[grim music plays]
[lock clicking]
The United States is one of the very few remaining countries
that actually carries out executions.
Very few women are condemned to death
who have a previous criminal record.
Most of them are on death row for killing intimate partners.
For killing children.
For killing people they know.
[dramatic music playing]
It doesn't look like anything bad happened here.
This call came out sometime after noon,
around 1:00 in the afternoon.
The scene was very confusing.
There was no visible fire damage from the outside.
The house looked completely clean.
[Nordskog]
with two paramedics.
Paramedics came in through the door...
and they see her and her 14-year-old son
sitting on a sofa eating cookies.
And the son wouldn't talk to them.
He was busy staring at the TV.
There was a light dust of soot,
but not enough to tell what happened.
At the beginning of this case,
when we were presented with the information
that four people were dead in the house,
two people had survived but were sort of acting drunk,
we had no idea why this happened.
Had I had more experience at that time,
I would have recognized more the effects
of carbon monoxide.
Just the two larger persons survived.
[ominous music playing]
We had fire damage burning the walls
up to about chest-high.
[Nordskog]
came into the kitchen area.
And then he sees this horrible scene.
Just this pile of little girls
laying on the kitchen floor.
With any murder, any murder/suicide plan,
anything, the big question of the day is why?
What we learned through the investigation
is that things clearly were not going Sandi's way
at this point in time in her life.
This is all she was thinking about.
[woman] Scott?
She was in a relationship with Scott Volk,
and he broke up with her two weeks before the incident.
She announced to him
that she was pregnant,
and he dropped the big bomb:
"Well, I don't want any kids."
Four days before the fire, she had an abortion.
The baby that she was carrying for Volk.
It is postmarked July 1st,
and it's stamped from Santa Clarita.
So that would have been the day of the fire.
On Sunday, one of her ex-husbands
received this in the mail.
And it was postmarked July 1st.
Okay, now this happened July 1st.
And inside is a note from her.
You can read it.
"Now you don't have to support any of us.
[bleep] you."
-[man] Wow. -"You are scum."
I think all the evidence, when taken together,
paints a very clear picture of what occurred.
[grim music playing]
To get approval to seek the death penalty...
you draft a memo
with various criteria
that goes to the death penalty committee.
But they make a recommendation
to the death penalty supervisor
whether to seek the death penalty.
And that's what was done in this case
and he determined that the death penalty was appropriate.
So we sought it.
[dramatic music playing]
Today was the day for her re-sentencing.
I spent four and a half months trying the case.
And I still have an interest.
[somber music playing]
[man]
'cause they felt that Judge Wiatt went too far.
It's very clear that the court was very clear
that they did not overturn her conviction.
She is a convicted mass murderer.
They just overturned her sentence
because of judicial misconduct,
meaning her defense attorney and the judge
had bitter fights in court in front of the jury.
And that was it.
That's just defense attorney shenanigans
and a judge who fell for the bait.
[man]
and that's what he did
every single day for four and a half months.
And I guess you could say he won.
I don't have sympathy for her at all.
She's right where she needs to be.
Um, I feel badly for her son, David.
He survived this.
And yes, he survived it physically,
but I can't imagine what happened with him
over the last 20-some years.
[somber music playing]