Mistrial declared in Sunrise murder case without body

Prosecutors say they’ll try again to convict a Sunrise man of murdering his wife after a judge Wednesday declared a mistrial four weeks into the proceedings.

The reason: jurors mistakenly learned the accused killer had failed a polygraph test.

Prosecutors were supposed to redact any mention of the polygraph from hours of videotaped confessions and other recordings, but they missed the part where a detective mentioned the accused killer, Joseph Traeger failed a lie detector test.

Broward Circuit Judge Ernest Kollra said once the jury heard that, he had no choice but to grant the defense motion for mistrial.

But, in finding the state did not provoke the mistrial intentionally, Kollra allowed the state to try Traeger again.

If he had found the state goaded the defense into seeking the mistrial by intentionally playing the unredacted video, he could have set Traeger free because trying him again would violate his right against double jeopardy.

Instead, the state will retry him within 90 days, as allowed by Florida law.

Traeger has been many things in his 55 years: an admitted heroin addict and crack user, a convicted rapist and attempted murderer.

But since 2018 he has been in jail awaiting trial in the death of his wife of 10 years, Jeneen Catanzaro.

While her body was never found, Kollra ruled last week there was enough evidence of her death by criminal means for the state to proceed further in its case against Traeger, allowing them to play his confessions.

“The only conclusion can be that she is dead,” Kollra said.

If convicted, Traeger likely faces serving the rest of his life in prison.

If acquitted, or if the charges are dismissed for some other reason, he’s already laying claim to about $50,000 left over from the foreclosure sale of the Sunrise condominium where he eventually told police he killed his wife.

“This is where it all went south,” he said four weeks after she went missing in one of the last of several sessions with detectives. “And then, you know, she’s like, look, if you’re not going to leave I’m calling the cops… Why would you call the cops? There's no reason to call the cops. I mean, we weren’t arguing. We weren’t … there's no reason to dial 911.”

He confessed when she grabbed the phone, he grabbed a knife.

“And I panicked and that’s when I … I did it and then I was, of course, “Oh my God. What did I just f---ing do?”

He re-enacted on a Sunrise detective how he shoved a kitchen knife into the back of his wife’s neck.

It took police nearly a month to get that confession from Traeger, which was played in court for the first time this week -  sometimes talking over dinners at Outback steakhouse and Chick-Fil-A.

Once, during a smoke break at the police station, Det. Michael Bulzone testified how Traeger taunted them.

“He went just like this,” Bulzone testified, mimicking how his quarry took a long drag on a cigarette and then said, “‘You’re really f---ing smart but you’re really f---ing dumb. You figured this whole thing out --  the timeline, everything.’ I go, ‘What do you mean?’ He goes, ‘You don’t know what I did with the body?’”

Minutes later, he told them what he did, though he would not yet admit he stabbed her to death.

“I put her in a couple of trash bags and put her in the dumpster, in the trash can.”

Asked what happened to her, he said, “Must’ve had a seizure. I mean she laid out on the floor with blood everywhere.”

So why not call 911?

“When I saw her, I just panicked. I thought I was going to get blamed for it,” he said.

Convicted of raping and nearly murdering his first wife in 1997, the registered sex offender thought police might doubt his story about his second wife dying in a fall after a seizure.

So, he said, after watching a garbage truck pick up the body for a trip to the landfill, he pawned a diamond pendant Catanzaro was gifted from her great-grandmother, cashed checks from her account after forging her signature and went gambling at Hard Rock casino.

In an early interrogation, he challenged detectives to “show me her body.”

Jurors were told a Palm Beach County Sheriff K-9 trained to alert on human remains indicated they were present in a pile of ash from trash incinerated at the landfill at around the same time the truck from Catanzaro’s neighborhood would have arrived there.

But, with the mistrial, that and other evidence will be for another jury to weigh.