She Had No Idea This Was Her Last Day Alive | True Crime Documentary

May 8th, 2018, Westfield, Massachusetts. Just a normal, quiet day. Then a 911 call comes in just after noon. A man’s voice, urgent and controlled. >> 911, the fire department. What’s the address of your emergency? >> Uh this is Brian Fannon from 90 North Westfield. My wife just shot herself. Can you send me some help? >> All right, Brian.

 We’ll get him on the way out there, okay? >> She’s gone, I’m God. >> Okay. >> [clears throat] >> Are you sure? >> Yes. Yes. >> Westfield police and fire respond immediately to the family home. When they arrive, they find 51-year-old Amy Fannon on the dining room floor. A single gunshot wound to the right side of her head.

 Her husband, Brian Fannon, a Westfield police detective of many years, is kneeling beside her. The dining room scattered, a spent casing on the floor, blood spatter on the window frame between the dining room and the breezeway, a pair of glasses nearby carrying what appeared to be reddish-brown residue. The weapon used is Brian Fannon’s own service pistol.

Massachusetts State Police Detective Brendan O’Toole is called to the scene. >> I saw the entry wound to her head. It didn’t seem right in that moment. How would something like that happen? >> [music] >> Westfield sits in western Massachusetts, the sort of town where people settle in and don’t leave.

 Families stick around and the same last names show up everywhere on Little League teams, in church bulletins, even on the police force from one generation to the next. It’s tight-knit. Honestly, everyone knows each other, at least a little. Amy Jean Hanson was born on June 8th, 1966 to Richard Hanson and Patricia Tarrant. She came from a large family.

 The Hanson girls in particular were remembered warmly in Westfield. She had eight siblings, mostly girls and a boy. They were known as some of the prettiest, smartest, and nicest girls in town. Amy was all three. Everyone who knew Amy said the same thing. She always gave more than she kept for herself. At church, she volunteered, always behind the scenes.

 She wasn’t interested in standing out or getting credit. She simply showed up, gave her time, and went home. Her faith wasn’t for show. It was deep, real, and part of her daily life. Amy and Brian went to Wyben Union Church on Montgomery Road in Westfield, and that place shaped her routine and her relationships. Amy loved being outside.

 She hiked, kayaked, rode her bike, and tended her garden, not as activities to brag about, but just because she genuinely enjoyed them. Being out in nature brought her peace, and people around her noticed that about her. The night before Amy died, she was making a gift. There was a baby shower coming up, someone close to her expecting a baby, and Amy was working on something handmade for it.

That evening, she also texted her daughter, Tori. Just your typical Tuesday night chat, nothing special, nothing that hinted it would be the last one. Mary Sandstrom, the assistant district attorney assigned to the case, described Amy simply in the way you do after pouring over someone’s life on paper for months.

“She sounds like a fairy tale,” she said. “Giving, selfless, completely dedicated to her family.” Then she added, “She wasn’t ready to die. Amy was healthy. She was happy.” That detail matters a lot, actually. Partly because of what happened next, and partly because Amy had no idea that the man she’d built her life around, Brian, had quietly started planning a future without her.

Amy met Brian Fannon in 1983. She was 16, he was 19. They went to Westfield High School, and at some point, in the usual way young people cross paths in a small town, something clicked. And in 1985, they got married. Brian came from a family with deep roots in Westfield, a lineage of police officers and public servants.

 Joining the Westfield Police Department was not a detour for Brian Fannon, it was an inheritance. He rose through the ranks. He became a detective. By the time Amy died, he had spent the better part of his adult life as a figure of genuine standing in Westfield. Stephanie Barry put it plainly, there was no one who spent any amount of time in Westfield who didn’t know who Brian Fannon was.

They had two children together, a son, Travis, and a daughter, Tori. By all accounts, the family was rooted, stable, and respected. They were, by the measure of their community, the kind of couple other people looked to. 33 years of marriage, and a house on the edge of all of it that no one from the outside could see inside.

 On the afternoon of May 8th, 2018, several hours after the 911 call, Massachusetts State Police Detective Brendan O’Toole brought Brian Fannon to the State Police Barracks in Russell, Massachusetts. The interview began at 2:41 p.m. Brian Fannon sat across from the detective. He was calm. He was coherent. He was, after all, a man who had spent his career on the other side of these conversations.

>> Tuesday, May 8th, it’s 2:41 p.m. I’m with Brian Fannon. Brian, do you understand I got a recorder on right now? >> Yes. >> O’Toole asked him to walk through what had happened. Brian told investigators he departed his office at Westfield Station at approximately 11:45 a.m. and headed home as his wife was also making her way back to prepare lunch.

>> What was she making? >> Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. >> He stated that shortly after arriving home, a dispute from the previous evening resurfaced and quickly escalated. >> What was the argument about? >> Um I’m retiring soon. We’re discussing what each of us expects retirement to be. >> Brian claimed he expressed to Amy that he had no desire to spend his retirement years upkeeping their 200-year-old property, a home Amy remained deeply attached to.

The couple also touched on the subject of their aging dog, with Brian expressing hesitation about getting a new one. >> You know, I don’t want to be tied down by a dog, you know. She always wants to have a dog. And I want to travel more than she does. >> Brian maintained that the situation rapidly deteriorated from there.

>> I took my gun out of the holster and put it on her hutch because I had to use the bathroom. >> Where’s the hutch located? >> In the dining room. >> He recounted closing the bathroom door and upon returning, he found Amy holding the firearm >> [music] >> with the barrel pressed to the right side of her head.

>> She has the the gun pointed up to the right side of her head. >> What did you hear her say? >> I I think she said I guess You don’t want You don’t want me around or you don’t want to be around me. >> Was she seated or >> No, she was still up. She was standing. >> Okay. >> Brian stated he was standing roughly 4 to 5 ft away when he made an attempt to prevent Amy from firing the weapon.

>> I tried to get to her. I almost did. She’s so quick. >> At the end of the interview, O’Toole asked Brian Fanyan to hand over his phone for data extraction. Brian complied, but he added something before the recorder went off. O’Toole later described the moment. >> I had turned off the recorder and that’s when Brian told me he said, “You’re going to see some things on there and it’s not what it appears to be.

” >> For Detective O’Toole, that was a clear warning sign, but he knew he had to keep his mind open. Right after Amy Fanyan died, the investigators grabbed everything digital from Brian Fanyan, his personal phone, his laptop, even his work computer at the Westfield Police Department.

 They handed the tech over to Detective Tom Forest from the Massachusetts State Police Cybercrime Unit. He dug through the hard drives. The trail didn’t start on May 8th. It went all the way back to early March 2018 when things started to get interesting. Not just a weird search here or there, but a pattern. The kind of trail you only notice when you lay out all the details.

 And this wasn’t just grief and confusion. This was calculated. Late February, early March, Brian kept looking up the name Kareen Knowles. People called her Cory. By April 2, his searches took a turn. He wanted to know if you could have an affair without sex. He literally typed that in. Couple weeks later, April 17, he dove into Massachusetts divorce law, page after page. And he wasn’t just curious.

He zeroed in on one thing. What happens to your pension when you split up? Brian was close to retirement. That pension was a big deal. Investigators later learned he told Kareen he worried about losing part of it if he divorced Amy. But he didn’t stop at divorce. On May 7, just 11 days before Amy died, Brian kept Googling how to delete the frequently contacted list on his phone.

Not a full wipe, just how to get rid of the people he called the most. On the morning of May 8, while Brian was still sitting at his desk at the police department, he looked up Massachusetts Medical Examiner offices, found a page about forensics units, the teams that show up when someone dies, the ones that comb through scenes, bodies, figure out what happened.

He left work at exactly 11:47 a.m. By lunchtime, he was home. Prosecutors said there was a reason for that. He didn’t want detectives to know how much he’d been talking to Kareen Knowles. ADA Mary Sandstrom summed it up. “It’s only when this affair starts up that all of these incriminating searches start to appear.

This wasn’t a man losing control. This was a man planning, step-by-step, doing his homework. Brian Fannon was a detective. He understood how murder investigations work because he had spent decades running them. He knew what forensic examiners look for at a scene. He knew what digital evidence can reveal. He knew, in short, exactly what he would be up against if things went wrong.

 And so, the searches are not just incriminating, they are a kind of arrogance. He studied the tools that would be used against him and still believed he could outsmart them. That is a very specific kind of thinking. It is not the thinking of a man who loved his wife and was afraid of losing her.

 It is the thinking of a man who believed the system he had spent 30 years working inside could be managed and beaten. He was almost right. On May 14th, 2018, Amy Fannon’s wake was held at Fershen & Adams Funeral Home on Broad Street in Westfield. Three days later, on May 17th, Brian Fannon came back for a second round of questioning. He arrived at the District Attorney’s State Police Office.

 Detective O’Toole was there. Detective Mike Blanchette was there. This time, before the interview started, O’Toole read Brian Fannon his Miranda rights. >> You know your Miranda rights. I I’m going to read them off this form. The other day >> you didn’t do this. Has something changed? >> So, you’re not You’re not under arrest or anything like >> I know that.

>> Notice what he asks. Notice that the very first thing Brian Fannon picks up on, sitting in a room where he has just been reminded of his rights, is the change in procedure. Not, how is the investigation going? Not, is there any news about Amy? The first thing he processes is what it means for him. This session was different.

 O’Toole and Blanchette had the forensic results. They had the phone data. They had a photo of Karin Knowles, and they had a specific question about the wound. >> I mean, there’s no doubt she got was shot. But But the question is from what distance? >> It was right freaking there, I’m telling you.

 I don’t know what to do what you need to, but I’m telling you it was right there. >> The absence of gunshot residue on Amy Fanyan’s wound was significant. In a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, fired at close range, GSR and stippling, the burning particles from the muzzle blast, are normally present on the skin.

 They were not present on Amy. The wound, as Detective O’Toole noted, was not consistent with someone shooting themselves. Brian stuck to his story. At the same time, across town that same afternoon, detectives sat down with Karin Knowles. While Brian had described Knowles to O’Toole as just a friend, the deleted texts recovered from his phone told a completely different story.

Investigators had recovered thousands of deleted messages between the two of them, thousands. The relationship was not a friendship. It had become something else entirely. And at 12:47 p.m. on May 8th, 2018, while Amy Fanyan was lying dead on the dining room floor, while first responders were still in the house, Brian Fanyan had sent Karin a text message.

“Please don’t call or text for a while. I’ll call when I can. Really bad. Pray for my family, please.” Amy Hanson Fanyan had been dead for minutes, and he was already managing the situation. His wife had just died, and he was already sending texts to make sure no one connected the dots. How do you even do that? Brian Finyan got charged with murder on November 6th, 2019, over 18 months after Amy died.

The whole process moved slowly, but on purpose. The investigators took their time building the case piece by piece, no shortcuts. The next day, Finyan stood in Hampton Superior Court. He pleaded not guilty. That courtroom was packed. Reporter Stephanie Berry was there, and she described the atmosphere as pure shock.

It just lingered in the air. But the real surprise was what she saw right behind Finyan, Amy’s own family sitting in seats usually meant for the accused’s supporters. Her relatives, her in-laws, some of them truly believing Amy took her own life. They thought Brian was innocent. To them, this whole prosecution was a terrible mistake.

Berry had never seen anything like it before, a victim’s family openly supporting the accused. The trial didn’t start until February 23rd, 2023, almost 5 years after Amy died. The prosecution’s first witness was Amy’s sister, Anna Hansen. Anna described a conversation with Brian a few weeks after Amy died.

 He told her he was worried about something he’d searched online. She asked what it was. He answered, “How to make a murder look like a suicide.” >> I asked him what that search was, and he said, “How to make a murder look like a suicide.” >> He specifically said he searched, quote, “How to make a murder look like a suicide?” >> Those were his exact words.

>> During cross-examination, the defense pointed out that Detective Tom Forest never found that exact search on Brian’s computers, but still, the conversation was recorded and made part of the evidence. Those words came straight from Brian to Amy’s sister. Prosecutors spent the next month making their case.

 40 witnesses, two full weeks of testimony, digital evidence, forensics, an affair, a financial motive, they brought it all out. The defense, led by Jeffrey Brown, countered that Amy had a tough history, anxiety, emotional swings. She’d written certain things in her diary. And their own forensic expert, Alexander Jason, testified that her thick hair could have blocked gunshot residue from reaching her skin.

 Maybe the particles never landed. But in closing, Jeffrey Brown said, “She raised the gun up to her head in a fit of rage and in effect caused her own death.” But prosecutor Mary Sandstrom laid it all out. The digital timeline, the affair searches in March, divorce and pension searches in April, gunshot residue videos on April 27th, Medical Examiner’s Office searches on May 8th, and Brian leaving the Westfield Police Department at 11:47 that morning.

“He’s looking up and researching the teams who will turn up after he commits this murder,” Sandstrom told the jury. “The evidence here proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he knew what he was going to do when he left the Westfield Police Department at 11:47 on May 8th.” The jury got the case on March 21st, 2023.

They needed less than 2 days. On March 22nd, 2023, the verdict came back, guilty of first-degree murder. That same afternoon in Springfield, the judge sentenced Brian to life in prison with no chance for parole. Stephanie Barry said the mood in the courtroom was gutting. On Brian’s side, people who believed in him completely just broke down.

Hampton District Attorney Anthony Gulluni released a statement. “Mr. Fanyan’s behavior was calculating and shockingly cruel. I commend the jury for seeing through his defense and holding him accountable. This result shows that no matter who you are, justice is blind. I thank everyone on our team, especially Assistant District Attorney Mary Sandstrom, for her phenomenal work and commitment to justice for Amy.

” After the verdict, Jeffrey Brown addressed the judge. >> Your honor, the jury claims you got it wrong. Anyone that truly knew Amy Fanyan, Brian Fanyan, knows that Brian Fanyan did not shoot his wife, Amy. >> Brian Fanyan used the knowledge he had built up over a career in law enforcement, knowledge that was supposed to serve justice, to try to commit the perfect crime.

 He researched the forensics that would be used against him. He studied the investigators who would come, and when they came anyway, he sat across from his own colleagues in an interview room and performed grief with the same careful planning he had given to everything else. The verdict is not hard to understand. What sits underneath it is.

Because the question that never quite gets answered in cases like this is not whether he did it, the jury settled that in under two days. The question is how many people who worked alongside Brian Fanyon, who trusted him in the field, who called him a colleague and a friend, how long does it take to unlearn that version of someone? Some of them may never fully get there.

 That is not weakness. That is just what happens when someone corrupts a trust that deep. Amy’s family have carried what no amount of legal resolution fully addresses. Her daughter Tori continues to live in Westfield, raising her own family. Her son Travis does, too. They stood by their father through the trial and after it.

 They lost both parents in a single afternoon. Their mother to violence and their father to the truth about what he had done. There is something specific to Westfield in this story that does not fully come through in a national headline. Brian Fanyon was not just a husband who killed his wife. He was a representative of the institution his community trusted most, the one that shows up when things go wrong, the one that stands between ordinary people and the worst moments of their lives.

 He used that trust against it twice, once in the dining room and once in the interview room. What cases like this leave behind in small, close communities is not just grief. It is a quieter kind of awareness, a realization that the uniform, the title, the decades of service, none of it on its own guarantees anything.

 Westfield already knew that the way most communities know it in theory. After May 8th, 2018, they knew it for real. That knowledge cost something. It always does. Amy Jean Hanson Fanyan, a woman full of life. She was 51 years old as it when she lost her life to this heinous act of violence and the person responsible is now behind bars paying for his actions.

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