The FBI is the most sophisticated law enforcement agency in the world, pursuing the most dangerous criminals. When a killer escapes prison twice with just one goal in mind—finding his ex-wife who he hated and wanted to kill—he would do anything to accomplish his mission. The bureau mobilizes.
“This time I thought Mr. Senobi would be a lot smarter. He had had time to educate himself, he had time to develop a plan. I watched him squeeze that trigger off, and I felt the impact. All I could see was Senobi disappearing into the night.”
On the evening of September 16th, Cheryl Senobi calls police and says her estranged husband, Mario, is lurking outside her house.
“Hi, this is Cheryl’s son, Toby.”
Cheryl has a restraining order against Mario, who is forbidden to come near her and their six-year-old son. By the time police arrive, Mario has vanished. But later that night, he returns.
“Stay right here, okay?”
“Never mind.”
She immediately ran to the bedroom where her son was, locked the door, and attempted to dial 911. She got no response on the phone, and she attempted to dial a second time, and at that point, Mario had forced his way through the bedroom door, put a gun to her head, and forced her and her child to leave with him.
“Is that what you’re doing?”
The next day, police rushed back to Cheryl’s house after receiving a frantic 911 call from her parents.
“Police! Anybody here?”
Cheryl and her son are nowhere to be found. Investigators immediately suspect 29-year-old Mario Senobi has kidnapped them.
“Kidnapping is a federal crime and in a case like this, the clock is ticking. Anytime we conduct a kidnapping investigation and we know that the victim has crossed state lines, then we will typically notify the federal authorities and get them involved so that we have access to their resources and they can assist us with our investigation.”
Gulfport PD contacts the bureau and Special Agent Steve Callender, a seasoned veteran, jumps on the case. He has no idea whether Cheryl and her son are alive and knows that locating Mario Senobi is imperative.
“The first question is: where is he? The second question is: what do I need to do to find him?”
In order to find Mario, Special Agent Callender needs to understand how his mind works. Publicly, Senobi is a hero, a firefighter trained in rescue diving who has been cited for outstanding service. He’s also an outdoorsman with excellent survival skills. But who is the man behind the facade? Special Agent Callender turns to his colleagues who specialize in criminal profiles.
“We contacted our behavioral analysis unit at Quantico, Virginia to help out with a profile of Mario Senobi: what kind of person he was, and it was a scary one: armed, extremely dangerous, with access to weapons, knives, rifles, handguns.”
A few months earlier, Senobi had accepted a good-paying job with a fire department 160 miles away, but he was let go after being arrested on a shoplifting charge.
“I saw you down there. I saw you kissing all over. Who is he?”
He turned his rage on Cheryl, accusing her of cheating on him and beating and raping her.
“You think I’m stupid? Think I don’t know what’s going on?”
“Well, I recall Cheryl Senobi coming to the police department and she was real concerned about her safety because he had shown some real abusive tendencies towards her and she was concerned for her life, and as a result of that, sought out a restraining order in the court.”
“You called the lawyer?”
The same day that she filed for a restraining order, Cheryl also filed for divorce. Mario was livid at what he considered her betrayal; he was determined not to let her go.
“Right now, I think an obsession would be an apt description. Interviews of his relatives revealed that his estranged relationship and the pending divorce were extremely low points of his life and something that he just couldn’t stand.”
September 20th, 4 days after their disappearance, there is still no sign of Cheryl or her son. But as the FBI manhunt continues, Senobi does something no one expects. He’s scheduled to appear in court in Pearl, Mississippi on the shoplifting charge. The bureau assumes Senobi won’t show.
“Senobi, step on down.”
“But he does step down, but obviously that was a surprise when he showed up; it was the police version of winning the lottery.”
Local police and FBI arrest Senobi immediately and demand to know where his wife and son are. He says they’re waiting for him at a nearby gas station.
“Cheryl Senobi had bruises on her face, black eye, cuts. At first, she did not want to say anything. However, over the next few hours and the next couple of days, the story began to come out as to exactly what had happened.”
Cheryl tells agents that after kidnapping her and their son, Senobi took them on a 3-day journey of terror through Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
“One word I could describe it was: hell.”
Cheryl Toby was repeatedly beaten, sexually assaulted in front of their young son on a 3-day journey from hell that went to Texas and back. I can’t imagine anyone ever going through something like that.
“You’re calling back right now, right now.”
Senobi also forced Cheryl to call her divorce attorney and tell him to stop the proceedings. After hearing Cheryl’s chilling story, investigators arrest Mario, but he insists he hasn’t done anything wrong and that the hellish journey was just a family trip.
“Mario Senobi truly felt in his heart he shouldn’t have been charged with any crime, that he was getting back together with his wife and son, and that this was nothing more than an out-of-town excursion, a holiday if you will.”
A jury disagrees. In September 1995, Mario Senobi is convicted of kidnapping, burglary, and aggravated assault. He’s sentenced to 40 years and shipped to the state penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi. In prison, Senobi’s rage at Cheryl and at law enforcement only grows. He wants just one thing: to get out of jail no matter what it takes, so he can exact revenge on his ex-wife.
“If I had to describe Mario in one word, it would be ‘focused.’ Mario Senobi planned and plotted before he did anything. He was going to make as few mistakes as he possibly could. That’s a very scary thing to deal with.”
Senobi’s opportunity comes in 1998, just 2 and 1/2 years after he enters prison. He makes friends with a 19-year-old inmate named Jeremy Granberry, who has a track record of escape attempts. Granberry has an upcoming hearing and Mario manipulates his way into the trial.
“Mario convinced Jeremy Granberry to use him as another individual that could claim credit for the burglaries that he had been charged with.”
Senobi writes a letter to Granberry’s lawyer asking to be put on the witness list. Granberry places it on his witness list for his upcoming trial, meaning that Senobi will have to be transported to Jones County along with Granberry. The truth is, Senobi was in prison when Granberry committed his crimes, but no one checks the dates. Senobi is now scheduled to leave the prison grounds and he’s fully prepared to make his wife pay.
“We all believed when Mario Senobi was sentenced to 40 years in jail that this would be the last time that we had heard of him. Unfortunately, we were wrong.”
“The pickup.”
And saw Senobi sitting in the passenger side. Special Agent Green and Johnny Grant quickly come up with a plan.
“I pulled alongside the shoulder of the road. I popped the hood up, I had Grant open the hood, pretending that we had a car problem. At the same time, I told him that I was going to go down and use the pay phone as loud as I could. I’m going to go inside to make a phone call.”
Green’s phone call distracts Mario for just a moment, long enough for the backup team to sweep in.
“By the time that he realized that the arrest team was there, they already had a shotgun barrel pointed at his cheek and were identifying themselves and telling him not to move, at which point he stopped moving.”
Agents pull him out of the truck and cuff him. They find a backpack under the seat with a loaded .357 revolver, a compass, a camera, gloves, and box cutters.
“We talked to him a little bit initially, we advised him of his rights, at which point he told us that he wished we would have killed him because he didn’t want to go back to jail.”
Senobi is immediately taken to the FBI in Atlanta before a federal magistrate. He waives his right to fight extradition back to Alabama and is taken to the Etowah County Jail.
“When we pulled up at our correction facility, we had people lying in the streets, employees and citizens and news media. I mean, it was a very joyous occasion that, you know, we had captured the cop-killer, Mario Senobi.”
A few days later, Senobi is moved to the federal institution in Talladega. No female guards are assigned to his floor.
“Mario Senobi, I think all the way up till the trial, believed that he was only doing what he thought he had to do in order to see his wife and son again and carry out the threats that he had decided that he wanted to carry out.”
In May 1999, Mario Senobi goes on trial for capital murder for the killing of Officer Keith Turner. Senobi and Jeremy Granberry are tried simultaneously, but in separate courtrooms. At his trial, Senobi admits to shooting Officer Keith Turner. Senobi takes the stand and does a chilling reenactment of the shooting. He claims he acted in self-defense.
“He started backpedaling. I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘No, stop.’ You know, like that. But he goes like this. When he went like that, I shot him right there in the vest. Well, I thought he had a vest on.”
“I don’t think he thought he could persuade that jury. I think it was more his own narcissism of the camera’s on me and I’m going to tell him the story that I want him to hear.”
“He tried to get his weapon. I said, ‘No, stop.’ Bow, at that point, I figured he had drawn his weapon. He’s coming up like this, I went like that, I started running. He popped up, bow, like that.”
On May 14th, Mario Senobi is found guilty of capital murder.
“Mario, what’d you get?”
“You got a tip, put this in.”
On April 28th, 2005, at 6:22 p.m., 39-year-old Mario Senobi is executed by lethal injection. He makes no final statement. After more than a decade of living in fear, Cheryl Senobi can finally rest easy knowing she and her son are safe from her ex-husband forever. Agents look at the life of Mario Senobi and see a tragic lesson.
“I always believe at some point there’s a line that everyone sees. It’s a bright line, a line that they know that if they cross, they’re going to go down a different road. At some point in his life, Mario Senobi saw that line and decided to take it. Whether it was the shoplifting, whether it was the beating of his wife, whatever it was, he could have turned back at any time and try to correct his life. He decided not to do so.”
