David Tronnes and Shanti Cooper-Tronnes.Photo:Facebook
Tronnes — who initially claimed his wife slipped and fell in the bathtub — previously pleaded not guilty and wasfound mentally competent to stand trialearlier this year despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
When Cooper-Tronnes married Tronnes, she believed he had inherited between $4 and $6 million dollars from his father, PEOPLE reported previously.
Shanti Cooper.
Tronnes had told police that on the day of the murder, he had pulled her from the tub and carried her to the living room — although they were both dry when emergency responders arrived minutes later.
A medical examiner later found that Cooper-Tronnes died from blunt force trauma to the head and strangulation. Four months after her death, her fake millionaire husband was arrested and charged with her murder.
“We all thought we knew David Tronnes,” a friend of Tronnespreviously told PEOPLE. “Come to find out, what we knew was a facade. He was living a total lie.”
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When the trial began last week, News6 WKMG reporter Emily McLeod wrote on X (formerly Twitter) from inside the courtroom and reported that in opening statements prosecutors said thatthe couple began fightingin 2017 over their home renovation project, which prosecutors coined a “money pit.”
In interviews with police, friends and relatives have called Tronnes “a miser” and claimed the wife, who was 11 years younger than him, married him for his money but ultimately “bought everything.” Tronnes even refused to pay more than one-third of the rent on a house they had previously shared because her young son also lived there, her friend Melissa Burzinski later alleged to police.
source: people.com
