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The path to justice for Jill Halliburton Su’s family was fraught with challenges, including wrongful accusations, a daring escape from a courthouse, and a pivotal moment that overturned a jury’s decision with a single word.
Prosecutor Maria Schneider, who shared insights on the episode of Oxygen’s Dateline: Secrets Uncovered, emphasized, “This family desperately needed closure.”
Jill Halliburton Su Found Dead in Her Florida Home
On September 8, 2014, the Su family could not have foreseen the lengthy struggle they would face in their pursuit of justice, as highlighted in the episode “The Figure in the House.”
Jill, an heiress to an oil dynasty, had just returned from Malaysia and planned on a quiet morning at her home in Davie, Florida. Her husband, Nan Yao Su, a professor of entomology at the University of Florida, had already left for work.
Just before noon, Nan Yao noticed something concerning while monitoring a live feed from the family’s surveillance cameras: an unidentified individual was moving through their home, and shortly after, the cameras abruptly went offline.
Reflecting on the footage, Nan Yao recounted, “He was walking from the kitchen toward the breakfast area and disappeared from the view of the camera area.”
Worried, Nan Yao called his son Justin and asked him to leave his part-time job at the university to go check on his mother.
Justin arrived home around 12:30 p.m. and noticed someone had ripped out all the cameras, plus several of his knives were missing from his bedroom.
As he continued to search the house, he heard water running in the master bathroom and discovered his mom dead in a tub filled with blood.
“Her head is down so her face is just inside this bathtub that is completely to the top full of hot bloody water,” he remembered. “When you see something so horrific, there aren’t words to comprehend.”
Horrified, he called his father and told him that he thought his mom may have killed herself. Nan Yao urged him to call 911.
“Mom,” he can be heard screaming on the call. “My mom killed herself.”
But when the 20-year-old lifted her out of the tub and began chest compressions, he noticed her hands were bound with a cloth belt and her feet were tied with an electrical cord.
“Her hands are tied,” he told the 911 dispatcher, “Oh, my God. I’m so scared right now.”
As it turned out, Jill had been stabbed more than 20 times.
Davie Police arrived minutes later and discovered one of Justin’s folding knives at the front entry of the house. Another large hunting knife—also belonging to Justin—was recovered from the bottom of the tub, along with a damaged alarm panel box. Around the back of the house, detectives found a small breach in a glass door that could have been a clue to how an intruder got into the house.
Although the house appeared ransacked, Detective Paul Williams believed it looked staged.
Attention Turns To Jill Halliburton Su’s Son Justin
As authorities tried to make sense of the strange crime scene, the focus turned to Jill’s son. After all, both weapons used in the crime had belonged to him.
During a tense, hours-long interrogation—which Justin compared to torture—the recent college dropout admitted he hadn’t been at work as his dad believed, claiming instead that he spent the morning asleep in his car.
“A lot of the stuff that we talked about earlier,” the detective told him, “The stuff you told us, doesn’t make sense.”
But Justin stuck to his story, insisting he had not killed his mom and suggesting a stranger must have broken into the house.
Justin was eventually released after security cameras at his gated neighborhood showed him leaving the house9:15 a.m., not returning until hours later when his dad called.
Although Nan Yao had seen someone on the live feed of the surveillance system, the cameras weren’t set to store the images, making it impossible for police to go back and confirm what he’d seen.
Suspect Dayonte Resiles Makes Bold Courtroom Escape
Police finally caught a break in the case nine days after the murder, whenDNA at the crime scene matched to Dayonte Resiles, who was known for committing burglaries in gated communities.
Though Dayonte had no connection to the family and had no reason to be in the residence that day, he was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
Two years later, however, the case took a surprising turn when Dayonte escaped his handcuffs during a court hearing and fled the courthouse. The coordinated plan required help from a fellow inmate, friends of Dayonte’s sitting in the courtroom and a getaway driver waiting outside as he ran through the hallway, down the stairwell and out of the building.
According to reporter David Neal, “This guy was just blazing through.”
Six days later, he was tracked to a hotel about an hour away and taken back into custody, but it was not the end of the courtroom theatrics.
Was Dayonte Resiles Convicted?
Dayonte went on trial in 2021 and after five days of deliberations the jury announced they’d found him guilty of a lesser charge of manslaughter. Nonetheless, when the judge polled the jurors on whether that was their verdict, one female juror responded “No.”
As the juror later told Dateline: Secrets Uncovered, she believed Dayonte should be convicted of murder and made the decision to speak her mind after entering the courtroom.
“I’m like ‘What am I doing?’” she said after her initial decision to agree with the other jurors. “This is not right.”
The jurors were ordered back to deliberate, but were never able to reach a consensus, leading to a hung jury.
Three months later, Dayonte went on trial again with prosecutors arguing that he had broken into the home that day with an intent to burglarize. Then, when he encountered Jill, he killed her.
This time, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
