We've all seen the headlines in the news of how somebody lost their life in an act of cold-blooded

murder and it grabs your attention, but have you ever stopped to think about the life of the person at the center of the

news story? These victims were way more than a salacious headline. I'm Eric Carter-Londine, and my podcast, The Murder and

my family dives into some of those stories to help listeners get to know the person who was lost and how their death

affected those closest to them. Listen to the murder of my family everywhere

you listen to podcasts. After a man was murdered in his own home, the co-conspirators started pointing fingers at each other.

It would come down to he said, she said, in front of a jury, and they frankly didn't know who

to believe until a tie-breaking voice came forward. I'm Charlie and

welcome to crime lines.

Hello and

welcome to Crime Lines and thank you to Nate for suggesting this case to me.

Let's go ahead and get started with Stephen and Adele Craven.

Steve was born in Minnesota in October of 1961,

and he grew up in both Deerwood, Minnesota

and Dryden, Michigan.

The thing his two hometowns have in common is that they're tiny. The

population is in common is that they're tiny. The population is measured in the hundreds, not the thousands.

Steve moved out to Long Beach, California to attend California State, and he graduated with a business degree in 1983.

In 1984, he was working for an import-export business alongside a woman named Adele Vakuna, who was from the area having grown up in Santa Fe Springs, California.

Steve and Adele started dating, and around the same time Steve enlisted in the Coast Guard and became a pilot flying Falcon jets.

He and Adele were together for the next several years, though they had a few periods of breaking up and then getting back together in those years.

Adele was Steve's first and only serious girlfriend, and in 1989 he called his family to let them know that he and

...