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A Liberty County, Georgia, jury convicted Nicholas James Kassotis on all 12 counts in the killing of his wife, Mindi Mebane Kassotis, and he was sentenced on August 14, 2025, to life without the possibility of parole plus 25 consecutive years.

Kassotis was a former U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps officer and attorney. He married Mindi in 2016 after they met on a dating app. She was a legal secretary and podcaster. Over roughly four years, he told her that classified work had placed them in danger and that an FBI agent named Jim McIntyre was protecting them and controlling their money and movements. They moved more than 50 times, staying in short-term rentals and motels across several states before living in Savannah, Georgia, by June 2022. Investigators never located any FBI agent named Jim McIntyre; he did not exist.

Mindi Kassotis, 40, was killed in late November 2022. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation determined that her remains were placed at the Portal Hunting Club off Jones Road in Riceboro, Liberty County, Georgia, on or about November 27, 2022. Deer hunters found part of her dismembered body there on December 2, 2022, and more remains were recovered over the following days across a three-mile area spanning Liberty and McIntosh counties. No missing person report matched her, and investigators treated her as a Jane Doe. Around Thanksgiving 2022, Kassotis told her family and friends that she had died suddenly of medical complications and had been cremated. There was no death certificate, funeral or grave.

The GBI released a forensic sketch of the unidentified woman. Heather Thomas, an ex-wife of Kassotis, saw it and told authorities that the woman resembled Mindi. With FBI assistance, investigative genetic genealogy and a DNA comparison with Mindi's mother identified the remains on May 11, 2023. By then, Kassotis held a driver's license in the name Nicholas Kilian James Stark, was living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and had remarried after telling his new wife he was a widower. A federal, state and local task force arrested him there on May 12, 2023.

Investigators recovered a Milwaukee brand knife, a plastic storage tub with blood traces and wipes at the disposal site. Home Depot surveillance and card records showed Kassotis buying a knife of that brand on the day Mindi is believed to have died at a store about 50 minutes from the hunting club. He had earlier bought a field dressing kit that included a bone saw at a Bass Pro Shops. A camera at a remote pumping station recorded his green Ford Explorer traveling to and from the area more than once, while subpoenaed cell phone and vehicle GPS records placed him where the remains were found.

Liberty County Sheriff's Office Detective Jack Frost and GBI Special Agent Tracy Sands interviewed Kassotis in May 2023. He maintained the Jim McIntyre story, described Mindi taking a fall and checking herself into a clinic while he was out of town around Thanksgiving 2022, and denied killing her while suggesting McIntyre was responsible. The detectives confronted him with the phone records, GPS data, pumping station video and knife purchase.

Kassotis was indicted in February 2024. Medical examiner Keith Lehman testified about lacerations on Mindi's arms and back, defensive injuries to her hand and forearm, and attempted cuts into bone. Defense attorney Doug Weinstein argued that Kassotis lived in fear of McIntyre and that no evidence showed how or where Mindi was killed. Three former wives testified about a pattern of deception and financial exploitation. After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously convicted him of all 12 counts, among them malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, concealing a death, removal of body parts from the scene of a death, tampering with evidence, and possession of a knife and of tools during the commission of a crime. Judge Paul Rose imposed the sentence the same day. No appeal has been reported.

The video is a police interview-room recording that runs about 115 minutes. It presents the interview itself and opens with a short narrated introduction naming the people involved.

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Part 2 of 2 of the recording described above.