Man Posing as Delivery Driver Calls Victim's Father Moments Before "Calculated" Slaying

Florida investigators had to sift through several persons of interest to learn who killed a 25-year-old man with a bright future before him.  

On the morning of February 27, 2018, bank teller Jessica Davnani headed to work in Orlando, Florida, no different from her regular daily routine. She wasn’t initially concerned when she couldn’t get ahold of her fiancé, Patrick De La Cerda, at his Deltona home, about 30 miles north of where she worked.

“After a couple of hours, I just felt like something was wrong,” Davnani told A Plan to Kill, airing Sundays at 7/6c on Oxygen. “And I just decided to leave work to check on Patrick.”

The murder of Patrick De La Cerda

Davnani made a horrifying discovery when driving to the rural Deltona home, where Patrick De La Cerda lived with his father, Max De La Cerda. Just inside the front door, the young man was dead, having sustained four gunshot wounds at the bottom of the stairs.

The door’s glass had been shattered, and another two rounds missed the intended target, according to Detective Chad Weaver of the Volusia County Sheriff’s Department.

“It looked like he’d been taken by surprise,” Weaver told A Plan to Kill.

At the home, valuables left behind indicated De La Cerda wasn’t killed during the commission of a burglary. But whoever carried out the ambush-style attack ensured they took a recording system that connected to several security cameras posted on the home’s exterior — potential clues, gone.

Only two spent shell casings from an AR-style firearm were recovered from the scene, despite there being six shots in total. The high-caliber ammunition, 300 Blackout, was something Assistant State Attorney Andrew Urbanek said would “not be a common type of ammunition.”  

“So, we knew we had somebody who’s smart enough to pick up shell casings at the crime scene and was leaving as little of a footprint as he possibly could,” Urbanek told A Plan to Kill.  

Det. Weaver called the homicide “a calculated crime.”

Who killed Patrick De La Cerda?

Investigators hit the ground running, first interviewing Davnani and Max De La Cerda after bringing them to the sheriff’s district office in Deltona. The distraught father pointed them to an earlier property dispute between Patrick De La Cerda and a neighbor, according to Weaver.

“Three months prior to Patrick’s murder, the neighbor and Patrick had some words, and [it] rose to the point of violence, where the neighbor had pulled a gun and fired shots at Patrick,” said Weaver. And, according to Urbanek, authorities were called to the approximately nine-acre property in January 2018.  

But the neighbor had a rock-solid alibi: At the time of De La Cerda’s murder, he was in jail.

Max De La Cerda offered another possible lead when questioned by detectives, claiming he received two strange calls at around 7:15 a.m. on the day of the murder. That morning, the father was more than an hour away on a construction job when a purported delivery driver called him, prompted by a sign posted at the end of the De La Cerdas’ long, wooded driveway requesting package handlers call his phone.

The unknown driver requested Patrick De La Cerda by name, and when the father suggested he try his son and call the driver back, the driver refused to leave his number.

Weaver called the odd time of the delivery and the caller’s strange actions “red flags.”

At the sheriff’s office, Jessica Davnani proffered her former boyfriend of eight years, Gregory Bender, as another person worth looking into. She said she hadn’t heard from Bender in some time, but he called her at work twice on the morning of De La Cerda’s murder — both times Davnani did not answer.

“For months, he was always threatening us because he was very jealous,” Davnani told A Plan to Kill. “I was always afraid for our safety.”

Who is Greg Bender?

Greg Bender, 21 years Davnani’s senior, was a successful hedge fund manager who lived in an affluent home outside Orlando. He and Davnani began dating in 2009 after meeting on a website for singles, but Davnani told A Plan to Kill that she ignored red flags in the relationship, calling him “very possessive.”

“He said that if I ever left him, it would never be pretty,” she said.

Six years into the relationship, Bender asked for Davnani’s hand in marriage, and she said yes. But in 2016, it was a “total shock” for Davnani when she paid Bender a hospital visit following a medical procedure, finding another woman at Bender’s bedside. It was Bender’s wife, Daymara Sanchez, prompting Davnani to call off the engagement.

“He said, ‘You can’t do this to me. I’m not going to let you go,’” Davnani said.

Davnani did her best to move on, and when Bender persistently pursued her, she blocked him from her devices and went so far as to create new social media profiles. It didn’t get any easier once Davnani met Patrick De La Cerda online, and soon, Bender allegedly began stalking the new beau, as well as De La Cerda’s brother and parents.

In one recording obtained by A Plan to Kill, Bender angrily told Davnani, “Unblock me. Enough is enough. Call me now, or all hell is going to break loose.” And in November 2017, Davnani went to a judge and obtained a restraining order against her ex.

Bender’s aggressive persistence also led De La Cerda to buy the cameras posted outside his home.

A “terrified” woman comes forward

Authorities planned to contact Bender’s then-ex-wife, Daymara Sanchez, but before they could, Sanchez’s attorneys contacted investigators. According to Det. Weaver, Sanchez was “terrified” of Bender, and through her lawyers, they arranged to meet outside the sheriff’s office so Sanchez could provide information she believed could help homicide detectives.

Sanchez said that around the time she and Bender were separating in late 2017, she found suspicious writings in her estranged husband’s notebooks.  

“According to Daymara, there were maps, and these bullet points, and this whole plan drawn out to kill Patrick,” Weaver told A Plan to Kill. “When Daymara found this murder plan, and she had confronted Greg about it, he told her, ‘Hey, this is just fantasy; I would never do anything like this.’ And she kind of dropped it.”

Two months later, De La Cerda was dead.

Authorities arrested Bender on charges that he violated his restraining order, but there was no guarantee he would stay behind bars for long. While in jail, law enforcement officials executed a search warrant at Bender’s home, finding several crucial pieces of evidence. First, a gun safe inside his walk-in closet contained 300 Blackout ammunition, the same kind of ammo used to kill De La Cerda. In Bender’s home office, a hand-drawn map lay at the top of his trash bin.

It was clear to detectives that it was a drawing of the De La Cerda property, accompanied by details of how he planned to kill his rival.

“Part of the plan was to use duct tape to cover up his footprints,” said Weaver. “He talked about using different vehicles and having to switch cars at different rest stops and exits, and having different license plates, which shows that he’s been thinking about this for a long time.”

Investigators also collected a burner phone from Bender’s property and a spent 300 Blackout shell casing from a junk drawer in the office.

A suspect charged with murder

The decision to charge Bender with murder came around the same time he was being released from county jail. In fact, officers were still conducting their search of Bender’s premises when the suspect came home, only to be arrested on charges of first-degree murder once he arrived.

According to Weaver, Bender remained “very calm.” Still, the suspect refused to cooperate in the investigation.  

Prosecutors hoped to use something concrete to make a conviction stick, which included data extracted from Bender’s burner phone and a neighbor’s security footage, which showed Bender’s vehicle leaving his home on Feb. 27, 2018, at 6:13 a.m. — about an hour before De La Cerda was gunned down.

“The cell phone data shows even more of how planned and how detailed and how methodical it was,” Weaver told A Plan to Kill. “This is somebody who’s been planning this for months.”

The burner had only ever contacted Bender’s personal phone number and Max De La Cerda, presumably when Bender posed as a fake delivery man to gain entry onto the victim’s property. Data also showed the phone stayed at Bender’s home for weeks until the day of the murder, when it traveled to the area near the Deltona property.

Furthermore, ballistics tests performed on the 300 Blackout shell casing found in the junk draw were a perfect match to the two shell casings found at the crime scene.

The defense argued that drawings illustrated by the defendant were only works of fantasy, but the jury only needed two hours to arrive at a verdict. Ultimately, in May 2021, Gregory Bender was found guilty of the premeditated murder of Patrick De La Cerda and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“I don’t think [Bender] cared about his wife. I don’t think he cared about Jessica. I think he just cared about controlling people and controlling them,” Det. Weaver told A Plan to Kill.

Jessica Davnani, a star witness in the murder trial, said she felt a “flood of emotions” upon hearing the verdict.

“Patrick, he was just so full of life, and he wanted to live his life to the fullest,” she said. “He wanted kids, he wanted a relationship with his mother, and I just know we would have had a fairy-tale life together.”

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