On stand, brother recalls Nicole Nachtman's murder confession
TAMPA, Fla. (FOX 13) - As Joseph Carey tried to console his little sister about their mother’s sudden death, Nicole Nachtman was confessing to murder.
“I shot them! I shot Mom and Bob,” Carey recalled Tuesday.
Nachtman’s brother took the stand as the prosecution’s last witness. He told the jury his sister confessed to him during a phone call and she didn’t seem to regret it.
"She then went into, like, a whisper and she was like, 'I didn't think I could do it, Joey, but I shot Bob.' And it was weird because it was in a whisper almost like she was proud of herself," said Carey.
Carey says his sister broke down and then told him about the screaming voices in her head.
"Ever since she got back from London, her school trip, she's had uncontrollable screaming in her head. Like a high-pitch screaming. And it was affecting her sleep and she was having nightmares," Carey said.
Prosecutors say in August of 2015, the former Florida State University student left school and drove home to Carollwood to kill her mom and stepdad, Myriam and Robert Dienes.
They say she killed her stepdad in the house, then waited for her mother to come home the next day and shot her dead in the driveway, although she told her brother she got feet and tried to avoid her.
"She mistimed it and ran into my mom, and Mom said, ‘Nicki, what the [expletive] are you doing here?’ And she says she blacked out, somehow, she knows she did it," explained Carey.
Prosecutors say the motive for murder was fear of telling her mother she had missed the deadline to get housing at FSU. But only a day after the murders, FSU called Nachtman to tell her she was granted housing for the semester.
Carey remembers what his sister said. “If I had only gotten the good news phone call about the dorms earlier, if I had only gotten the good news about the dorms earlier, I wouldn't have had to do it,” recalled Carey.
Days later, Carey said he went to visit his sister in jail and she appeared relaxed and giddy, without a care in the world.
The defense says that’s because the fear and threat was gone. They say Nachtman was a tormented soul who was under her mother’s control and eventually snapped, but her brother never saw it coming,
“I remember saying, ‘Why did you need to do that? You had options, you could have called your uncle, you could have called me. Why did you have to do that?’” asked a sobbing Care. “Don't know what she said, she just kept crying."