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10 years later: David Crespi pens letter on murder of daughters

By Jim Bradley
By Jim Bradley

MATTHEWS, N.C. — Ten years ago, much of Charlotte was in shock after a Matthews banker was arrested for murdering his twin daughters.

Samantha and Tessara Crespi were just 5 years old when their father, David Crespi, stabbed them repeatedly, then calmly called 911 and told dispatchers “I just killed my two daughters.”

Now, a decade after that chilling 911 call, Crespi is serving two life sentences inside a state prison where he said, “I remember them every day.”

Read our past coverage:

Crespi sent a handwritten letter to Eyewitness News reporter Jim Bradley, saying "Daily, I pray for all impacted by our tragedy."

READ: Excerpts from David Crespi letter to Jim Bradley

Crespi’s life behind the barbed wire of the Albemarle Correctional Institution has included a variety of prison jobs, from chapel clerk to helping inmates get their GEDs to working as a geriatric aide.

He is visited frequently by his remaining children and his wife, Kim, who drives to the prison to see him every two weeks.

While Crespi declined a Channel 9 request for an on-camera interview, he and his family appeared in a Danish documentary in 2013, in which he insisted, as he has for years, that his decision to chase his young daughters through the house before stabbing them a total of 32 times was the result of a psychotic episode brought on by prescription medication he was taking to treat depression.

In the documentary he said, “Who I was was chemically altered. I know for certain that I know what caused the death of my daughters. I know it was the pills.”

Crespi’s wife, Kim, has spent years trying to convince the world around her that it was bad medicine, not a bad man that killed her twins, who would now be 15 years old.

She, too, declined an on-camera interview, but said through texts that “prison remains a harsh reality.”

She provided Eyewitness News access to photos, showing a smiling David Crespi with both her and her children during Christmastime visits.

She said her husband has been “medication free for seven years, is not bipolar, and is and was a model citizen with the exception of the medication-induced tragedy that has devastated all of us.”

Not everyone is so convinced.

“It holds no water with me,” said Marsha Goodenow, the former Mecklenburg County prosecutor who handled the Crespi case.

She said in interviews with detectives that Crespi admitted that for 10 years, while he was both on and off prescription medications, he had fantasies about killing his wife, children and strangers. She bristles at the suggestion that he is a victim.

“Even if you believe he is not a threat to the general public, he still has to be punished for murdering two 5-year-old girls,” Goodenow said.

Asked if she thought Crespi should ever be allowed out of prison, she said, “No, I do not. How do you know he won’t do it in the future?”

Kim Crespi, who still lives in the house where her girls were killed, has a different view. In a recent internet posting she said she’s “working with legal counsel and experts to have a wrongful plea set aside.”

As he begins the second decade of his life sentence, David is “hopeful,” he writes, “that one day, all will understand” what drove him to a murderous act few can even begin to fathom.

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