The Mysterious Murder of An Aspen Socialite
In February 2014, Aspen socialite Nancy Pfister was discovered murdered in the closet of her mountainside home, sending shockwaves through one of America's most exclusive communities. This is a case of wealth, betrayal, a shocking confession, and lingering questions that remain unanswered to this day. Three people were arrested, but were any of them telling the truth about what happened that night?
TW: Suicide
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SOURCES
Murder of Nancy Pfister - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Nancy_Pfister
Murder in Aspen - CBS News
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/48-hours-probes-murder-of-aspen-legend-nancy-pfister/
Murdered Colorado socialite Nancy Pfister’s Australian connection | News.com.au
https://web.archive.org/web/20140308072115/http://www.news.com.au/national/murdered-
colorado-socialite-nancy-pfisters-australian-connection/story-fncynjr2-1226845854024
Kalman Haas - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_Haas
Robert Kalman Haas (1890-1964) - Find a Grave Memorial
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/193909170/robert_kalman-haas
Elizabeth “Betty” Haas Pfister (1921-2011) - Find a Grave Memorial
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/158943583/elizabeth-pfister
Arthur Oral Pfister (1910-2007) - Find a Grave Memorial
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/158943506/arthur_oral-pfister
Wrongful death suit filed in Nancy Pfister murder | AspenTimes.com
https://www.aspentimes.com/news/wrongful-death-suit-filed-in-nancy-pfister-murder/
Judge orders killer’s ex-wife to turn over $850,000 | AspenTimes.com
https://www.aspentimes.com/news/judge-orders-killers-ex-wife-to-turn-over-850000/
Styler’s medical condition still under scrutiny | | aspendailynews.com
Murder in Aspen - CBS News
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/48-hours-probes-murder-of-aspen-legend-nancy-pfister-update/
Aspen, Colorado - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen,_Colorado
BREAKING: Charges Dropped Against Carpenter | Aspen Public Radio
https://www.aspenpublicradio.org/2014-06-20/breaking-charges-dropped-against-carpenter
Aspen Heiress Murder Case Ends With Guilty Plea - ABC News
https://abcnews.go.com/US/aspen-heiress-murder-case-ends-guilty-plea/story?id=24238409
Kathy "Sati" Carpenter Obituary January 19, 2023 - Evergreen Memorial Park
https://www.evergreenmemorialpark.com/obituaries/kathy-sati-carpenter
TRANSCRIPT
It was February 26th, 2014. Just as the sun was setting over Aspen, Colorado and the frigid winter air began its nightly dive toward freezing, the switchboard at the local 911 call center suddenly lit up.
what the caller on the other end was about to tell the operator would shake up America’s poshest city like a snowglobe.
The caller’s name was Kathy Carpenter, and she was so hysterical the 911 operator had trouble understanding her. In a firm and steady tone, the operator asked Kathy to calm down and explain what was going on.
Kathy hyperventilated and pushed out the words the best she could.
It was her friend, she said. She found her friend in the closet—and her friend was dead.
Kathy gave the address of the emergency. It was the house on Buttermilk Road at the top of the mountain. And then she gave the name of her friend who was dead. The friend’s name was Nancy Pfister.
Everyone in town knew who Nancy Pfister was. Nancy was like Aspen royalty, a lifelong resident and small-town socialite whose circle of friends included Jack Nicholson, Cher, and the Dalai Lama.
It was shocking enough that she was dead, but the way Kathy described it was even more terrifying— it looked like murder. Kathy had found Nancy wrapped in sheets, stuffed in the closet, and there was blood on the headboard of her bed.
In a city that averages less than one homicide a year, the murder of one of its most prominent citizens would quickly become the only story anyone in Aspen was talking about. And the one question on everyone’s mind was: who would’ve wanted Nancy Pfister dead?
First responders soon converged on Nancy Pfister’s house on Buttermilk Mountain and, once inside, deputies walked up the stairs to the master bedroom and opened the closet door, where the body reportedly was. But as they looked inside, police weren’t immediately sure what they were looking at. They saw what looked like a bundle of sheets. But they didn’t see a body.
It wasn’t until they moved in closer and touched the sheets that deputies realized they had found the victim, and it was worse than they imagined. Not only was she wrapped in sheets, but her head had been covered with a white plastic garbage bag.
Meanwhile, deputies met with Kathy Carpenter in front of her Subaru, which was parked down the road as a restless puppy yipped from the passenger seat. Kathy was so upset she was barely coherent as she explained that she had gone to Nancy’s house to feed the dog when she discovered the body.
The deputy caught a whiff of alcohol in the air as Kathy spoke and asked her if she’d been drinking. Kathy shook her head and insisted she hadn’t been.
But she could hardly stand upright and soon began vomiting into the snow. Maybe it was just because she was so distraught. Whatever the case, she was such a mess that deputies called an ambulance to take her away—and after she was gone, they impounded her car.
Back at the house, investigators processing the crime scene were troubled by the information they had gotten from dispatch. Kathy had told 911 that she found her friend dead in the closet. But there was something about the ID she made that didn’t really make sense to the officers. Detectives couldn’t grasp how Kathy was able to identify Nancy Pfister beneath those sheets and that plastic bag. when they entered the closet, they couldn’t even spot the body at first glance.
Now, a little background on Aspen, Colorado. It’s One of the most exclusive cities in the United States, known for its luxury ski resorts, its high-end retail stores, and its designation as the home-away-from-home for the rich and famous. There’s even a neighborhood they’ve nicknamed Billionaire Mountain.
With the highest real estate prices in the country and its dense concentration of wealth, you may be surprised to learn that Aspen’s median individual income was just under forty thousand dollars per year in 2014.
What this reveals about Aspen, Colorado is the city’s stark class disparity—which is a nationwide problem in the 21st century, but in Aspen, that divide is exponentially greater. Aspen really is something of an upstairs-downstairs community, where the city’s workforce—its hospitality workers, bank tellers, retail associates, and so on—literally can’t afford to live there. Some of them live on the outskirts of town, in trailer parks, while many of Aspen’s frontline workers live in employee housing.
Kathy Carpenter lived in housing like that.
On the surface, Nancy Pfister and Kathy Carpenter were the unlikeliest of friends.
Nancy was one of the town’s biggest personalities, a true local luminary. Nancy’s father, Art, had developed his family’s ranch into the Buttermilk Mountain Ski Resort, which helped him amass a fortune over the years, while Nancy’s mother Betty was an airforce service pilot in World War II and an inductee in the Colorado Aviation Hall of Fame.
And Nancy’s life was no less exciting. She socialized with people like the Kennedys; she threw lavish parties at her multimillion dollar home at the crest of Buttermilk Mountain. She was close friends with gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompon, dated Jack Nicholson and was even at one time engaged to Michael Douglas.
Kathy, on the other hand, was among the town’s working class and had her share of personal troubles. She worked as a bank teller and lived in a condo provided to her by the bank. Kathy had recently been demoted at her job, partly due to her struggles with alcoholism. She had been arrested for public intoxication at least twice, and had filed for bankruptcy at least once.
Kathy’s and Nancy’s paths first crossed by chance one afternoon in 2007 when Nancy walked into Kathy’s Alpine Bank branch to open a new account following her father’s death. As Kathy assisted Nancy in opening the new account, the two women got to talking and immediately bonded. Nancy thereafter made Kathy her exclusive contact at Alpine Bank. Before long, Nancy began meeting Kathy for lunch, and then for dinner, and then for evenings out on the town and weekends together.
And now, Nancy Pfister was dead—and police were growing more skeptical of Kathy’s story…
The medical examiner quickly determined Nancy’s cause of death. Once the plastic and the sheets that wrapped her body were removed, it was revealed that she had received several hammer blows to the head. And that was likely what killed her. However, Nancy had no defensive wounds on her body, so she had likely been asleep when she was attacked, and whoever killed her wrapped her in sheets, put a bag over her head, stuffed her in the closet, but then also flipped her mattress over to hide the bloodstains.
Investigators processing the house found valuables intact and no evidence of burglary. Whoever did this was at the house to kill Nancy.
The morning after, deputies brought Kathy Carpenter in for a formal sit-down interview, and Kathy walked detectives through the events leading up to her discovery of her friend’s body.
Kathy said she last saw Nancy Pfister on the morning of February 24th. The night before, she had gone to Whole Foods and did Nancy’s grocery shopping.
This detail made investigators curious about her and Nancy’s friendship. They asked Kathy if it was common for her to run errands for Nancy. Kathy said she ran errands for her all the time, and she didn’t mind, because she loved Nancy.
That night, Kathy said she returned to Nancy’s house with the groceries and found Nancy already in bed. After asking Kathy to fetch her some pills from her nightstand, Nancy then asked her to spend the night.
This prompted One of the detectives to ask Kathy if she and Nancy had ever been intimate.
And while at first the question seemed to come as a surprise, Kathy ended up revealing that they had—but only once. It wasn’t that kind of relationship, Kathy insisted, and then had nothing more to say on this subject.
Kathy told investigators she became concerned after a couple of days passed without hearing from Nancy. So around 5:30 in the evening, on February 26th, she drove over to her place to check on her and feed the dog.
And when she walked in, she was hit with a foul odor. She checked the fridge but didn’t see any obvious source, but did happen to notice several unopened bottles of champagne, which was unusual, because Nancy would never leave a bottle of champagne untouched for more than a day.
This gave her a bad feeling, so she walked upstairs to the master bedroom, where she found the bed in a state of disarray, with the sheets missing and the comforter draped over the side.
Kathy said she then tried opening the closet door, but it was locked, so she drove back to her apartment to get the skeleton key Nancy had given her, and then returned to Nancy’s house, opened the closet door, and screamed in horror when she saw Nancy’s body.
One of the detectives who was at the scene, and couldn’t even tell at first glance that there was a body in the closet, asked Kathy how she knew it was Nancy.
It was obvious, Kathy said. She could see Nancy’s blonde hair.
The detectives looked at each other before one of them opened the case folder to take another look at the crime scene photos. And it was clear that the white plastic bag that covered Nancy’s head completely concealed her features. The detective thought to himself, there was no way Kathy could’ve seen Nancy’s hair through that garbage bag over her head.
Detectives continued interviewing Kathy for several more hours, and the more Kathy revealed—and the more they dug up from police records—the more suspicious Kathy looked.
Investigators soon learned of prior incidents involving the two women and law enforcement. In 2009, Nancy called the police to report that Kathy was at her house, drunk and having a mental breakdown. Nancy told the police she wanted Kathy out of her house, but Kathy wouldn’t leave, and was trying to bust into her locked bedroom. Kathy then charged at the police who responded, and was arrested and taken to jail to sober up.
Not long after, Kathy was demoted at work from supervisor to her previous role of bank teller.
The following year, Nancy again called police out to her home, this time because Kathy had taken a handful of pills and was wandering Nancy’s house in a daze. When police arrived, Kathy blurted out that she hated Nancy.
And then there was the time when Nancy herself was arrested for DUI in August of 2012—which Kathy felt somewhat responsible for, because the two women had gone out that night with the agreement that Kathy would be the designated driver, but by the end of the night, both women had become too drunk to drive. This led to a heated argument, during which Nancy called 911. Authorities soon arrived to find Nancy behind the wheel of her car, so, they arrested her. And in the morning, she called Kathy and demanded she bail her out of jail. Kathy did just as Nancy asked, and she used her own money to do so. And later, Nancy also made Kathy pay for her legal fees.
Detectives interviewed Kathy for nearly ten hours, after which they asked her if she’d be willing to take a polygraph test. She agreed, and so they brought in an examiner, who wired her up and began the test.
And Kathy failed.
Upon learning she flunked the polygraph, Kathy insisted she had absolutely nothing to do with Nancy’s murder. She knew how bad it looked but it wasn’t her, she promised.
Well if it wasn’t you, then who was it? The detectives asked. And they didn’t really think she’d have an answer for them. But she did.
She said that Nancy had two tenants living in her home recently while she was out of the country. And Kathy had heard that they owed Nancy a lot of money.
Their names, she said, were Trey and Nancy Styler.
Maybe police thought Kathy was sending them on a wild goose chase, but they still tracked down the Stylers and brought them in. Separately, the couple began describing their relationship with Nancy Pfister.
Dr. “Trey” Styler and his wife, Nancy – I’ll call her Mrs. Styler – were a couple in their sixties who had just moved to Aspen. They answered a newspaper ad from Nancy Pfister, who wanted to rent out her mountaintop home while she escaped to Australia for a few months
When the Stylers first knocked on her door, Nancy appeared like a character from a soap opera: in a bathrobe, decked out in pearls, champagne in hand. A picture of Aspen Royalty
The two Nancys hit it off right away, bonding over organic gardening and Mrs. Styler’s dream of opening a health spa. Nancy agreed to rent them her home for $12,000 for three months, plus a fee for using her car. The Stylers said they could only pay half up front; the recession had wiped them out. But Nancy seemed understanding, and she told them to pay the rest later to her friend at Alpine Bank, Kathy Carpenter.
Then she sweetened the deal: they could move in with her immediately, a month before their lease was set to start. For the Stylers, who needed a place fast and were already charmed by their new landlord, it felt like a miracle.
“It’s karma!” she told them.
But, as the Stylers would later tell police, the karma quickly turned sour.
They moved in, and within weeks the relationship deteriorated. Nancy treated them less like tenants and more like personal assistants—asking them to run errands and do chores—and then sprung a new obligation on them: could they also watch her eight-month-old labradoodle while she was out of the country?
Trey balked. Dog-sitting wasn’t part of the deal, and the puppy was completely untrained. He had already eaten their phones and one of Treys expensive cameras. But Nancy was never one to take no for an answer, and she offered that her friend Kathy could take the dog on weekends. the Stylers felt boxed in and reluctantly agreed.
By the time Nancy threw herself a going-away party, her persona, in their telling, had shifted from warm extrovert to a heavy drinker who used everyone around her like staff. She made The couple help her pack for her trip, and Trey drove her five hours each way to the Denver airport. He later told investigators that Nancy was so sedated on pills by the time they arrived he had to wheel her to the gate in a wheelchair, but he was relieved: at last, they’d have the house to themselves.
But their time without Nancy would not last long. Soon after she landed in Australia, Nancy began emailing the Stylers, accusing them of misusing her credit card and demanding the remaining $6,000 in rent immediately. Her tone was threatening: they’d be hearing from her lawyer, they’d better start packing, she wanted them out.
The Stylers decided all they could do was pay up. They went to Alpine Bank, sat down with Kathy Carpenter, and handed over the $6,000 balance plus $650 for utilities, hoping that would end the hostility.
It didn’t. From Australia, Nancy now insisted they owed more because they’d moved in a month early (even though she insisted they do so). If they didn’t like it, she suggested, they could always go live in a trailer park “Down Valley.” where the working class of aspen lived.
She vented on Facebook that her tenants weren’t paying rent or utilities and hinted she might have to cut her trip short. In another post, she advertised her home as available to rent again—and mentioned she needed a dogsitter.
Trey took the hint. He scrambled to find a solution—applying for a bank loan, calling old colleagues—but nothing came through. On February 19, Nancy left the Stylers a voicemail: she’d be back in Aspen in three days, and they needed to be out. If they weren’t, she’d check into a hotel and send them the bill.
So the Stylers did what she asked. They rented a motel room half an hour away and started looking for a moving van and storage unit. Kathy, who’d grown friendly with them, felt bad and lent them her Subaru to help move their belongings, while also keeping Nancy updated.
On the evening of February 22, four days before the murder, Nancy returned to her mountain home. The Stylers were gone, but many of their possessions were still there. Nancy was furious. She accused them of breaking her bed, not paying utilities or snow-plowing fees, and now said they owed her an additional $14,000. She told them she would hold their remaining belongings hostage until they paid.
Mrs. Styler told the police that she and Trey, exhausted and desperate to be done, started planning how to retrieve the rest of their stuff. On February 25, they drove up to the house with a moving crew. The house was locked, but Trey still had a key, so he let himself, his wife, and the movers inside.
According to the Stylers, they found Nancy’s dog alone and unfed, and there was a foul smell hanging in the air. However, given Nancy’s substance abuse issues, they didn’t think much of it and continued moving their stuff out of the house.
Throughout their interviews, police could feel how much resentment the Stylers had built up toward Nancy. Trey even referred to her as a “bitch” multiple times. That anger, combined with their financial dispute, gave him motive. But Trey was sixty-five and looked frail. Investigators struggled to picture him beating someone to death, moving a body, and flipping a queen-sized mattress by himself.
Still, they had to take him seriously. They put Trey on a polygraph. And just Like Kathy Carpenter, he failed. Detectives swabbed Trey and Mrs. Styler for DNA and let them go home, but they kept turning his story over in their minds. Nancy had pushed them to the brink—but they were on the verge of finally collecting their things and walking away. Was that really the moment to kill her?
Then investigators heard from one of Nancy’s friends. He said he’d gone up to the house on the 25th to keep plans he had with her, only to find the Stylers there, loading belongings into a vehicle out front, and Nancy nowhere in sight. Wondering if she was inside, he went upstairs to the master bedroom to look for her. Mrs. Styler followed him closely the whole way. He didn’t see anything unusual, though
The picture was getting murkier, and suspicions were mounting. But police were about to find their biggest piece of evidence the very next day…
So the next morning after the Styler’s questioning, a sanitation worker found a large, durable black trash bag inside a city- owned garbage dumpster, and because the bag had been dumped illegally, the worker tore it open to see if he could determine who may have dumped it there.
Inside the bag, the worker found a jewelry box, an old photograph, and a pill bottle with Nancy Pfister’s name on it. Nancy’s murder was the biggest story in Aspen that week, so the worker immediately recognized the name and turned over the trash bag and its contents to police.
Investigators did a more thorough examination, and inside the bag, they found another, smaller bag, and the contents were more damning. Because inside, they found more of Nancy Pfister’s belongings: her passport, credit cards, banking documents—as well as a hammer speckled with a dried red substance that they assumed was blood.
They kept digging through the bags inside of the bags uncovering more of Nancy’s things that looked like they were very intentionally dumped, when they found something that did NOT belong to Nancy. It belonged to someone else.
It was a vehicle registration and inspection sheet, and a P.O. box receipt—all bearing the name of Dr. Trey Styler.
It’s worth noting here that this bag was found directly behind the hotel where the Stylers were staying. Could it be that they’d be so careless as to discard this almost perfectly curated bag evidence within just a few feet of where they were staying? Or did someone maybe plant this?
Either way, investigators decided it was time to do a deeper dive into the Stylers. And that’s when they found that the couple wasn’t necessarily the helpless victims they portrayed themselves as….
For the first decade of their marriage, Trey and Nancy Styler had been the picture of success. Trey was a successful anesthesiologist, Nancy was one of the world’s experts on the Victorian water lily, and they lived, with their young son, in a luxurious, 6,000-square foot home in Kansas. Their backyard water lily ponds attracted attention far and wide, and were even featured at one point on the HGTV channel.
Life was great for the Stylers, until one afternoon, Trey was digging another lily pond in the family’s backyard when suddenly, a backhoe came tumbling down on his leg, sending him to the ER. Many surgeries followed, and Trey would never be the same again. The nerves in his leg were severely damaged, forcing him to use a cane. He closed his practice and retired early, and with money Trey inherited from his mother, he and his wife started a printing business.
But the business was not successful. And around this time, Mrs. Styler was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy.
By the early 2000s, the Stylers were almost completely out of money. So Trey went back to work, developing scheduling software for an anesthesiology group, but the working relationship went sour when Trey failed to meet his deadlines.
The group fired Trey and sued him for breach of contract. Trey countersued, and the lawsuit dragged on for so long—for over five years—that it completely depleted the Stylers finances. By the mid-2000s, they had to sell their luxury home and move into a modest house in suburban Denver. I know, I know. It’s a little “cry me a river”, but stay with me.
Trey’s money kept dwindling until he could no longer afford to pay his attorney, so he fired the attorney and represented himself. When the yearslong lawsuit was ultimately dismissed, Trey sued his attorney for legal malpractice—and he actually won a $900,000 judgment in that case, but the attorney later declared bankruptcy and had his legal obligation discharged. So, Trey got nothing.
Then the recession came, and Trey’s health continued to decline, forcing him to use a wheelchair more and more.
By 2013, the Stylers fortune was essentially gone because of medical debt and legal fees, (the unfortunate reality for a lot of people) and it forced them to relocate yet again—
to an even more modest home in an even smaller town, 20 miles outside of Denver.
Mrs Styler at this time began thinking about other work she could do, like maybe opening a med spa. She obtained an aesthetician’s license and intended to use it to provide spa services to wealthy clientele. And what better place to find wealthy clientele, she reasoned, than Aspen—the Beverly Hills of Colorado.
So in the summer of 2013, the Stylers sank the last of their savings into spa equipment and began visiting Aspen, seeking work opportunities and a place to live.
But spa jobs and affordable housing remained elusive in Aspen. Every day, the Stylers scanned the classifieds in the Aspen Times, for weeks and weeks, until finally an advertisement for a rental caught their eye:
“Three bedroom house, three-and-a-half baths,” the ad read. “House on the mountain. No cats.”
The price seemed doable for the family. Four-thousand a month, for six months—from November 22nd until May 22nd, when the owner returned from abroad.
The Stylers decided to contact the owner,—and before long, they drove up to her house and knocked on Nancy Pfister’s door.
Nancy Pfister’s comment, that the three of them meeting seemed like karma, took on a cruel irony in the wake of her murder.
And whether the Stylers were responsible or not, they were now nearly destitute. All they had was their luxury car, their spa equipment, and some jewelry.
Investigators soon learned that Trey had tried pawning some of that jewelry at a local pawn shop, and when the owner’s offer was lower than he’d have liked, Trey hung his head, said he was going to end himself, and walked out the door.
The branch manager who refused Trey Styler a loan on account of his poor credit also reported Trey having made a similar remark about taking his own life—and in the same breath, Trey had mentioned his landlady was ruining his and his wife’s lives, and that if something were to happen to her, it would be the best thing for everyone involved.
That was enough for Detectives to impound the Stylers’ Jaguar and have the car sprayed with Luminol. And the result was, some areas near the driver’s side of the vehicle lit up—which indicated the possible presence of blood.
Police also found cleaning supplies in the trunk and black plastic garbage bags similar to the one found in the dumpster behind the Stylers’ motel.
Investigators sent all the evidence they found, from the Stylers’ car and from the motel dumpster, to the crime lab, and as they awaited results, they put both the Stylers and Kathy Carpenter under 24-hour surveillance.
One thing was clear, from the surveillance of the Stylers: Trey really was in poor health, using a wheelchair much of the time.
Meanwhile, investigators discovered that $6,000 in cash and two diamond rings were missing from Nancy Pfister’s safe deposit box at Alpine Bank. And they knew that Kathy Carpenter had access to that safe deposit box, so they questioned her. And that’s when Kathy admitted to taking the money and rings.
This was all investigators needed to obtain a search warrant for Kathy’s condo. And there, police found notebooks containing Nancy Pfister’s personal information, as well as a ripped-up business card with Nancy Pfister’s name on it.
Not long after, results came in from the crime lab for the items found in the motel dumpster.
That hammer with red specks—tested positive for blood. And the DNA profile from the blood matched Nancy Pfister’s DNA. Additional DNA found on the garbage bags that contained the hammer could not be ruled out as coming from Trey Styler.
So the following day, on March 3rd, 2014, Trey Styler and his wife were arrested at their motel and charged with murder in the first degree.
But investigators weren’t completely satisfied the case was closed. They were still bothered by Kathy Carpenter’s role in all this, especially her statements to authorities.
So investigators went back to the transcript of her initial call to 911 and read it carefully.
And something in the transcript jumped out at them:
Kathy had told the dispatcher she had seen blood on Nancy’s forehead.
It was clear from the crime scene photos, from how Nancy Pfister’s head was completely covered with that white plastic bag, there was no way Kathy could’ve seen blood on Nancy’s forehead—unless she had seen Nancy before the bag was placed over her head.
For prosecutors, this sealed the deal. Kathy had to have been involved.
So ten days after the arrests of the Stylers, Kathy Carpenter was also taken into custody and charged with first-degree murder.
Prosecutors believed that Kathy had become close with the Stylers, and the three commiserated over their shared hatred for Nancy Pfister, and ultimately conspired to kill her. And afterward, each helped cover up the evidence.
Soon, additional charges would be filed against all three, including, aiding and abetting a murder after the fact.
But then, in mid-June, a shocking turn of events took place.
Trey Styler was ready to confess.
Dr. Styler claimed that he and he alone had killed Nancy Pfister.
Through his attorney, Trey said he was ready to plead guilty to the crime, but only under the condition that all charges against his wife be dropped and she be made immune to any future prosecution.
Before agreeing to this plea deal, the DA carefully revisited and reviewed all their evidence.
They went back to the transcript of Kathy Carpenter’s phone call to 911.
And obtained the tape recording so they could listen to it while reading the transcript.
And at that point in the call, where this smoking-gun statement was timestamped, Kathy Carpenter can be heard telling the 911 dispatcher that she saw blood on Nancy Pfister’s headboard, not forehead
They replayed that portion of the call several times, and Kathy had unmistakably spoken the word headboard, and not the word forehead. Whoever had transcribed the call made a mistake.
At this point, with all the forensic evidence pointing toward Trey Styler—and none toward Kathy Carpenter or Nancy Styler—all charges against the two women were dropped. Prosecutors agreed to Trey’s terms. Nancy Styler was given immunity.
Trey would then sit down with investigators and give them a full account of what happened.
He said he had driven up to Nancy Pfister’s home with the intent to confront her. he parked outside Nancy’s house, let himself inside the home, proceeded upstairs with a hammer to the master bedroom, and, upon seeing Nancy Pfister sleeping peacefully in bed—while he and his wife’s lives were falling apart—he brought the hammer down on her repeatedly until she was dead. Afterward, he wrapped her body in the bedsheets, all by himself, moved it to the closet, and flipped the mattress over. He insisted that his wife wasn’t there and had no involvement.
And while prosecutors remained skeptical of this, given his limited mobility and long term health issues, they chose to take him at his word.
On June 20th, Trey Styler entered a plea of guilty and was immediately sentenced to twenty years in prison.
But he would only serve one year of that sentence. On August 6th, 2015, Trey Styler took his own life in his prison cell at the Arrowhead Correctional Facility.
Now, to this day, many people are skeptical of Trey’s story.
After Trey’s death, Mrs. Styler filed a claim on Trey’s life insurance policy and was awarded one million dollars.
A few months later, she wrote and published a book about her experience, called Guilty by Matrimony.
And in this book, she claims that she had no idea about the murder, but that Nancy most likely had borderline personality disorder. And people thought this was incredibly inappropriate, not only was she making money off of the crime, (one that many thought she had a major role in) but she was disparaging the memory of Nancy. Luckily, the book was panned and I’m not sure that many people read it to begin with.
But we may never have a concrete answer as to what happened to Nancy Pfister. Did trey commit this crime alone? I mean, I personally don’t believe so, I would doubt he’d be strong enough to. But if that’s not the case, then which of the two women helped him out.
I’m curious to hear what you all think, you can leave a comment wherever you listen. I think for me, the saddest part in all of this is that Nancy lived her life in such a way that you could see multiple different people killing her for multiple different reasons.
I’ll be back here next week another twisty case, this time a cold case that Reddit helped solve. You’re not going to want to miss it. I’ll see you then, and until next time, stay curious.