In the new book, “The Carpool Detectives: A True Story of Four Moms, Two Bodies and One Mysterious Cold Case” (Random House), author Chuck Hogan tells the remarkable true story of how this group of friends solved a fifteen-year-old double homicide — one that had stumped seasoned detectives for more than a decade.
The murders dated back to 2005, when the bodies of a businessman in his 60s and his wife were found near their crashed SUV in a remote Los Angeles County canyon. Before their disappearance, they had simply vanished from their normal routines. The family business suddenly shut down, and millions of dollars went missing. Despite the strange circumstances, police couldn’t find any solid leads, and the case quietly faded from the headlines.
Marissa Pianko, the unofficial leader of the group, stumbled across the case in 2020 during a broadcast journalism class at UCLA. Her professor played a clip from the scene where the couple’s bodies were discovered. She couldn’t shake the question — was it an accident, or had someone murdered them?
They began calling the victims’ relatives, filing requests for police records, and speaking directly with the detectives who had originally worked the investigation. They knocked on doors and asked neighbors what they remembered. Some recalled hearing a chilling scream one night. Others remembered the husband pleading with someone to buy his company just days before the couple vanished.
Bank documents later revealed that vendors had submitted fake invoices, with the payments ending up in the dead man’s account. Because the deaths wiped out the company’s debts, the son and his brother-in-law inherited the remaining estate and property.
It all painted a damning picture. Marissa and her friends concluded that the son was “a s–t…an accountant who did very little accounting, an entitled jerkoff mooching off his father, who got drunk at every lunch – and frosted the tips of his hair. Clearly, he was a bad character…” writes Hogan.
The victims’ daughter stood apart from the rest of the family. She was deeply concerned about her parents’ fate and even suspected her brother or brother-in-law. She worked closely with the moms, eventually handing over her parents’ cell phones in hopes they might uncover something police had missed.
“One of the things that we were super-focused on was to protect the identity of the victims’ family. We changed the location of the case in the book, and we asked the author to protect them,” Pianko told The Post. “They wanted privacy, and they were so kind to us to let us write the story.”
In the end, the women discovered the deaths were no tragic car accident but a calculated mob hit. Organized crime had taken control of the business, and the murders were part of a larger scheme.
Digging further into the files, they identified two mobsters linked to both the financial crimes and the murders.
Today, the four women are investigating a different cold case — this time, the unsolved killings of about 20 women in the 1970s and 80s, which may have been the work of a serial killer. For Pianko, the fact that this case is decades old brings a small sense of relief.
“Our main suspect called my cell phone when I was making a PB&J sandwich for my kid and [the caller] asked me why I was digging into him. I felt the blood drain out of my body,” Pianko recalled. “At that moment, I felt that we had gotten into something too dangerous for us.”
