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Undercover Meeting In Ice Fishing Hut Brings Down Killers of Canadian Hockey Mom
Carmela Knight's charred remains were discovered in September 2014 after a fire ravaged her home, but strange clues left behind would prove her death was no accident.
Beloved hockey mom Carmela Knight’s life ended in a tragic fire at her home — but it would take a secret undercover operation inside an ice fishing hut to unravel the mystery of her death.
The 35-year-old’s charred body was discovered the evening of September 14, 2014 in the garage of her Pickering home, just outside of Toronto, after her worried neighbors saw the flames of a raging fire and called 911.
After digging through the ashes, investigators would discover a strange set of clues left behind at the crime scene that would take months to untangle and point to a surprising list of suspects, according to Dateline: Secrets Uncovered’s latest mystery, “Fire and Ice.”
What happened to Carmela Knight?
Carmela was a well-loved figure in the community, often spending her days shuttling her two young boys to the hockey arena.
“She was a sweetheart, she had a heart of gold, and she was so genuine,” her friend Tara Coccimiglio remembered.
Those who knew Carmela remembered her for her vibrant personality and dedication to her family.
“We learned that she was very involved with her boys,” Detective Dianne Jennings told Dateline: Secrets Uncovered. “Nobody could say a bad thing about Carmela. There was nothing negative whatsoever in any interview.”
That was part of the reason it was so shocking when the Knight family home went up in flames on Sept. 15, 2014.
Once the fire had been put out, investigators discovered Carmela’s charred remains inside the garage of the home. She had a tourniquet wrapped around her arm and a needle still sticking in her arm, although those who knew her said she never did drugs and a toxicology report would later come back clean.
The medical examiner’s office would also determine that Carmela had been killed from blunt force trauma before the fire was ever set.
“She had facial injuries and she died of a neck compression,” Jennings explained.
Police Find Motive in Carmela Knight’s Murder Case
Carmela’s husband, David, told authorities that on the day of the murder, he left around 3:30 p.m. to take his boys to hockey practice. He was spotted in surveillance footage skating on the ice at the time of the fire, confirming his alibi.
But an interior alarm system showed that someone had been inside the house between the time David left and Carmela came home from work around 5 p.m., suggesting someone may have been laying in wait for the mom of two.
Carmela’s mom, Franca Agosta, told detectives that not long before her daughter’s death someone driving a black SUV came up to Carmela’s fence while she was working in the backyard and asked for her husband. David wasn’t home at the time, but there was something about the encounter that unnerved her.
“She was scared,” Agosta said. “She didn’t know who he was.”
Investigators considered the possibility that the unidentified man could have been behind the attack, but they also weren’t ruling out the possibility that David was somehow involved in his wife’s death, especially after they received a strange visit from Carmela’s sister-in-law Heather Knight.
Heather told authorities that just two days after Carmela’s death, her husband, David's brother Matt Knight, left Canada to head to Florida, leaving behind his house key as if he never planned to return. Before getting on his plane, he placed one final unsettling call to her.
“He just said ‘I know who, what, when, where, and how. With a phone call, I could have stopped this, and I have to live with it for the rest of my life.’ And he burst into tears,” Heather told police. “And he says maybe 20, 30 years down the road, when we’re on a beach somewhere or something, I’ll fill you in on everything, but I don’t want to tell you everything, because I don’t want you to be in that position.’”
She also told police that on the night of the murder, Matt rushed out after hearing of the fire to meet with his friend Graham MacDonald, a contractor who had also been doing some work at Carmela and David’s house.
Detectives flew to Florida to confront Matt, but he insisted his wife was lying about the conversation and refused to cooperate with authorities.
Investigators also spoke with MacDonald, who claimed he had nothing to do with the murder, telling authorities that he had gone to visit his grandmother and then took the train home from Toronto that day. But surveillance footage didn’t back up his story and when police confronted him in a second interview, he told them that he was “smoking crack that night” and couldn’t recall exactly where he’d been.
Police also learned that at the time of Carmela’s murder, she and David had been going through a divorce.
About a year and a half earlier, Carmela caught David having an affair with a woman in Florida, where the family owned a second home.
“There was naked photos of this girl and there was a picture of Dave and her and she was kissing him on the cheek,” Carmela’s sister Nancy Burridge recalled of images found on a thumb drive hidden in David’s car.
David promised to end the affair and the couple went to marriage counseling. But when Carmela discovered he was still seeing his mistress, she decided to end the relationship for good.
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“He was begging her to come back and she said, ‘No, I can’t do this anymore, you’ve had chances and that’s it,’” Burridge said.
In the aftermath of the split, David was planning to move to Florida to start a construction business, but investigators learned that he ran into money problems in the months before Carmela’s death and had stopped paying their mortgage in Pickering.
He stood to gain $800,000 in life insurance proceeds in the event of Carmela’s death, giving him a potential reason to want her dead.
As the family’s financial situation got more dire, Carmela filed an emergency motion to gain custody of her children. The hearing was scheduled to take place just three days after her death.
Who killed Carmela Knight?
Investigators suspected that David had something to do with his wife’s death, but they had no evidence to prove it. So, they enlisted the help of some undercover detectives who created an elaborate ruse to ensnare MacDonald.
MacDonald unwittingly befriended an undercover officer who introduced him to “Uncle Dan,” another undercover officer who claimed to have a reputation for fixing legal problems.
Uncle Dan invited MacDonald and a friend to go ice fishing, but on their way, police conveniently stopped the vehicle and let it be known that MacDonald was considered a suspect in an ongoing murder investigation.
The traffic stop unnerved MacDonald, who ultimately confessed in the quiet privacy of the ice fishing hut that he’d killed Carmela.
Uncle Dan didn’t press him for details and instead arranged to meet him again a week later. This time, he claimed that he had a friend with a terminal illness, willing to take the fall for the murder in exchange for MacDonald setting up a trust fund to take care of the man’s children.
To carry out the plan, however, Uncle Dan said the man would need to know every detail of the crime.
“I had him go through his involvement, how it was planned, how it was executed,” Uncle Dan told Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
MacDonald told him that he had carried out the murder at David’s direction. David let him into the house before he left for practice that afternoon and he hid in a bathroom until Carmela came home from work.
“She came in through the garage and he attacked her from behind and she fought for her life. She raced around the kitchen island, he finally got her down on the ground and strangled her,” Jennings said, adding that he later placed the tourniquet on her arm in an attempt to stage it as an accidental overdose.
Even with the damaging confession, investigators still felt they needed more to tie David to the murder. MacDonald told Uncle Dan that he agreed to carry out the murder for $100,000 and a new life in Florida, but he had yet to receive any money.
Undercover detectives convinced MacDonald to demand a portion of the payment from David. David agreed, and after investigators caught the Canadian father paying MacDonald $5,000, they felt they finally had enough to make the arrests.
David and MacDonald were ultimately convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and arson. They each received a life sentence with a chance of parole after 25 years.
“I want him to suffer and every day of his suffering I want him, I want him to see Carm’s eyes, you know, and think of what he did and how he destroyed a family,” Agosta said of her former son-in-law.
Matt Knight pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to murder and spent a year behind bars.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, Carmela’s youngest son Dylan moved in with Burridge and finally came to terms with his dad’s role in the killing.
“I didn’t want to believe it and I believed him for so long,” he said. “I just came to the realization that he ruined my childhood and he put me in a place I don’t know if I’ll ever get out of.”
