The Usual Suspect

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2:37Memphis is a music city. We have soul, we have jazz, we have blues. Everybody loves barbecue. It's one of those smells when you come to Memphis.

2:53There is a darker side where we have quite a bit of crime and quite a few homicides. We end up with some interesting trials. Business is good. Call your next witness. I am Karen Cook. I'm an assistant district attorney general. My name's Tom Henderson. I'm an assistant to the district attorney general. My name is Danielle McCollum. I'm an assistant district attorney and I was part of the prosecution team for the Tina Corona case. Tina Corona was a young woman from Tennessee. She was married to Joe Corona. It always seemed like they were in love with each other. October 25th of 2008, Tina at the time was the president-elect of the Corvette Club.

3:39My wife and I were to host a Memphis Corvette Club progressive dinner at our house. For me, it's more of a social event than about the cars. Tina was supposed to get up and go shopping for some supplies. I think Tina left sometime in the morning. She had driven the Avalanche. Joe called me at 11.30 Saturday morning to see if we could work on the Chevelle. So he came at 1 o 'clock, and during the day, Joe had been trying to get a hold of Tina. She apparently was not answering her phone. Joe called, I think it was around 5. Pretty hysterical that he couldn't find Tina. You know, I had people starting to show up.

4:29Never did see Tina. It's not like Tina to be that late for anything. Wow, Tina's missing. I mean, this is Memphis. A lot of bad things happen. There have been a number of carjacking. They were frantic. They didn't know if she was broken down on the side of the road or if she'd been abducted. Joe and I and my wife went around looking the entire night all over the place for her. Looking for that black avalanche. Joe was on his phone basically constantly. They checked hospitals, stores, parking lots. They couldn't find it anywhere. They went to a police station, gave a missing persons report, decided they'd pick it back up first thing Sunday morning.

5:14Sunday, the Corvette Club immediately acted just like a family would. They got together and started looking, trying to find out what happened. They're probably one of the more well-organized search parties because they had flyers, they had groups. Nobody found anything and everybody went home on Sunday.

5:41Monday is when Tina's body was found in the avalanche on Brannock. One of the neighbors, they see a foot sticking out from a blanket and call the police. Word came that there was a body and it shattered our hopes. Tina's dead. They were sure they had a homicide. Obviously, Joseph Corona was a suspect at the beginning. My husband's always the first suspect. Joe turned at me and said, well, you're my alibi. Joe said he had an alibi. He was with me the entire day.

6:23I'm Maureen Maher. Tonight on 48 Hours, the usual suspect.

6:51When they see Tina Corona in the backseat wrapped up with blankets, obviously this is not a suicide, it's not a natural cause. They know they have a homicide. Shelby County Prosecutor Tom Henderson had a mystery on his hands. They'd find no gunshot wounds, no knife wounds. Investigators weren't even sure yet how 44-year-old Tina Corona had been killed. For that, they'd have to wait for the medical examiner. Meanwhile, friends tried to process the news that Tina had been murdered. We were devastated because we were hoping to find her alive, of course. You always have hope till it's over, and then it's just overwhelming.

7:34It's hard for Kathy Struna to picture Tina gone, as life with her close friend was always an adventure.

7:45Tina's social life revolved around cars. As active members of the Memphis Corvette Club, she and her husband Joe traveled in their three Corvettes to various events, frequently socializing with Kathy and her husband, Matt. I would put Tina in my top five friends from my lifetime. She made you feel that special, and she was that special. That charm helped Tina professionally. Despite never graduating from college, she earned about$200 ,000 a year as a vice president with the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald. Joe Corona was also involved in finance, running his own company, Corona Investments. In his spare time, he tinkered on cars with friends like Gary Hathaway.

8:36He had a great sense of humor, and he was a funny guy to be around, and I actually did enjoy being around him. Tina met Joe in 1993. She was divorced with a four-year-old son, Todd. Joe, also divorced, was managing a shoe store, where Tina, known for her collection of hundreds of shoes, was a regular. The couple married several months after they met, and holidays quickly became family affairs. There's Tina. Merry Christmas. Merry New Year. Happy Hanukkah. Show them the tree. She loved decorating for Christmas. Todd, now 24, has fond memories of those early years with Joe. You think Santa did all right?

9:20He loved me and tried to act like my father. We had fun together. We've been to baseball games together, football games together. We went all sorts of places. Over their 15-year marriage, Tina and Joe enjoyed a lifestyle filled not just with cars, but also cruises and casinos. Pastimes they shared with fellow Corvette club members Gary and his wife Pat. And how were they as a couple? A very happy couple. You know, she called him JoJo. Well, they were always holding hands. Great couple. I never really saw them fight. I never saw them argue or anything. He would always buy her jewelry. If it wasn't every week, it was every other week, or flowers.

10:06Jo accompanied Tina most everywhere, behavior that could seem doting. But to friends, it was peculiar. He would never let her go to a nail appointment or a hair appointment. And did you ever talk to her about it? She wanted desperately to please him because she really thought he was all out. She had chemistry for him. More time with Joe meant less time with Tina's mother, Clara Murphy. I could see a change in Tina, you know, after she married Joe. I felt like Joe was trying to keep Tina from me. She made beautiful pictures. Eventually, mother and daughter were completely estranged, a rift stemming from an argument over thousands of dollars that Clara said Joe owed her family.

10:52After it was all over with, Tina gets up from the table, and she said, I've lost my family, and they left, and I never talked to her again for 14 months. Clara says she tried communicating with Tina, but her daughter refused, until she received a surprising email. And Tina writes to you, I guess as long as I'm married to Joe, and I pray that we stay married as long as you and Dad did, we will never, ever get to work things out. I know how you feel about him. That's exactly right. While the message may not have seemed hopeful, it did end with the words, I will always love you, Mom. One month later, Tina was dead.

11:40I can't imagine what her mother and her son, they'll never be the same. Friends gathered at the Corona home to support a distressed Joe. He walked in and there was this glass bowl with marbles in it and a candle on the table, and he flung that on the floor. He did seem upset. He came up to me and gave me a hug and says, you're not going to do that. Believe me now, are you? Joe told friends in police he believed Tina may have been murdered in a gang-related carjacking gone bad. Is it conceivable that people might have said, hey, you know, she was carjacked or it was a random act of violence? I think it's conceivable that the average person would believe that.

12:31The average law enforcement officer would not believe that. The carjacking theory would immediately be called into question when it was revealed how Tina's body was found. She was in the backseat of her Chevy Avalanche, partially nude, her hands loosely bound together with duct tape. And thousands of dollars worth of jewelry had been left on her body. I'm thinking, why would a criminal or a robber or somebody do that? You know, it didn't make sense to me. It was just an add-up. There was a lot that didn't add up for Henderson and the rest of the prosecution team of Danielle McCollum and Karen Cook.

13:10She was wearing sandals, and the sandals were placed perfectly side by side just to the right on the front driver's side. Law enforcement officers would look at this scene and think, this has got to be staged. Then there was the location. Tina's body and truck were actually found in a suburb of Memphis on a safe residential street in the town of Bartlett. Crime is everywhere, but certain types of crime are not everywhere. There weren't that many carjackings in the suburbs. So you would expect law enforcement to be suspicious. But not Gary Hathaway, Joe's friend and alibi, who is about to make a disturbing discovery.

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15:33Tina's gone. She's not coming back. It was time for friends and family to not just mourn the passing of Tina Corona, but to come together and celebrate her life. It was standing room only. People were standing up all... It was just packed. When we were leaving to go to the graveside, hundreds of corvettes lined up back following us there. It was Joe's wish, and he wanted to keep it lighthearted, not a real sad, formal affair. But some people thought the tone of the service was wrong and that Joe's behavior in particular was inappropriate. They played, I'll have another beer in Mexico at her funeral, which was disgusting for me.

16:22and he would do thumbs up to somebody over there on the side, I don't know. He was sitting in the front row, bent over like this, tapping his foot to the music. We were just so numbed and confused about the whole thing. We're on Brannock Street in Bartlett. This is where they actually found the avalanche with her body in the backseat. Gary started having serious reservations about Joe as soon as Tina's body was found in the back of her truck on a quiet, dead-end street in a Memphis suburb. And in relationship to this, where is the storage unit? The storage unit is straight line, probably about two blocks that direction.

17:06Were you suspicious? I was suspicious, yes. Gary was at the Corona's house on Monday when police broke the news about Tina. The coincidence about where the truck was found was still bothering him when he noticed there was one car too many parked at the house. The Chevelle is normally kept in the storage shed, and his red 80 Corvette during that period was kept in the house garage. So this gets a little complicated. This is a model that is not to scale, but it will help illustrate that in 2008 the Coronas had eight cars, Four that they kept at the house and another four that Joe kept six miles away here at the storage unit In order to get one car out of the storage shed It was a whole lot easier to just take one car down there, swap it out, bring the other car back So the fact that the red Corvette and the red Chevelle were both at the Corona house that Monday was a big problem Why is the Red Chevelle being in the garage such a big deal for you?

18:15Why is it so telling for you? If both of those cars are there, what car should he drive to the storage shed to get the car? He would have had to have left a car there. Every car that's normally at the house was still at the house, except for the Avalanche. With four cars at the house and three cars at the storage unit, the question becomes, which car did Joe drive to the storage unit and leave behind in order to get the Chevelle back to the house? Gary realized the only car missing was the Avalanche, parked a half mile away from the storage unit. And the Avalanche has just been found several streets over with the body of his dead wife.

19:01Exactly. Is that the moment that you said, he might have done it. Gary kept his suspicions to himself until he and his wife Pat finally had a moment alone. We actually went to bed that night. On Monday? Yeah, and we couldn't sleep. He said, are you awake? And I said, yeah. And he goes, let's get up. He goes, I think Joe did it. I said, yeah, he did it. pat had already thought joe had been acting unusual the day tina disappeared but she immediately became concerned when she walked into the corona home that saturday night and was blown away by the overwhelming smell of bleach in the couple's bathroom tina didn't like bleach she didn't buy bleach she didn't use bleach she liked pine salt Gary and Pat continued to wrestle with their suspicions.

19:58That is, until Joe asked them to accompany him to the morgue. The act he put on was just amazing. Quite the act. I never saw a tear shed. He kind of stumbled back a couple of steps, making it look like he was going to fall. Way back, he got in our front seat with Gary. And as we're driving along, he gets on his cell phone and, you know, he's saying, Yeah, yeah, it was Tina. Yeah, I've got closure now. No, no, don't send flowers. Tina didn't like flowers. Send some to charity. I look in the mirror at my wife and she's looking at me and we're both going, oh, you know. That's when I started getting afraid of him, at that moment.

20:49Even more chilling for Gary was the realization that Joe may have used him for an alibi. Obviously, I'm thinking that he had already killed her when he called me at 1130 and he was looking for an alibi. So Thursday afternoon, I called the Bartlett police and said, you know, we're going to come over and need to talk. The Hathaways immediately began to distance themselves from Joe Corona. But friends like Matt and Kathy Struna continued their support. We arranged for grief counseling for Joe at our church, and we took him to church with us. We took him, we had him out here for dinners at our home.

21:31Kathy even helped Joe pack up Tina's belongings about a week or two after her death. I asked him, I said, what do you want to do with all of this? And he said, I don't care what you do with it. He said, I just want it out of here. I don't want to look at it. I don't want to see any of her stuff ever again. So we were going through everything and putting it in boxes. And I found a box of her high school albums and photos and stuff like that. And he said, I'm just going to throw that in the trash. I said, oh, no, you're not. I said, that should go to Todd. More and more questions were coming up about Joe Corona.

22:10The Bartlett Police Department worked hard to eliminate every other logical suspect, and Joe Corona stood out. But what possible motive would a man who routinely showered his wife with flowers and jewelry have to kill her? How about an affair with this woman? She thought that she was his one true love.

22:46As the investigation into Tina Corona's murder continued, friends like Gary and Pat Hathaway had grown increasingly suspicious of Tina's husband, Joe. I sat there every day expecting at any moment there were going to be half a dozen squad cars come with the lights flashing and everything and they were going to haul him off. To get him, yeah. But many questions remained, including why would Joe want his wife dead? Searching for answers, some eyes turned to a woman the Coronas knew from church, Becky Black. Becky Black was a friend of Tina and Joe's, and I started having an affair with Joe. Started walking at the track at the gym, and it started growing to something more intimate, and ended up lasting for about eight to ten years.

23:34Did she cooperate? Yes. So right away she copped everything, the relationship? Yes. Becky Black met Joe when she was in her mid-30s, feeling unappreciated in a troubled marriage. He was filling in the gaps of the stuff that I wasn't, you know, wasn't getting at home. You know, opening the door, putting roses on my windshield, sending flowers to me at work. He paid her attention. He paid her compliments, just like he did with Tina. And so that gave her, you know, a false sense of security with him, and she was happy. Even after police questioned Becky, she continued to see Joe. After the murder, I was kind of caught in between.

24:16It was like I considered him my best friend. Like I didn't want to betray my best friend. But soon her support turned to suspicion as Joe allegedly bullied Becky. She had had enough. He was getting meaner, more vocal, demanding that I do this and demanding that I do that. Becky told her husband about the affair and her concerns about Joe, which she now also shared with police. Seeing an opportunity, investigators convinced Becky to keep the pretense of the relationship going and to meet Joe in her car, in a parking lot, wearing a wire. I was afraid for my family's safety, and when they approached me to do that, I was more than willing.

25:06You love me more than you did her? Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I love you more than I've ever loved anybody. While Joe did repeatedly profess his love for Becky in those recordings, he did not profess guilt. All this time, I just kept thinking that maybe, you know, you may have done that for me, thinking that was the only way that you could get me. And then I started thinking, at first I was scared, and then I thought, if you did, that made me feel special. It made me feel like... Honey, I didn't do it, okay? And when I say I would do anything for you, I mean, I wouldn't do something like that.

25:48He was convincing Becky that he didn't do it, and the police don't suspect him. He told her multiple times, I'm off the list, you're off the list. Actually, Joe was at the top of the list. But investigators doubted the affair was the motive for murder, especially when they learned Tina had known for years that Joe was cheating on her. A lot of people think this was about Becky Black. I think Becky Black was just a side issue. How many times do you usually call her every day? Investigators were still searching for a motive when they learned about a home the Coronas were planning to buy. Tina had been wanting a brand new house out in Fayette County, a big house.

26:29They had been discussing it since the beginning of 2008. One week before the murder, after many delays, Tina believed the closing was finally going to happen. This house closing was a big deal to us as far as realizing that he was really running out of time. Prosecutors believe that Joe did not want Tina or the bank looking into his finances. and that the closing was never going to happen. The reality was Joe did not even have an approved mortgage. When you fill out the application, they're going to start checking your bank accounts. And Tina would have noticed it. And if Tina noticed it, she might ask questions.

27:12What Tina would have noticed, say prosecutors, was that Joe had built a financial house of cards. Instead of investing all his clients' money, his company, Corona Investments, was scamming people, including Tina, their closest friends, and even his mistress, Becky Black. They didn't know anything. The friends and family had no idea. Because he was covering it up using some fraudulent bank accounts. Investigators scrutinized the Corona's finances and found checks from clients and friends like the Strunas. How much money did you lose with him? $15 ,000. Corona Investments is where we had to write that check.

27:52We traced the paper trail and find out that went into his personal account. And there was a$30 ,000 withdrawal from Tina's annuity, requested by Joe 10 days before Tina's murder and deposited into his own account 10 days after her death. Police say Joe forged Tina's signature. Over a period of eight years, investigators believe Joe Corona conned his so-called clients out of more than$780 ,000. Joe Corona was in trouble because his con was about to be exposed because Tina wasn't stupid. If she were to find out that he's stealing from their friends and relatives and hiding it from her and defrauding her, that would have been the end of it.