9: DNA evidence released in case of Delaney Park man accused of murdering wife
- Law & Crime: Trial of Florida man accused of murdering wife, leaving her to die in ritzy Orlando bathroom
- Abc News: How detectives uncovered Florida woman’s murder inside fixer-upper
- Redfin: 218 E. Copeland Dr, Orlando, FL 32806
- Club Orlando
