US man found guilty of wife’s murder in row over Zombie House Flipping show
Shanti Cooper-Tronnes abruptly walked out of a meeting with the producers of a home renovation television series that her husband coveted appearing on in 2018. She was beaten to death days later.
This week, a jury in Florida found her husband, David Tronnes, guilty of murdering her because he was so enraged by her refusal to go on the show, which he believed would bail them out of costly improvements to their house.
Tronnes, 55, received a sentence of life imprisonment after his conviction on Wednesday, the local state attorney’s office said in a statement. The conviction came at the end of a six-day trial whose grisly details drew national attention.
Cooper-Tronnes’s son from a prior marriage, Jackson Cooper, spoke in court on Wednesday before his stepfather’s sentencing and likened his mother’s slaying to “a hole in my heart that I can’t fill or fix”.
Afterwards, Cooper told a news conference covered by NBC that Tronnes’s punishment felt “like five years of struggle and pain lifted off of our shoulders”.
“It feels good inside that he’s finally where he is,” Jackson Cooper said of Tronnes. “We can move on knowing that he’s where he’s supposed to be – where he’s meant to be.”
Cooper-Tronnes, 39, met Tronnes online in 2013. She believed he had inherited millions, and he moved from Minnesota to live with her in Orlando’s Delaney Park.
In 2015, Tronnes paid a little more than $600,000 cash for the house he shared with Cooper-Tronnes and put it in a trust fund with his mother, CBS News reported. The couple wed in 2017, but Tronnes did not put his wife on the deed to the Victorian-style home.
Though the place measured 4,000 sq ft and included a pool as well as a garage apartment, Tronnes reportedly spent about a quarter-million dollars renovating it. Cooper-Tronnes, who operated a lucrative financial software business out of her home office, funded the renovations.
Tronnes, who did not work, oversaw the refurbishments. The project eventually spiraled out of control and strained the couple’s relationship, leading Tronnes to sleep in a garage while his wife stayed in a one-bedroom studio on the property, prosecutors said.
Ultimately, in hopes of at least minimizing the losses, Tronnes called a local house renovator who appeared on a reality TV show named Zombie House Flipping. The series details how crews renovate homes in the worst of shapes – often abandoned – in hopes of selling them at a profit.
The renovator, Keith Ori, told CBS that he had gotten the go-ahead to use the Tronnes household for the show. And he met with them one last time in April 2018, before filming was scheduled to start the next month, to make sure they were both still on board with appearing on the show.
“They both agreed and said, ‘Yes, we understand.’ And then she took off immediately,” Ori recalled. “I got a sense that she was pissed off at him.”
Authorities established that Tronnes fatally beat and strangled Cooper-Tonnes in her bedroom on 24 April 2018. He then sought to clean up the scene of the crime and reported that he had found his wife dead in the bathtub after she had apparently fallen. He claimed he spent the day cleaning and walking his dogs when he found Cooper-Tronnes’s body.
The eye bruises, facial injuries and “blood evidence” that a medical examiner found on Cooper-Tronnes did not support her husband’s story, prosecutors said. Investigators also said they were suspicious because Tronnes did not weep or otherwise seem distressed over Cooper-Tronnes’s death.
Authorities gathered evidence for about four months before booking Tronnes in his wife’s killing. He was charged with first-degree murder, and his trial began on 12 October.
Jurors who heard prosecutors’ case against Tronnes deliberated for less than five hours – a relatively short time – before declaring him guilty as charged.