A jury found a Florida man guilty of first-degree murder, after he killed his wife for refusing to appear on the reality TV show Zombie House Flipping with him, and he was exposed for lying about inheriting millions of dollars.
David Tronnes was sentenced to life in prison by a judge for the 2018 murder of Shanti Cooper-Tronnes, who was found covered in blood and partially submerged in a bathtub in their Orlando, Florida home.
Initially, Tronnes had claimed his wife slipped and fell in the bathtub and pleaded not guilty. After being tested Tronnes was found to be competent to stand trial despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
When Shanti married David, she was under the impression that he had inherited between $4 and $6 million dollars from his father.
However, after the wedding she kept getting stuck with paying all the bills. Surrounding friends and family of Shanti recalled that she was overwhelmed with all the financial responsibility being shoved onto her after the marriage.
A close friend said, “Before she was so brutally beaten and murdered by David, she had spent a sizable amount of money renovating their home for the realty TV show Zombie House Flipping.”
A news release from the state attorney’s office states, “Cooper-Tronnes’ refusal to appear on the show upset Tronnes to the point that it led to her murder.”
According to police, David had told them on the day of the murder that he had pulled her from the tub and carried her to the living room. However, police noticed that David and Shanti 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.
Authorities claim that Tronnes killed his wife of about a year in their Orlando neighborhood after she learned he not only did not have the millions she thought he did, but he also allegedly had a penchant for going to bathhouses for anonymous sex with men.
“We all thought we knew David Tronnes,” a friend of Tronnes said. “Come to find out, what we knew was a facade. He was living a total lie.”
During the trial prosecutors stated that the couple began fighting in 2017 over their home renovation project, which quickly turned into a never ending money pit.
In interviews with police, friends and relatives, Tronnes had been referred to as a miser and claimed his wife, who was 11 years younger, married him for his money, but ultimately ended up buying 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,” Shanti’s friend Melissa Burzinski later alleged to police.
