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.
But Cooper-Tronnes’ body — like the living room floor where Tronnes moved it — was found dry to the touch, leading detectives to believe that Tronnes killed her accidentally or perhaps during an argument about renovations to their home, they said in the recording.
Tronnes insisted, however, that he returned home following a morning walk with the couple’s dogs and found his wife dead that afternoon. He then moved her body from the tub to the living room, he told investigators, while describing the couple’s plans for their new home.
“We love what we were doing for the house [and] the vision we had,” Tronnes continued. “It was a thing we did together. It just seemed like everything was coming together.”
The couple met on Match.com in 2013 and Tronnes moved to Florida before they wed last year, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Tronnes told police the couple had actually lived in the $600,000 home prior to getting married and purchased it in a trust in his name. But Shanti-Cooper’s name was never actually added to that trust, WKMG reports.
Tronnes, who has pleaded not guilty, is due back in court in January and remains held without bail at the Orange County Jail, according to the station.
Cooper-Tronnes’ relatives, meanwhile, are just as doubtful about Tronnes’ account as investigators were on the recording released Wednesday.
“I suspected him from the minute they told me,” Marion Perry, the woman’s grandmother, told WFTV. “He wouldn’t look you in the eye when he spoke to you.”
