Final messages show desperation hours before Caneiro family massacre

📱 Jurors heard Keith Caneiro’s final text messages, sent minutes before he was killed.
💰 Prosecutors highlight financial disputes, trust withdrawals and altered records as a motive for the killings.
⏰ The texts went unread for nearly 2 hours, as investigators say the Caneiro family was murdered and two homes burned.

FREEHOLD BOROUGH — For the first time, jurors in the Paul Caneiro quadruple murder trial heard the final text messages sent by Keith Caneiro moments before he was killed at his Colts Neck house.

Evidence on Friday in Superior Court also included a flurry of tension-filled emails and text messages, picked by prosecutors from three specific dates leading up to the awful pre-dawn massacre of Keith, his wife and their two young children on Nov. 20, 2018.

Paul Caneiro, now 59, has been accused of brutally killing his own brother, sister-in-law, 11-year-old nephew and 8-year-old niece, which prosecutors say was motivated by financial desperation.

Read More: Caneiro murder trial reveals call of shots and security camera outage

Digital evidence reveals escalating financial conflict

Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office Detective Brian Migliorisi testified about all the data that he pulled from Paul Caneiro’s iPhone, as well as emails from a massive Google Drive of the victim’s.

The transfer of emails and messages from Keith Caneiro’s backup drive was so large that it crashed Google’s servers as they fulfilled investigator requests.

Jurors again heard the two last known calls between brothers Paul and Keith on Nov. 19, 2018, portions of which were also played on the first day of testimony.

In those calls — of which only one side is heard — Keith repeatedly asks for the TD Bank account log in from Paul, the sole trustee on the trust account linked to a massive $3 million life insurance policy.

“Are you sure it went to the right place this time?” Keith asks. “I understand what you’re saying – Paul, I’m worried, I need to see where the money went,” he adds.

Trust withdrawals and altered bank records under scrutiny

Migliorisi also read out loud from binders of emails, now printed out as evidence.

On April 11, 2018, Paul Caneiro said he accidentally had sent money from that trust account directly to pay college loans for his daughter.

“I am going to make a single payment plus interest to the policy,” his email said, adding
“I’m sorry about that and will make it right.”

“I’m stressed out more than I’ve ever been,” a separate message from Paul to Keith read that day. “I didn’t sleep most of the night trying to sort this out.”

Testimony last week outlined that bank records show that Paul Caneiro made multiple withdrawals from the trust over two years, draining roughly $78,000 between 2017 and 2018.

Read More: Inside Paul Caneiro's big expenses before Colts Neck killings

In 2017, $19,880 was paid back into the trust from Paul Caneiro’s personal accounts, but no deposits were made the following year, a Monmouth County investigator testified.

Instead, starting in April 2018, bank statements linked to Paul Caniero were altered to make it appear as though payments had been to the insurance company, the same detective said.

Emails show brotherly tension weeks before killings

In September 2018, there was a flurry of emails as the brothers discussed potentially selling the extermination business they were equal partners in.

“100 f***ng emails of conversations and you can’t follow up properly on any of them,” Keith Caneiro snapped to Paul in one of dozens of messages from a single day in September 2018.

Then later in the same exchange, Keith said: “We helped each other out, this is what brothers do.”

Defense attorneys point out that seeing messages from single days in April, September and November, two weeks before Keith Caneiro and his family were brutally slain, does not show all the nuances of their sibling relationship.

This is “not the entirety of everything that existed” Monika Mastellone pointed out, while cross examining Migliorisi on Friday.

Final texts sent as Keith Caneiro went outside into the dark

Between 1:27 and 4:54 a.m. the morning of the killings and house fires, Paul Caneiro’s iPhone was plugged in at his Ocean Township house — the screen stayed off, and there was no app activity the entire time it was charging, data shows.

During that time, four text messages were sent to Paul from Keith, as follows:

3:14 a.m. My power is totally out at home, total AC failure
3:15 a.m. I used the manual switch in the basement but nothing is working
3:17 a.m. I’m not even sure what to do
3:18 a.m. The generator says AC failure Going outside to see if the generator is in the right mode

Investigators have testified that Keith Caneiro went outside in the darkness that morning— and was shot five times, in the head and back.

Inside, Jennifer Caneiro was shot in the head and stabbed in the torso, while their 11-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter were also repeatedly stabbed and left inside the burning home.

The text messages were not marked as read by Paul Caneiro until 5:03 a.m., investigators said.

By that point, the fire at Paul Caneiro’s Ocean Township home had started and reported.

Due the impending winter storm, the Caneiro murder trial would not resume until Tuesday.

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