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Robert “Rob” Cantor was getting his second chance at love — but it cost him his life.
A 59-year-old man was found deceased in the basement bedroom of his home in Teaneck, New Jersey, on March 6, 2011, after the house was intentionally set ablaze, as reported in a recent episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered, titled “The Room Downstairs.”
The medical examiner later concluded that Rob, who worked as a software engineer, had been shot execution-style in the back of the head, a vicious murder that shocked the community.
Who was Rob Cantor?
At the time of Rob’s death, he was about to start a new phase in his life. After being with his wife Susan for 27 years and having two children, their marriage was coming to a close.
The pair had amicably decided to part ways, even choosing to live for a time under the same roof as they adjusted to life on their own.
“They just grew apart,” Rob’s sister Leslie Padron explained to Dateline of the split.
Mehrdad Sanai, Rob’s close friend and running buddy, described him as a “kid at heart” who loved to joke and look at the lighter side of life.
“He was wonderful, he was kind, he was loving. He always saw the other point of view,” Sanai remembered.
It was perhaps some of those qualities that first attracted the new woman in Rob’s life, 40-year-old Sophie Meneut, a French-born mom of three whom he met at a science lecture. They bonded over their shared love of philosophy, science, and running and quickly fell in love.
“He was crazy for her, I don’t know,” Sanai said.
The day Rob Cantor died
It seemed as though Rob was fully embracing his second act, but on March 6, 2011, it all came to a sudden end.
A 911 call was placed after Rob’s home was seen in flames. By then, the basement was completely engulfed. Once the fire was out, emergency responders discovered Rob’s body in a basement bedroom.
“The body had suffered severe burns,” said Terry Lawler, who at the time was an arson investigator for Bergen County.
Authorities initially believed that Rob’s death may have simply been a tragic accident, until the medical examiner discovered a bullet to the back of his head and ruled the death a homicide.
“It wasn’t just a shooting, it was an execution,” former Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli said, calling it a “despicable” act.
A forensic scientist determined that ethanol had been put on a comforter to accelerate the blaze.
Investigators focus on the women in Rob Cantor’s life
As the investigation began, authorities considered the possibility that Rob’s death had been connected to two other recent house fires in Bergen County, New Jersey.
But after failing to find any evidence to connect the fires, they began to take a closer look at Rob’s personal life. His wife Susan — who by then had moved to her own place — seemed devastated by his death and told police that she’d been at home the night of the murder, talking on the phone to a friend.
“Nothing really led us to believe that she had any involvement in this,” Cecilia Love, who was a homicide detective on the case, explained, adding that by all accounts the divorce had been a mutual decision.
Detectives then took a close look at Meneut, who had also been “very, very upset” about Rob’s death.
They learned that when the romance began, Meneut was married to Sui Kam “Tony” Tung, the father of her three daughters.
Rob and Meneut had begun a clandestine affair, consummating the relationship in that same basement bedroom where Rob died.
Sui Kam “Tony” Tung confronts Rob Cantor at his home
Eventually, Tung discovered the betrayal and came to Rob’s house to confront him about a year before Rob was killed.
Rob told his friend Sanai that the meeting had been very civil and he’d “felt sorry” for Tung.
In his own comments to Dateline correspondent Andrea Canning, Tung said he’d just gone to the house because he wanted to know who Rob was and insisted that he began to like Rob as the conversation continued.
“We had a lot in common,” he said. “We both liked food. Obviously, we both liked Sophie.”
But Tung admitted that the conversation took an awkward turn when he asked to see the basement bedroom where his wife and Rob had made love.
“I remember I was a little upset,” Tung said of the basement room. “You took Sophie down here? What the hell’s wrong with you? You can’t go to a hotel?”
Tung said that as he got ready to leave, he asked Rob to stop seeing his wife.
“He said, ‘I can’t answer you right now,’” Tung said.
Over the next year, Tung returned to Rob’s house two more times, but he insisted to detectives that he had been over the affair at the time of Rob’s death.
By that point, Meneut had moved out and the marriage was over. Tung told investigators that on the night of the murder, he got home to his New York City apartment at around 9 p.m. and spent the night doing dishes and watching television. He said that the only time he left the apartment was at around 1 a.m. to go buy beer.
Camera footage shows Sui Kam “Tony” Tung lied
But surveillance cameras told a different story. They showed Tung arriving home in his car just after 10 p.m., and then coming out of the apartment again about 20 minutes later carrying a bag, according to prosecutors. He spent several minutes at his car before walking to a corner and disappearing into the night. Although he never got into his car, authorities believed Tung found another way to New Jersey to kill Rob.
Then, just hours after the murder, Tung ran a computer program to begin obliterating data stored on the device. Authorities were still able to recover an email he’d sent to a friend in Texas several months earlier, in which Tung asked the friend if he had a magazine for a .380 caliber handgun, the same type of weapon used to kill Rob. Although the friend never sent the magazine, prosecutors believed it proved what type of weapon Tung owned.
Tung was arrested in May of 2012.
Tony Tung put on trial
He went on trial three years later. Meneut took the stand to testify against Tung, telling jurors he’d been furious about the affair, especially about the location where she and Rob had consummated their relationship.
“Tony was really upset that I had slept with an older man in a basement,” she said on the stand, adding that he’d come home and showed her a gun he purchased a few days later.
Prosecutors argued that Tung was pushed over the edge after Meneut had introduced Rob to one of her children for the first time on the day he was killed. They believed that Tung made his way to New Jersey and killed Rob in that same basement bedroom as an act of revenge.
Tung was convicted of murder and several other charges and sentenced to life in prison. However, an appellate court overturned the conviction three years later after ruling that part of a detective’s testimony may have unfairly prejudiced the jury.
He received a new trial, but a second jury reached the same conclusion and found Tung guilty again of murder and other charges.
